Visionary: Celebrating Leadership in the Arts

Marilyn Minter deftly explores American culture’s pathology of glamour through painting, photography, and video works that focus primary on the female body and its treatment in popular media. In striking Photorealist paintings and sexually charged photographs, Minter abstracts her subjects as she reimagines them at the cusp of beauty. From early bodies of work, including Coral Ridge Towers, which captured the artist’s mother in shocking intimacy, to her Food Porn paintings, which anticipated contemporary aestheticization of food of consumption, her images are always powerfully urgent.

Laurie Simmons, a central figure of the Pictures Generation, is a photographer and filmmaker who imbues her subjects (primarily inanimate human-like entities) with living energy, suffusing synthetic spaces with nostalgia colored by an adult’s memories, longing, and regret. Simmons’s work blends psychological, political, and conceptual approaches to artmaking—transforming photography’s propensity to objectify people, especially women, into a sustained critique of the medium. Laurie Simmons: Big Camera/Little Camera was on view at the MCA in 2019 and she has numerous pieces in the MCA Collection.

Nancy C. Crown is a Principal of Henry Crown and Company and a Vice President of the Ojai Valley Inn. Ms. Crown sits on various committees of Crown Family Philanthropies (CFP), is a Trustee of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and serves on both the Board and the Executive Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She sits on the board of Start Early, a child advocacy organization in Chicago, which focuses on closing the opportunity gap for young learners, and the International Advisory Board of the Friends of Genoa.

A Steven Crown is Co-President of Henry Crown and Company and sits on the Board of CFP. Mr. Crown is a Trustee of The Art Institute of Chicago, Claremont McKenna College, NorthShore–Edward-Elmhurst Health, and Northwestern University. He currently serves on the Board of Managers for the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago and the Board of Governors for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also a member of the UCLA Anderson School of Management Board of Advisors.

In 2009, after more than 60 years of family grantmaking under the name Arie and Ida Crown Memorial, Crown Family Philanthropies (CFP) was developed to represent an array of family grantmaking practices. Today the legacy of Arie and Ida Crown lives on in the work continued by their descendants, who remain dedicated to the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world.” Supported by a professional staff of experts, CFP is led by more than 50 family members across multiple generations who come together to set strategy and make grantmaking decisions.

CFP partners with communities across the country and around the world, and their deep focus on Chicago has remained central across decades of family leadership. They are committed to a Chicago where all people have what they need to thrive: from equitable and high-quality public education, to shelter and safety, to beautiful and enriching public spaces. CFP’s work in Arts Education facilitates equitable access to strong arts education programming in Chicago to ensure that all students have the benefit of well-rounded and holistic learning experiences.

Together the Crowns cochaired Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s 2014 campaign to fuel Arts Education in Chicago Public schools, raising over $38 million.