On April 9, DuPage Children’s Museum in Naperville received an email from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that recently had been gutted on President Donald Trump’s orders.
“We regret to inform you,” it read, “that your IMLS grant has been terminated.”
A termination notice from the institute’s new acting Director Keith Sonderling was attached to the 38-word email.
“Best wishes,” the message concluded.
IMLS provides significant funding to libraries, museums and other educational institutions across the country. Amid Trump’s order to shutter the agency, several Illinois museums have had their grants terminated, including the DuPage Children’s Museum, Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the National Museum of Mexican Art in the Pilsen neighborhood, the Chicago History Museum, the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington and the Galena and U.S. Grant Museum in western Illinois.
The agency did not respond to repeated requests for comment, making it difficult to know how much funding has been terminated in recent weeks
DuPage Children’s Museum was awarded an $84,729 grant to help create a traveling exhibit it could bring to area libraries, according to Andrea Ingram, the museum’s president and CEO. The venture would have been an extension of a standing exhibit at the Naperville museum called, “The Questioneers: Read. Question. Think. PLAY!”
The exhibit is inspired by a book series from local author Andrea Beaty. Ingram described the books as “just beautiful stories (about) these second graders who are all different.”
But in the termination notice to DuPage Children’s Museum, the institution was told that upon further review, its grant “is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program.”
Ingram, in an interview at the museum’s three-story location near downtown Naperville, said, “I don’t think that this is the type of bureaucracy reduction anybody believed was going to be forthcoming.”
“My job is joy,” she said, children’s shouts and laughter sounding off in the background. “I mean, the very definition of what we do here is joyful learning.”
Over the past decade, Ingram estimated the DuPage Children’s Museum has received about $1 million in IMLS competitive grants for various projects.
Ingram said she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to the museum’s defunded exhibit. But to her, the matter is bigger than her museum’s programming alone, she said.
“We must keep (in mind) that this is not about $80,000 to (DuPage Children’s Museum),” she said. “It’s about the systems that we depend on. … I bet most Americans didn’t know what IMLS is, and that’s OK. We don’t need to know that there is a backbone that makes this work.”
Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art had three active multiyear grants terminated by IMLS, according to the museum’s Chief Development Officer Barbara Engelskirchen. Among those was a $556,726 grant that would have paid for an internship program over a three-year period, Engelskirchen said. Without the funding, the program will be canceled, she said.
Other active grants included a two-year $475,000 grant to help make the National Museum of Mexican Art more accessible to people with disabilities as well as a three-year $245,341 grant to support programming the museum does in partnership with Chicago Public Schools, Engelskirchen said.
Both are set to move forward despite the loss in funding. For the accessibility project, the National Museum of Mexican Art has received and spent about half of its funding, Engelskirchen said. The museum will pay for the rest of the project’s costs itself, she said.
As for CPS programming, the initiative — whose focus is helping teachers incorporate Mexican art and culture into their curriculum — is supported through other funding sources. Lack of IMLS funding will likely just “decrease the number of children we’ll be able to reach,” Engelskirchen said.
At the Chicago History Museum, an IMLS grant was recently terminated, according to Michael Anderson, the museum’s vice president of external engagement and development. The museum had received some of the $241,759 it was promised, but the remainder was canceled. IMLS money was funding about one-fourth of the total project, an exhibition about the Latino community in Chicago called “Aquí en Chicago.”
“There’s, I think, a sense right now that if you’re too DEI-focused or if you’re too inclusive or if you are supporting stories or narratives that don’t align with the current politics, you will either be punished or defunded,” Anderson said.
The museum had already begun building out the exhibition space when they learned their grant had been terminated, Anderson said. The exhibit is still on track to open in the fall, although they may need to look for additional funding sources from the museum’s donor base or modify some aspects of the exhibition.
Beyond “Aquí en Chicago,” Anderson worries about funding for future programs.
“There is value in history,” Anderson said. “There is value in knowing where we’ve come from, and it helps inform where we’re going. And it does feel a little bit like a gutting of, or a singling out of, history and the value of history … it’s a slippery slope.”
In Aurora, the Grand Army of the Republic Museum received IMLS grant funding in 2023 to pay for equipment meant to help preserve the museum’s wartime artifacts, according to a spokesperson from the city. The grant, which totaled just under $42,000, is set to expire Aug. 31.
The city of Aurora said it has been unable to request an extension of the grant to continue the project since IMLS staff were placed on leave March 31 as part of Trump’s dismantling of the agency. Officials also do not know how to request a reimbursement once they’ve spent the funds. However, the city set aside $50,000 for the project, so they expect it to move forward regardless of hold-ups with the IMLS funding, although the grant would “certainly amplify the scope of the project,” the city spokesperson said.
Along the Illinois-Iowa border, the Galena and U.S. Grant Museum had been counting on more than $576,000 from IMLS. But earlier this month, the museum received the same termination letter sent to DuPage Children’s Museum, well wishes and all.
The allocation was slated to help with collection care as the museum transitions to a new facility, according to Tessa Flak, executive director of the Galena-Jo Daviess County Historical Society,.
The museum — which has exhibits honoring hometown hero Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and 18th president of the United States — has been housed in a 10,000 square-foot building owned by the city of Galena since 1938. For the past 18 years, the museum has slowly been working toward building its own facility, Flak said. An $11 million venture, the museum just broke ground on its new facility April 3.
IMLS funding would have helped move the museum’s 14,000-plus artifacts to its new facility, as well as establish an archives room and museum-rate exhibit cases at the burgeoning space, Flak said.
On April 21, Flak sent a letter to IMLS appealing the museum’s grant termination.
“Sudden and unexplained cancellation of active grants undermine the trust in the federal process, especially for small and mid-sized institutions that rely on these partnerships to serve their communities,” the letter read. “We are concerned that this will have a chilling effect, not just for our museum, but for cultural institutions across the country that play a vital role in public education and civic life.”
In the meantime, the museum will be launching a GoFundMe to try to make up for the cuts.
tkenny@chicagotribune.com
mmorrow@chicagotribune.com
