Inside J.B. Pritzker’s DNC Strategy: Art, Booze, Billionaires, and ‘The Bear’

It’s not exactly a new thing for a mega-wealthy family to use its billions to make inroads into the cultural firmament. It was kind of a requirement for a while—see the museums around the country left by Morgans, Fricks, Rockefellers, and Gettys. And it goes across the political spectrum. The left-leaning Soros family has members on a number of museum boards. So does the Koch family, which famously paid for the backlit fountains that plume outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art all night and day, and opened the same year the family gave $129 million to conservative candidates across the country. The Waltons, who have built a mini empire of galleries and concert venues surrounding the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, have drifted steadily bluer over the past 20 years.

So it’s no surprise that the Democratic National Convention will shine a spotlight on a number of politically powerful families who also like to throw money around in cultural philanthropy.

The family that’s perhaps pervaded more institutional boards of trustees than any other is at the center of Illinois politics: the Pritzker family, Chicago-based billionaires who own the Hyatt Hotel empire, Royal Caribbean Cruises, and various other entities. In the 25 years since Jay Pritzker’s death, the number of family members have proliferated and the fortune has spread among the many branches.

This week will be something of a coming out party for J.B. Pritzker, the Malort-shooting, JBeer-quaffing Illinois governor who has been an extremely game host to the DNC. He lobbied hard to win the convention for Chicago, inviting the bid committee to a party at his Gold Coast mansion, where Jim Belushi channeled his brother John by playing “Sweet Home Chicago” on the harmonica à la Joliet Jake in The Blues Brothers. The next night Pritzker went full Bear-mode and hired three Chicago-based Michelin-starred chefs to come to the Frank Gehry designed bandshell in Millennium Park (not coincidentally named the Jay Pritzker Pavilion) to see Metallica sound check before rocking Lollapalooza later that night.

Plus, Pritzker and the Chicago 2024 Host Committee guaranteed the bid committee that they could raise enough money to not leave the DNC in debt—a calamity that actually happened after the Charlotte-hosted DNC in 2012. In March 2023, a spokesperson for the governor confirmed that the committee had promised to deliver the funds, telling Politico, “The governor has spoken directly to Joe Biden and committed that Chicago has the ability to fund the convention.” That turned out to be correct—the Chicago DNC Host Committee announced last week it had raised $95 million, a record haul.

A spokesperson for Pritzker declined to comment on exactly how much of the $95 million raised came from Pritzker himself, but Chicago host committee chair Michael Sacks and Leah Israel, the committee’s fundraising lead, confirmed that Pritzker was not the highest individual donor. They said the biggest contributor was an unnamed company or person who gave $6 million. (They did say that Pritzker offered up his mansion for fundraisers.) They also confirmed that donors included local financial services titan CME and United Airlines, as well as unions such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Laborers’ International Union of North America, and that further public disclosures would come 60 days after the close of the convention.

After a kickoff lunch Saturday, the Pritzker family is also hosting an event Tuesday night at the Salt Shed featuring a performance by John Legend—it’s set to be one of the most FOMO-inducing bashes of the week. And last week, the governor started things off with a sampling of some of the custom beers brewed specially for the event, the aforementioned JBeers—get it? JB…JBeers—featuring an IPA and a Mexican lager, served up at a River North establishment.

Governor Pritzker began Monday with a morning speech to the members of Illinois’s delegation, where he unapologetically mentioned his enormous wealth, and copped to the reality that being a billionaire doesn’t usually put you in line with the Democrats.

“Back in 2018, our party was not exactly begging me to run for governor. No one was crying out for a white, Ukrainian American, Jewish billionaire,” he said, adding that his family members have long been Democrats because his ancestors were thankful for the social services and public education they received after immigrating to Chicago.

And he’s been doing the rounds with the visiting press. On The Daily Show, Pritzker went day-drinking around Wrigleyville bars with correspondent Jordan Klepper, and discussed why The Bear, the aforementioned family melodrama about a chef in Chicago, wins Emmys in the comedy category.

“I don’t know why it’s in the comedy category, but I gotta say, it’s one of the best shows on TV and it shows off Chicago,” he said.

As they left the bar, after consuming shots of Malort and pints of Chicago’s beloved Old Style beer, Klepper declined the check and said, “Put it on the Pritzkers.”

And hours into the first day of the convention Pritzker brought some JBeers to the bros on Pod Save America, who started crushing them on-air. “I would just note that Tommy’s and my beers are open, the governor’s is closed, he’s got a lot to do today,” co-host Dan Pfeiffer said.

