It’s not all wine-and-Brie parties and lunches at the Arts Club for museum directors these days. Besides the old drag of romancing the donors and the new horror of shrinking endowments, there are minefields cropping up all around them. There’s been the fractious board at the Terra, the investment fiasco at the Art Institute, and now the big guns of a federal indictment at the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design. Athenaeum director Christian Narkiewicz-Laine pleaded not guilty this week on a three-count indictment handed down by a federal grand jury late last month. The feds have charged the museum founder and former Sun-Times architecture critic with defrauding no less an entity than the government of Denmark.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
According to the indictment, in 1995 Narkiewicz-Laine approached the Danish consulate in Chicago about cosponsoring an exhibit of Danish architecture and design at the Athenaeum. The consulate agreed to help solicit 75 Danish companies for products and, in some cases, for contributions of up to $10,000 each to support the show. The consulate and the Athenaeum opened a joint checking account to receive the funds; the Athenaeum was to be reimbursed from the account for expenses and third-party-vendor invoices. The show, “Denmark Through Design,” ran during the summer of 1996. Between May and November of that year, $158,500 was raised and de-posited in the joint account and $138,000 was disbursed to the Athenaeum, in part to reimburse it for third-party bills that were allegedly either inflated or totally false. In addition, the indictment states, Narkiewicz-Laine billed three of the corporate sponsors directly and deposited the money ($8,500) in an Athen-aeum account, hiding the payments from the consulate. He is accused of bilking the Royal Danish Consulate out of a total of $62,763.
At the time of the Danish exhibit, the Athenaeum occupied eight floors of the former Montgomery Wards headquarters at 6 N. Michigan, including the penthouse conference room that once was Aaron Montgomery Ward’s office. Narkiewicz-Laine held forth there during an interview with the Reader in 1998, when he was making plans to open a $30-million satellite museum complex in Schaumburg. He’d struck a deal to lease 20 acres of land at a dollar a year for 99 years and to rent a barn of a building on the new town square for five years at the same rate. He claimed the downtown museum was getting more than 300,000 visitors annually (though there were only three people in sight on the afternoon of the interview) and said he started it without benefit of an endowment and ran it as a nonprofit “business.”
