Museums in the Down Economy (From ICON, May 2011)

The time is 2001, and Anne d’Harnoncourt is the Director at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Museum dining room is packed with art critics and journalists anticipating another press luncheon that will launch another world class exhibit. The wait staff offers red or white wine as journalists search the twenty or so silver accented tables for their name cards. The mood is celebratory and gay, like a scene from the Vincent Minnelli movie, Gigi.

After the speeches, appetizer, entrée and dessert, the press is handed complimentary copies of the exhibition catalog, which is really not a catalog at all but a pricey art book ranging in the $50.00 price range. These art tomes—Cezanne and Beyond, Andrew Wyeth, Giorgio de Chirico, The Arts in Latin America, Renoir, Dali or Thomas Eakins—make a substantial addition to any library.

If you think this sounds good, just a couple of years before, at a PMA Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi exhibit, the museum hosted ‘journalist trolleys’ that escorted the press to Manayunk and back in order to visit the Venturi offices after another sumptuous feast in the PMA dining room.

Today, many of the classic perks that still have journalists talking have been relegated down the George Orwell memory hole.

Signs that the bad economy was impacting the museum surfaced shortly before Ms. d’Harnoncourt’s death when the Versailles-style press luncheon, in a nod to minimalism, replaced wine with iced tea, and the press catalog handouts metastasized into CD photo miniatures.

Not only at PMA but at large and small museums nationwide, layoffs have decimated staffs, reduced departments, or forced high profile museum personnel--who thought they had a lifetime career—to look for other work. In effect, the national Recession has forced museums to crawl on all fours like survivors of some half baked holocaust.

In Massachusetts, the Rose Museum at Brandeis University put its entire collection up for sale—deaccessing is the museum term—in order to cover operating expenses. In New York, the Brooklyn Museum, in order not to betray a donor, turned its exhibition space over to one artist. The Art Newspaper reported that in Colorado, the Denver Museum announced plans in 2010 to sell 4 of the 825 works earmarked for its new satellite site, the Clyfford Still Museum. With layoffs, furloughs and hiring freezes at an all time high, not to mention endowments shrinking by a third during the worst of the market swoon, the larger the museum the steeper the loss.

Economic stagnation also affected general museum income from tourists, members, publications, shops and restaurants. Corporate support, once as dependable as a rock called Gibraltar, was scaled back because of market priorities. If you think this Lentil soup couldn’t get any thinner, consider the startling new statistics regarding the museum habits of Americans: Three out of 4 people don’t visit museums, and when they do, it’s for “King Tut” style blockbuster exhibitions that bring in huge audiences. Museum visitors are also getting older, unless of course you count the six years old who like to go to Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.


Please Touch, as has been noted in the Philadelphia press, has also seen better days.

The museum opened in October 2008 to great fanfare, but its move from an economically smart (and small) Center City location to high priced Fairmount Park that has the potential to spell financial disaster for the ‘little museum that could.’ Today both membership and attendance at Please Touch is considerably down.
“The new Please Touch Museum has won adoration from 6-year olds and other important critics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, “and its move to Memorial Hall undoubtedly kept a rare architectural artifact of the 1876 Centennial Exposition from sliding into irretrievable decrepitude…”

The implied ‘but’ here refers to the museum’s slide into economic disaster.
When plans were announced several years ago to move Please Touch to Memorial Hall, skeptics predicted that the new location wouldn’t work. The criticism wasn’t questioning the remarkable renovation of Memorial Hall that took place in lieu of the move, but it did suggest that betting on a children’s museum to garner enough financial support to meet an 88 million dollars fundraising goal (according to The Inquirer, Please Touch is still 21.5 million shy of its target) was comparable to investing in sub-prime loans.

The planners whose vision it was to turn a small Center City museum into a PMA-like fortress devoted to the “toy” fantasies of 6-year olds must have been smoking something.

