Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museum Funding-Fundraising

An Art Museum For Las Vegas After All?

Here’s a switch: Las Vegas, whose art museum closed in 2009, is talking about building a new art museum — this one to focus on contemporary art. Whether this one is any more viable than the first is a matter of conjecture. Interestingly, in the information I’ve been able to find online, there’s not a mention of a collection or much about art. It’s all about a new building with 35,000 square feet of gallery space on a two-acre site downtown.

marquee1I caught wind of this on the local CBS news website. The article began:

A major campaign to raise money for The Modern Contemporary Art Museum kicked off in Las Vegas. Anna Auerbach with Moonridge Group says they need to raise $29 million in order to move forward with the project. The museum will be located in downtown Las Vegas on East Charleston Boulevard and South Arts Way. Auerbach says most cities of this size have an art museum of this scale, and it’s time Las Vegas does too….

The museum will be one of three complementary components of a progressive cultural center that will showcase art, technology, and design in addition to providing essential training and tools for a new wave of artists and designers. The campus will include three components: The Modern Contemporary Art Museum, the Center for Creativity, and Luminous Park, anoutdoor sculpture garden and community gathering space.

The Modern Contemporary Art Museum will house…an important and progressive series of rotating exhibits….and showcase the works of both established and emerging artists from the 20th century onward. The Modern will also include a retail store/gift shop, a bistro and event spaces.

So as you’ve read, the price for this is $29 million. And how much have organizers raised? Would you believe $2.5 million? So they’ve gone public before raising even a tenth of the cost. That’s unusual in itself, fundraisers will tell you. Generally, they want to amass funds or pledges for at least half before going public. In this case, the organizers are taking another strange path — they’re trying crowd-funding for $100,000. They posted their plea on Indiegogo with a campaign running through Apr. 17, according to Nevada Business. As of this posting, they have $10,155.

With the $100,000, the organizers plan to hire a project manager.

In their plea, the organizers say they can move forward only with the public’s help and they add:

  • We deserve an art museum, an education center, and beautiful and safe public park in the heart of downtown
  • This complex will generate tremendous economic impact
  • It will educate individuals of all ages and backgrounds
  • It will create a legacy for our families, friends, and children

Good goals. But before I’d contribute — assuming I lived in or near LV — I’d want to know more about the art and the organizers, not to mention their long-term plan for building and sustaining a museum in Las Vegas.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Modern campaign

MASS MoCA Expands, With State Funds

It seems like only yesterday that MASS MoCA opened, but it was 1999. And today, MASS MoCA announced that was moving into its “Phase III renovation.”

The Massachusetts House of Representatives has just passed an omnibus capital improvement act that allots a $25.4 million grant to MASS MoCA for the project, and the bill now goes to the State Senate for consideration. Let’s hope.

The money will fund the museum’s “final phase of its multi-decade effort to renovate its 26-building, 600,000 square foot, 16-acre factory campus….Phase III development will include the addition of some 130,000 square feet of gallery space, ultimately doubling the space currently available for exhibitions, plus significant work on its performing arts courtyards and other exterior venues.”

MASS MoCA opened with “200,000 square feet of space renovated for galleries, stages, rehearsal studios, and art fabrication facilities.” Then, in its Phase II expansion, from 2002-2008, it added another 200,000 square feet of space for more “galleries, performing arts facilities, outdoor festival fields and courtyards, and 125,000 square feet of commercial lease space.” At the end of this project, the 19th century factory space MASS MoCA began with will be completely transformed (see the pix below).

MASS MoCA is unique, I think — not just for reclaiming so much factory space for art but that plus its public-private partnership (along with state-provided money, the museum has raised $110 million in private funds) and because it has kept alive North Adams, attracting overnight tourists.

Here’s a passage from the release on the point:

MASS MoCA projects a net gain in annual attendance of 65,000 patrons associated with the Phase III project. According to the C3D study, under current visitation patterns to the Berkshires every new 10,000 patrons to MASS MoCA translates to new region-wide economic activity of approximately $1.8 million, generating $160,000 in additional local and state tax revenues, such that the total impact of Phase III development could reach over $11,000,000 per year, and over $1,000,000 per year in new tax revenues.

Art has critical mass in that part of Massachusetts, with the Williams College museum and the expanding Clark Art Institute. Together, the three make a great draw — if only they could get tourists during the winter.

MASS MoCA

Photo credit: Courtesy of MASS MoCA

Fundraising Tactic Worked!

MEDIA CONFERENCEDo you remember last December, when I wrote here about Allen & Co., the financial company headed by Herbert Allen, which had decided to give up the naming of the Allen Room, one of three performance spaces at Jazz at Lincoln Center, so JALC could resell it to another donor? Allen gave $10 million for the name “in perpetuity” in 2004, and I guess he figured it was worth more now.

He was right. On Monday, JALC announced that Robert J. Appel, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Chairman of the Board of Directors, had given $20 million for the naming rights. So the Allen Room will now be called The Appel Room.

This is great news: I would like to see other donors be as creative as Mr. Allen.

For more details, go here, which is the 2014-15 season announcement.