“I’ll crack it around 6:30,” Pritzker said.

The governor is set to give a big speech tonight at the convention, speaking on the same night as a guy who worked his way up through Chicago politics and seized the presidency, Barack Obama. Back in January, Chicago Magazine foresaw a scenario eerily similar to what’s to come, and made a hell of a prediction, speculating that Pritzker would use the spotlight as a stepping stone to the nation’s highest office.

“He’ll get to make a prime time speech,” reporter Edward Robert McClelland wrote, “which he hopes will make him The Next President of the United States, just as Barack Obama’s speech in Boston did 20 years ago.”

The magazine also said the Pritzker family would end up with another building or street sign with their name on it after the campaign was done and dusted, and just for good measure reminded readers that the Pritzkers are “the first family of Illinois.”

As J.B. mentioned on Monday, his ancestors did indeed immigrate to Chicago from Ukraine. Nicholas J. Pritzker arrived in 1881, worked as a pharmacist, and his three sons—Jack, Harry, and A.N. Pritzker—become lawyers and started the firm Pritzker & Pritzker, which was successful enough to fund the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago. The global Pritzker empire began in earnest in 1957 when A.N.’s son Jay Pritzker and his brother Donald spent $2.2 million to buy Hyatt House, a Los Angeles motel that had recently opened near LAX, sensing that high-end travelers would need a lux place to crash near the airport. They quickly built Hyatt into one of the world’s biggest hotel brands, and along the way acquired companies like Ticketmaster (sold to Paul Allen in 1993) and the Marmon Group, a manufacturing conglomerate they sold to Berkshire Hathaway, first partially and then entirely.

Through a series of deals and savvy investments, the family has managed to keep the fortune, and then some—since the pandemic it’s added over $10 billion. Forbes estimates that the entire family’s net worth is $41.6 billion, split among the roughly 50 members.

And the family has put its time and money into establishing a nexus of soft power at essentially every Chicago cultural institution, as well as at institutions around the country.

Penny Pritzker served as commerce secretary in Obama’s Cabinet and, more recently, got tapped by President Biden to lead a peace envoy in Ukraine. But before that, she chaired the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art near Chicago’s Gold Coast for years. Pritzker currently serves on the board of the Obama Foundation, which is spearheading the opening of the museum at the presidential library on Chicago’s South Side.

And through it all she’s been a dedicated collector, a frequent attendee of the Expo Chicago art fair and a supporter of local artists, such as Theaster Gates. He and her husband, Bryan Traubert, have made appearances on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list year in and year out.

Her brother, the governor, doesn’t do much board hobnobbing these days, though he remains a trustee of Duke University. In the 2024 state budget Pritzker earmarked an additional $10 million to the Illinois Arts Council in order to fund art-related organizations across the state. He’s also, like his sister, a fan of Gates—he’s made official visits to the artist’s Rebuild Foundation, and has hung his art in the governor’s mansion.

Tom Pritzker, who’s been the public face of the family’s enterprise for decades, has also thrown himself into arts philanthropy, serving as chairman of the board of the Art Institute of Chicago, which holds one of the country’s great collections of Impressionist gems—plus Norman Rockwell’s Nighthawks. He’s also on the board of the University of Chicago, home to the Smart Museum of Art and the Renaissance Society, one of the oldest contemporary art concerns in the country. Elsewhere in the city there’s the Museum of Science and Industry—which is technically called the Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, named for a guy with political views diametrically opposite to the Pritzkers’—and both Matthew Pritzker and Jason Pritzker have served on the board at some point. Gigi Pritzker Pucker is on the board of the Chicago Children’s Museum, and Jennifer Pritzker is the founder of the Pritzker Military Museum, which was established in Chicago in 2003 and earlier this year moved a few hours north to Kenosha.

But the Pritzkers’ reach extends far beyond the banks of Lake Michigan—they also hold serious positions of power at museums on both coasts. Before their divorce in 2019, John Pritzker and his wife, Lisa Stone Pritzker, were a powerful couple on the San Francisco art scene, serving on the board of SFMoMA, which is home to the Pritzker Center of photography. When Leo Villareal covered the Golden Gate Bridge with his Bay Lights installation—said to be the world’s largest LED light structure, and costing $8 million—the Pritzkers were at the launch, alongside future veep contender Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco.

And in Los Angeles, Jeanne and Anthony Pritzker, called Tony, have long been solid supporters of the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Tony has been on the board since 2011, and in 2013 the couple donated $2 million to the institution to support children’s programming. At the center of the innovative indoor-outdoor museum is an open-air courtyard now named the Pritzker Family Commons.