Museum officials are still hopeful that Please Touch can rise to the occasion. Executive Vice President Concetta Bencivenga says that “because the economy is starting to show some hopeful signs, we are hopeful that engaged individuals who are passionate about children and education, and really passionate about educating the next generation, begin to support Please Touch, or reaffirm their commitment to help us fulfill our goal of completing our capital campaign.

“Anyone who has ever opened a museum knows that the first year is the most inefficient year,” Bencivenga added, “So we have gone through a lot of reorganization as we settle into the new space.”

Hopefully that can be accomplished despite the museum’s relative isolation from the rest of the city. SEPTA bus service to this part of Fairmount Park is tricky unless you’re a veteran bus rider, so travel by car is almost a necessity. A museum that is out of the “walkable” centralized area of the city where buses rarely travel is bound to experience trouble.

In marked contrast to Please Touch, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has had a relatively unscathed last few years, according to PAFA President and CEO, David R. Brigham. PAFA, in fact, is experiencing a kind of Renaissance with its new director, Harry Philbrick, formerly Director of Education at The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

“Aldrich was a very nice and quiet contemporary art center and he [Philbrick] turned it into a very important contemporary art museum,” Brigham says, “He has an artist’s edge and an artist’s hand.”

PAFA has not only weathered the economy, but according to Brigham it has had six consecutive balanced budgets. “We’ve also maintained full employment—we’ve had no layoffs during the recession and we’ve actually been able to grow our program and not cut it. We’ve been healthy.” With 650 full time students and 65 faculty members, tuition helps keep PAFA afloat, but it’s not the only thing. “A remaining portion comes from earned income from the store, facility rentals and income from endowments, and that’s a good healthy mix,” Brigham adds.

The PAFA collection houses some 2,000 paintings, 450 sculptures and 11,000 works on paper. The museum’s biggest draw is the annual student exhibition which takes place in May. The exhibition, which showcases the work of graduating students, attracts potential buyers who survey the works while balancing checkbooks, drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The exhibition gives student artists the opportunity to chat up guests as well as make themselves available for interviews.

PAFA, it seems, has no worries about the future. The new addition to the convention center directly across the street is likely to increase visitors. A serendipitous element was the center’s recent gala opening with a convention of 20,000 operating room nurses. The timing for PAFA couldn’t have been better, since its March exhibition, “Anatomy Academy,” included Thomas Eakins’ ‘Gross Clinic,’ as well as other medical works, something that Brigham called an “ideal content for that audience.”

While many museums around the world, in order to increase revenue, have taken to hosting commercially-based “blockbuster” exhibitions, that’s certainly not the case with PAFA.

“The blockbuster exhibition model,” Brigham said, “is not our model because going this route tends to lead to decisions that might be in conflict with one’s mission. That’s not our motivation. Our motivation is to help organize exhibits that help to illuminate the current state of American art. Of course we want them to be popular but our first motivation is to do serious exhibitions.”

Museums outside the City of Philadelphia are also feeling the Recession’s scorched earth policy.

Mention Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania to most people and chances are they will think of artist Andrew Wyeth.

At the Brandywine River Museum one can see generations of Wyeth family art as well as American art that relates in some way to the Brandywine Valley. American still life painting, illustrations, portraititure and landscape works are among the hundreds of works represented in the collection. This summer the museum plans a large Jamie Wyeth exhibit (“Farm Work by Jamie Wyeth”) that will feature the sculpted shapes of farm implements as seen by the artist who lives on a farm in Chadds Ford with his wife, Phyllis.

The Brandywine River Museum was a favorite place of Andrew Wyeth, who used to “pop in and out all the time” according to Director James Duff.

“Jamie pops in as his father did. It’s never a regular thing but it’s a fairly frequent thing because they want to see art. On any given day when he was alive you might find Andrew Wyeth in our gallery just looking at pictures. And Jamie does the same thing to a certain degree. Jamie has a more parapetic life; one day he might be in Washington, the next day in New York or Maine.”

