How is it that a museum that was thinking of building galleries, at a cost of $15 million, just three years ago, now can’t pay its employees and has closed?
That’s what has happened in Fayetteville, N.C., which has a population of more than 200,000. The Fayetteville Museum of Art closed at the end last month, with more than $500,000 worth of debt and no cash for the payroll.
“We’re dead,” Tom Grubb, the museum’s executive director since 1990, told the Fayetteville Observer.
It’s a far cry from 2007, when, according to the Observer:
Museum officials unveiled an ambitious plan to raise $15 million to build a nine-story white tower at Festival Park and establish an endowment to help operate it. It had long been their desire to relocate to the city center – to a more visible location in a bigger building.
The museum was apparently counting on public money as an anchor, but it never materialized, and the project went poof! Then it lost operating support, with local government cuts. And then there were accounting questions, and then… it was all over.
In an update on the situation last week, the Observer said trustees were seeking help:
Board President Meredith Stiehl said the board agreed to use an advisory panel of “proven community leaders” to recommend ways to fulfill the museum’s mission of collecting, preserving and displaying art and promoting art education.
In contrast to the loony editorial published by the Boston Globe about the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, the Observer editorial board has got it right. Editors there wrote, in part:
While the museum is reorganizing, it’s up to the Arts Council to help fill the void and bring good art shows to town. If the museum fails in its reinvention, the entrepreneurial job of creating a new museum will become the council’s responsibility.
We hope everyone in the local arts community will unite to support the visual arts and a first-class museum for them. There is no good time for a city to lose a key part of its cultural foundation, but this is one of the worst, as city, county and other groups try to recruit new businesses and residents coming to this region with BRAC expansions at Fort Bragg.
The museum’s closure should be a short story, not another chapter in a long, bitter novel.
Let’s hope.