New York City is home to more billionaires than any city in the world—the Democratic donor Michael Bloomberg and the Republican donor Julia Koch among them. But the Pritzkers have found a foothold in the Big Apple too: In 2019, John joined the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Still, the most public-facing cultural contribution bequeathed by the Pritzkers has to be the Pritzker Prize, the world’s preeminent honor that an architect can achieve during their lifetime.

There’s simply no two words that have more of a seismic impact in the architectural community. When a great architect dies, the words end up in the first sentence of their obituaries. See one: “The Pritzker Prize–winning Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid—arguably the most famous female architect of her time—died this morning in Miami.” Or another: “Richard Rogers, the Pritzker Prize–winning British architect whose inviting, colorful modernism forever altered the cityscapes of Paris and London, died on Saturday at his home in London.” And another: “Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki, who won the prestigious Pritzker Prize for designs praised as smartly and artfully fusing the East with the West, has died.”

There are plenty of other connections between art and politics in Chicago. Host committee chair Sacks and his wife, Cari Sacks, have been collecting for years. Cari has been highly involved in MCA Chicago’s fundraising efforts, while Michael has been called the Rahm whisperer for his proximity to former mayor Rahm Emanuel, and currently serves on the board of the Obama Foundation.

Speaking of Emanuel, before his three mayoral terms he served as Obama’s chief of staff, from 2009 to 2010, and afterward took over as the ambassador to Japan under President Biden; while in that post Emanuel asked if the MCA could loan out works from its collection to hang on the walls of the ambassador’s residence. It obliged, the museum’s director Madeleine Grynsztejn told me in April during Expo Chicago, the city’s big art fair. (Her full title is Pritzker director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.) And speaking of Expo, Rahm’s brother Ari Emanuel is the Endeavor head honcho and big-time Democratic fundraiser—who happened to buy Expo Chicago in late 2023.

Chicago’s longest-standing political dynasty has to be the Daley family. Richard J. Daley served as mayor of Chicago from 1955 to 1976, and his son Richard M. Daley was mayor from 1989 to 2011—43 out of 56 years in Chi-Town were run by the Daley family. The Daleys, too, lay claim to a pretty serious art legacy in Chicago. The elder mayor Daley oversaw the installation of a gigantic Picasso sculpture in the civic center courtyard, now known as Richard Daley Plaza—though the sculpture itself has always been called The Picasso because the artist refused to name it. Daley approved the initial maquette and presided over the unveiling, where he gave a pretty concise summing up of how the public would likely respond to the 50-foot-tall, 160-pound sculpture of an indescribable figure: “What is strange to us today will be familiar to us tomorrow.” In the years that followed, sculptures by Joan Miro and Alexander Calder would spring up next door, setting the stage for an explosion of public art downtown.

And then the younger mayor Daley was instrumental in commissioning Anish Kapoor to create Cloud Gate, known affectionately as The Bean, for Millennium Park, one of the world’s largest public art works and one of the most Instagrammed places in Chicago, if not the country.

The latest Daley to serve is Nora Daley, the younger Daley’s daughter, who in 2022 was named by Governor Pritzker to head the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency that has $17 million to use toward funding grants and support for arts education. Nora is something of a perfect fit. In addition to doing the institutional thing, such as supporting local museums and chairing the board of trustees of the Steppenwolf Theater Company, and serving on the board of the MCA, she has long been a board member of After School Matters, which has provided art education to Chicago’s public schools since the ’90s.

This week, Daley teamed up with Abby Pucker, the founder of Chicago cultural force Gertie, to produce a series of public art programming called Next Stop Chicago, which will provide funding to community-based organizations across the city during the convention. At a time when the entire Democratic universe will settle down in Chicago for the week, Pucker, whose mother is Gigi Pritzker Pucker, gave out grants of $80,000 to a number of organizations to put on shows when, as Pucker told me, “All eyes are gonna be on the city.”

And the focus on historically marginalized communities signals that, while philanthropists are welcome to join the museum board, attention also has to be paid to the noninstitutional areas, to supporting culture, not just at the Art Institute and the MCA but in parts of the city where the next generation of artists can emerge.

“At the end of the day, the people who are able to give money to the campaign are the people who can collect art or sit on a board, and there’s something to think about in terms of a power dynamic,” Pucker said. “You have to invest in areas where artists are coming from and give them a chance to be a part of the art world. It’s important to talk about arts and culture philanthropies and not just talk about museums—we need to broaden our perspective about what belongs in the cultural bucket.”