The Brandywine is unique in that it is not a separate organization but a department of the Brandywine Conservatory. The Conservatory, according to Duff, also operates the Chadds Ford Environmental Management Center, charged with the specific task of water quality preservation. This double-barrel mission has been made more complicated by the faltering economy.

“We are scrambling for funds to support environmental work just as we are scrambling for funds to support the arts program,” Duffs adds. “The environmental program was the first program here before the museum came along. “
An old 1864 grist mill was acquired in 1967 for the Conservancy and then later, as Duff notes, “a lot of people thought it would make a dandy museum to deal with regional art.” That happened when the mill was renovated by Baltimore architect James R. Reeves.

Duff was the director of a museum in New York State before coming to the Brandywine 38 years ago. “There have been significant changes in the area,” he says. “When the museum first opened 40 years ago people wondered why there was a 4-lane highway down here because there wasn’t enough traffic to justify 4-lane traffic on US Route 1. No one would have conceived of a stop light in the middle of Chadds Ford then, it was just so unnecessary.”

With the growth of the region also came the growth of the museum.
Today the museum has over 300 volunteers and five buildings on a 12 acre campus filled with wildflowers and indigenous trees. But the Brandywine, like most museums, has not had an easy time of it. “These times have been difficult,” Duff confesses,” especially the last two years, but right now with endowment coming back nearly to what it was 3 years ago, and with attendance increasing, we’re very hopeful about the future.

“Most not for profit institutions take their income based on a trailing average of the market value. When you do that,” Duff adds, “the effect of a declining endowment hits you even years after the actual decline. But with the market coming back we look forward to what we hope will be years of able and growing income.”
Duff also believes that the Brandywine collection will grow, and mentions that the last two exhibits related to the Civil War have been drawing in all kinds of people.

In nearby Bucks County, the place where William Penn called home, there are historic stone cottages, gourmet country stores, the canal, and two museums: the Henry Chapman Mercer Museum and the James Michener Museum.

The Michener Museum, says museum director Brice Katsiff, was one of hundreds of regional museums built in the late 1980s and early 1990s when 1.2 museums a week were opening around the country. These institutions celebrated local cultural history. As for the museum’s namesake, Katsiff says that many people coming into the museum today don’t know who Michener was.

“He’s not in the pantheon of American Literature by any means. Young people will come to the museum and they will know that there’s a museum named after him, but that’s it. When the museum started out there were some people who said that the entire museum should be about Michener.

“Like most museums,” Kistoff says, “the majority of things that come to us come to us through gifts, but we do have modest, limited acquisition funds and we are buying new work. If we give an artist an exhibition we try very hard to buy something from the exhibit for the collection.”

The economy has forced the Michener to cut back on staff through hiring freezes, some layoffs and early retirements. The museum also shrank a portion of its programming. The Michener is a leaner institution than it was 5 years ago.
It also experienced a radical 50% cut in State Arts Funding, declining federal support and the end of a State run program called the Legislative Initiative Grants.

“In the current climate there’s even more negative pressure on government support, witness the effort to eliminate funds for NPR,” Katsiff says, adding that he doesn’t think all the factors in the current government support for the arts cultural climate are the byproduct of the cultural wars. “Some factors are the by product of financial pressure; the cultural war issue may be lingering a little bit in the minds of some people but I don’t think it has the power that it had 10 or 15 years ago.”

For the Michener, the silver lining in the crises is that it is forcing museums to find more diverse funding sources. “The final outcome,” he says, “may be a strengthening and one of the options may be that not all Non-profits or all cultural institutions are going to survive. The question is what degree of government support is healthy.”

Perhaps the most traumatic change for the Michener was the forced closure of its satellite facility in New Hope sometime before the financial collapse. It closed because the museum was not able to support it.

“Look,” Katsiff says, “I think we saw that 20 years ago when Canadian cultural institutions were almost entirely dependent on government money and then there was a shift. Reagan came in and there was a shift in thinking about government money for cultural institutions and the Canadian institutions really suffered serious cutbacks because there had been only one source of money—the government. An institution has to have multiple sources of income so that no one agency ‘owns’ it.”

