James Rondeau, the director and president of the Artwork Institute of Chicago (AIC), has taken voluntary go away from his function whereas the museum conducts an investigation into an incident on a flight from Chicago to Munich final month.
German police had been known as to fulfill a United Airways flight from Chicago when it landed in Munich on 18 April amid reviews {that a} passenger, Rondeau, had eliminated his garments. In accordance with CBS Information, which first reported the information, the incident occurred after Rondeau took prescription drugs and consumed alcohol. A spokesperson for the AIC confirmed to The New York Occasions that the CBS report was correct.
In a press release shared with The Artwork Newspaper, a spokesperson for the museum stated: “The Artwork Institute takes this very significantly and has opened an unbiased investigation into the incident to collect all obtainable data.”
Rondeau has not publicly commented on the incident.
Rondeau has been the AIC’s director and president since 2016, however has labored on the museum since 1998, first as an affiliate curator of latest artwork, later because the chair of its modern division after which, following the merging of its fashionable and modern departments, because the chair and curator of the brand new division. As such he was concerned within the inaugural set up of the museum’s new Renzo Piano-designed Trendy Wing when it opened in 2009. In 2015 he helped safe the museum’s largest present ever, a trove of 42 fashionable masterpieces from the collectors Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson collectively valued at $400m.
Rondeau’s tenure on the helm of the museum has had its share of challenges, too, together with negotiations with a newly shaped union representing staff on the AIC and its affiliated faculty that ultimately resulted in a contract settlement in summer time 2023. In September of that 12 months, a former payroll supervisor on the museum was accused of embezzling $2m from the establishment; he subsequently pleaded responsible and was sentenced to a few years in jail. And in Might 2024, amid a world wave of campus protests in solidarity with Palestine, greater than 80 college students from the College of the Artwork Institute (SAIC) and Columbia Faculty Chicago had been arrested after forming an encampment on the museum grounds (prices in opposition to them had been later dropped).