 

 

Museum Secrets: Instructive Audit In St. Louis

St. Louis Art Museum director Brent Benjamin (below right) receives $670,000 in pay, “slightly more in annual compensation than the heads of similar art museums.” The museum has an endowment of $140 million and an operating budget of about $30 million. In 2012, it spent $1.4 million on exhibitions that yielded only $320,000.00 at the gate. The museum’s restaurant is losing money — $260,000 last year.

SLAMWhy do we know all this? As a government entity, publicly-supported, museum, the St. Louis Art Museum is subject to regular audit, and late last month, the most recent results — including those facts above — were published. SLAM receives about $20 million each year from local property taxes (much like the Detroit Institute of Arts…more about which in a minute). Interesting and instructive.

The audit also noted that SLAM was under budget by $1 million on its recent $130 million expansion, and that the museum is great at collecting on pledged donations (Of more than $10 million in pledges at year-end 2010, it wrote off just $12,000 as uncollectable), and — according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch account of the audit, “has millions of dollars more than it needs to pay its bills” — “more than 16 times the current assets needed to cover liabilities — basically, enough cash in the bank to pay bills 16 times over.” That last quote is from an earlier P-D account, here.

BBenjaminThe news was all the better for SLAM because the 2011 report, about the St. Louis Science Center, and the 2012 report, about the Missouri History Museum — two of the five institutions that receive money from the tax — turned up more substantial problems. Now about about those exhibition costs; There’s no reason to worry. SLAM is free, except for special exhibitions, and Benjamin, according to a follow-up story, “pointed out that exhibition losses, about $1 million in 2013, were explained in part by the museum’s free-Friday policy. “It’s been successful,” Benjamin said, adding that between one-third and two-thirds of museum attendees came on Fridays.”
Yikes — I’m not keen on that part. I know money is tight, but maybe the museum could make it “pay as you wish” on Fridays instead of free — to even things out. Or, maybe the museum should reexamine its hours: it must be nearly empty at times. Benjamin also said the restaurant — which was apparently praised by local critics for the good looks of its food but panned for its taste — had planned to lose money for a while, in start-up costs. Nevertheless, there will likely be changes, soon.

So Benjamin gets an A, or maybe A-, from me.

But I write this post because it’s revealing to other museums, too, not least the DIA, where The Detroit News recently criticized director Graham Beal’s salary of $455,453. The DIA and SLAM have similar sized budgets, and while that is not the total indicator of a job’s worth, it is one indicator. And there are those hours — if everyone is coming when a museum is free, maybe it’s time to try other options.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of SLAM

Nastiness Starts: DIA Plan Opponents Attack Director

Politics, not to mention bankruptcies, are a nasty business, so perhaps we should have been prepared. Today The Detroit News published an article headlined DIA executives’ pay up 17% since ’10. It puts the museum and its executives under the microscope, probably to undermine the deal reached last week.

bealThe headline doesn’t cover most of the reporting, which may have influence. The article goes on to elaborate on the raise for top museum executives; a loan to Graham Beal, the DIA director; a “discretionary fund” for his business expenses; compensation for his wife’s travel, and a few other things. It also said the Beal has put his house up for sale — signaling, perhaps, his intended departure. (And who would blame him?)

A few choice excerpts:

The Detroit Institute of Arts gave executives pay hikes, and granted a $155,000 loan to Director Graham Beal, while it campaigned for a regional property tax and faced a pension shortfall, according to its financial records….

…“At a time when we are asking for so much from people in Detroit — pensioners, firefighters and police officers — it is outrageous that these individuals are being so grossly compensated,” said state Rep. Kurt Heise, R-Plymouth….

…The DIA’s pension plan has more than $25.5 million in assets but has a $7 million shortfall, according to the museum’s most recent audited financial statement. In 2012, the shortfall was more than $11 million.

…Beal’s total compensation is $455,453. [AnnMarie] Erickson received $270,802, according to the DIA’s most recent tax filing. Four other museum executives are paid more than $100,000….Beal, 66, also received a $155,832 housing loan, according to the 2012 tax filing. He received the loan in December 2011, nine months before voters approved a 10-year, $230 million regional tax to pay for museum operations….Beal still owes the full $155,832 loan.

Although the News compares Beal’s salary to those of other local arts groups, like the Symphony chief’s, which is lower, those salaries don’t seem out of line to me. Nor are the article’s comparisons all apt — running a museum is somewhat more complicated than a symphony, for example. The Detroit Symphony has a smaller budget than the DIA (or did…the DIA’s has shrunk a bit).

And although the AAMD is quoted as saying that there are “only a few examples of museums offering free or subsidized housing for executives, namely the Indianapolis Museum of Art,” I think this requires more investigation. Off the top of my head, I recall that the Metropolitan Museum used to subsidize the director’s housing, though that may have been discontinued with Tom Campbell. So did the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Morgan Library (that ended recently for practical reasons, not on principle). I believe there are others.

What’s clear here is that some politicians (maybe just a few) opposed to the deal to save both pensions and the DIA are going to fight it, perhaps with dirty tactics — just as banks and bondholders are going to fight. The latter don’t have much choice — Kevyn Orr, and his boss Gov. Rick Snyder, along with the court, have the final say. But politics is unpredictable. Let’s hope these issues go away.