Despite its financial woes, the Michener added a new wing designed by Philadelphia’s Hillier Group and a new project, by the prestigious Kieran Timberlake firm (currently involved in the design of the US embassy in London) is set to begin soon. The museum is also opening a pavilion for concerts, lectures and jazz night entertainments, a “must do” development in an age when museums must be multi-purpose. Fortunately for the Michener, it is located in a county of almost 700,000 people, many of whom have some financial means.

While life at the Allentown Art Museum may not be all Billy Joel songs, it’s still looking up.

Brooks Joyner, President and CEO of the Museum since May 2010, says that the nation’s financial crises has caused the museum “to hit rock bottom with a bare bones budget.”

Founded in the 1930s, the Allentown Art Museum has a diverse collection of American and Renaissance painting. The museum’s famous Samuel H. Kress collection includes some important Old World Masters, Italian, Dutch and Flemish masterpieces that have been in storage since the museum’s temporary closure since November 2010 until the construction of new gallery space. The museum is scheduled to re-open in October 2011 with a grand opening in February.

Staying open during construction was an option but an expensive one that Joyner says would have cost the museum at least a quarter million dollars. Joyner, who hails from the Josyln Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has had plenty of experience in budget cuts that approach the shock level of a radical mastectomy.
At the Joslyn, he recalls at July 2001 meeting in which the museum was told by its controllers and financial officers that the institution would come up a 1.2 million short and literally run out of money to pay its obligations. “Jaws dropped on a number of Board members and our Chairman’s face when we heard this,” he said. “And this was before 9/11 and the great economic disaster.”

Joyner says that the museum has been suffering since 2008 when it lost government funding at the federal, state and county levels. The last 2-3 years have been Lentil soup ones, with the museum eliminating Tuesday hours, reducing personnel, establishing a hiring freeze and reducing salaries by 5% across the board. It also had to re-do employee benefit packages and order Departments to reduce their budgets. The bold pairing down, while seemingly inhumane, produced results: By June 2010 the museum was able to balance its budget.

Joyner tells me, “We hope to do that this year. We’ve turned the corner on the losing proposition that had reduced benefits, morale and salaries. Our plan is to restore salaries to the level where they once were.” Just as importantly, the museum has achieved this without, as Joyner says, selling out the integrity of its programs in any way when it lost government funding.

“We’ve been able to supplement with private, corporation and foundation support.” If that happens, the museum can look forward to a significant rebound when it reopens in October; a rebound that Joyner expects will “hit some of our all time highs next year.”

As if the American museum financial crisis needed more bad news, Joyner reminds me that over the last couple of years there’s been “a generational die-off” among the nation’s top museum directors.

“The greatest museum directors in the country have been dying quite frequently,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. A few years ago the Cleveland Museum director was going to speak at our museum in Omaha but we got a call from his secretary who said he was ill, not feeling well, and he was dead in 5 days. We also lost Jim Woods, the Chicago Art Institute director, and most recently the Getty President, and then Anne d’Harancourt and 2 months ago the director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Some die of age and infirmity, but some die suddenly and unexpectedly.”
But that, as they say, is another sad story.









The time is 2001, and Anne d’Harnoncourt is the Director at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Museum dining room is packed with art critics and journalists anticipating another press luncheon that will launch another world class exhibit. The wait staff offers red or white wine as journalists search the twenty or so silver accented tables for their name cards. The mood is celebratory and gay, like a scene from the Vincent Minnelli movie, Gigi.
After the speeches, appetizer, entrée and dessert, the press is handed complimentary copies of the exhibition catalog, which is really not a catalog at all but a pricey art book ranging in the $50.00 price range. These art tomes—Cezanne and Beyond, Andrew Wyeth, Giorgio de Chirico, The Arts in Latin America, Renoir, Dali or Thomas Eakins—make a substantial addition to any library.
If you think this sounds good, just a couple of years before, at a PMA Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi exhibit, the museum hosted ‘journalist trolleys’ that escorted the press to Manayunk and back in order to visit the Venturi offices after another sumptuous feast in the PMA dining room.
Today, many of the classic perks that still have journalists talking have been relegated down the George Orwell memory hole.
Signs that the bad economy was impacting the museum surfaced shortly before Ms. d’Harnoncourt’s death when the Versailles-style press luncheon, in a nod to minimalism, replaced wine with iced tea, and the press catalog handouts metastasized into CD photo miniatures.
Not only at PMA but at large and small museums nationwide, layoffs have decimated staffs, reduced departments, or forced high profile museum personnel--who thought they had a lifetime career—to look for other work. In effect, the national Recession has forced museums to crawl on all fours like survivors of some half baked holocaust.
In Massachusetts, the Rose Museum at Brandeis University put its entire collection up for sale—deaccessing is the museum term—in order to cover operating expenses. In New York, the Brooklyn Museum, in order not to betray a donor, turned its exhibition space over to one artist. The Art Newspaper reported that in Colorado, the Denver Museum announced plans in 2010 to sell 4 of the 825 works earmarked for its new satellite site, the Clyfford Still Museum. With layoffs, furloughs and hiring freezes at an all time high, not to mention endowments shrinking by a third during the worst of the market swoon, the larger the museum the steeper the loss.
Economic stagnation also affected general museum income from tourists, members, publications, shops and restaurants. Corporate support, once as dependable as a rock called Gibraltar, was scaled back because of market priorities. If you think this Lentil soup couldn’t get any thinner, consider the startling new statistics regarding the museum habits of Americans: Three out of 4 people don’t visit museums, and when they do, it’s for “King Tut” style blockbuster exhibitions that bring in huge audiences. Museum visitors are also getting older, unless of course you count the six years old who like to go to Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum.


Please Touch, as has been noted in the Philadelphia press, has also seen better days.
The museum opened in October 2008 to great fanfare, but its move from an economically smart (and small) Center City location to high priced Fairmount Park that has the potential to spell financial disaster for the ‘little museum that could.’ Today both membership and attendance at Please Touch is considerably down.
“The new Please Touch Museum has won adoration from 6-year olds and other important critics,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, “and its move to Memorial Hall undoubtedly kept a rare architectural artifact of the 1876 Centennial Exposition from sliding into irretrievable decrepitude…”
The implied ‘but’ here refers to the museum’s slide into economic disaster.
When plans were announced several years ago to move Please Touch to Memorial Hall, skeptics predicted that the new location wouldn’t work. The criticism wasn’t questioning the remarkable renovation of Memorial Hall that took place in lieu of the move, but it did suggest that betting on a children’s museum to garner enough financial support to meet an 88 million dollars fundraising goal (according to The Inquirer, Please Touch is still 21.5 million shy of its target) was comparable to investing in sub-prime loans.
The planners whose vision it was to turn a small Center City museum into a PMA-like fortress devoted to the “toy” fantasies of 6-year olds must have been smoking something.
Museum officials are still hopeful that Please Touch can rise to the occasion. Executive Vice President Concetta Bencivenga says that “because the economy is starting to show some hopeful signs, we are hopeful that engaged individuals who are passionate about children and education, and really passionate about educating the next generation, begin to support Please Touch, or reaffirm their commitment to help us fulfill our goal of completing our capital campaign.
“Anyone who has ever opened a museum knows that the first year is the most inefficient year,” Bencivenga added, “So we have gone through a lot of reorganization as we settle into the new space.”

Hopefully that can be accomplished despite the museum’s relative isolation from the rest of the city. SEPTA bus service to this part of Fairmount Park is tricky unless you’re a veteran bus rider, so travel by car is almost a necessity. A museum that is out of the “walkable” centralized area of the city where buses rarely travel is bound to experience trouble.

In marked contrast to Please Touch, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has had a relatively unscathed last few years, according to PAFA President and CEO, David R. Brigham. PAFA, in fact, is experiencing a kind of Renaissance with its new director, Harry Philbrick, formerly Director of Education at The Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
“Aldrich was a very nice and quiet contemporary art center and he [Philbrick] turned it into a very important contemporary art museum,” Brigham says, “He has an artist’s edge and an artist’s hand.”
PAFA has not only weathered the economy, but according to Brigham it has had six consecutive balanced budgets. “We’ve also maintained full employment—we’ve had no layoffs during the recession and we’ve actually been able to grow our program and not cut it. We’ve been healthy.” With 650 full time students and 65 faculty members, tuition helps keep PAFA afloat, but it’s not the only thing. “A remaining portion comes from earned income from the store, facility rentals and income from endowments, and that’s a good healthy mix,” Brigham adds.
The PAFA collection houses some 2,000 paintings, 450 sculptures and 11,000 works on paper. The museum’s biggest draw is the annual student exhibition which takes place in May. The exhibition, which showcases the work of graduating students, attracts potential buyers who survey the works while balancing checkbooks, drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The exhibition gives student artists the opportunity to chat up guests as well as make themselves available for interviews.
PAFA, it seems, has no worries about the future. The new addition to the convention center directly across the street is likely to increase visitors. A serendipitous element was the center’s recent gala opening with a convention of 20,000 operating room nurses. The timing for PAFA couldn’t have been better, since its March exhibition, “Anatomy Academy,” included Thomas Eakins’ ‘Gross Clinic,’ as well as other medical works, something that Brigham called an “ideal content for that audience.”
While many museums around the world, in order to increase revenue, have taken to hosting commercially-based “blockbuster” exhibitions, that’s certainly not the case with PAFA.
“The blockbuster exhibition model,” Brigham said, “is not our model because going this route tends to lead to decisions that might be in conflict with one’s mission. That’s not our motivation. Our motivation is to help organize exhibits that help to illuminate the current state of American art. Of course we want them to be popular but our first motivation is to do serious exhibitions.”
Museums outside the City of Philadelphia are also feeling the Recession’s scorched earth policy.
Mention Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania to most people and chances are they will think of artist Andrew Wyeth.
At the Brandywine River Museum one can see generations of Wyeth family art as well as American art that relates in some way to the Brandywine Valley. American still life painting, illustrations, portraititure and landscape works are among the hundreds of works represented in the collection. This summer the museum plans a large Jamie Wyeth exhibit (“Farm Work by Jamie Wyeth”) that will feature the sculpted shapes of farm implements as seen by the artist who lives on a farm in Chadds Ford with his wife, Phyllis.
The Brandywine River Museum was a favorite place of Andrew Wyeth, who used to “pop in and out all the time” according to Director James Duff.
“Jamie pops in as his father did. It’s never a regular thing but it’s a fairly frequent thing because they want to see art. On any given day when he was alive you might find Andrew Wyeth in our gallery just looking at pictures. And Jamie does the same thing to a certain degree. Jamie has a more parapetic life; one day he might be in Washington, the next day in New York or Maine.”
The Brandywine is unique in that it is not a separate organization but a department of the Brandywine Conservatory. The Conservatory, according to Duff, also operates the Chadds Ford Environmental Management Center, charged with the specific task of water quality preservation. This double-barrel mission has been made more complicated by the faltering economy.
“We are scrambling for funds to support environmental work just as we are scrambling for funds to support the arts program,” Duffs adds. “The environmental program was the first program here before the museum came along. “
An old 1864 grist mill was acquired in 1967 for the Conservancy and then later, as Duff notes, “a lot of people thought it would make a dandy museum to deal with regional art.” That happened when the mill was renovated by Baltimore architect James R. Reeves.
Duff was the director of a museum in New York State before coming to the Brandywine 38 years ago. “There have been significant changes in the area,” he says. “When the museum first opened 40 years ago people wondered why there was a 4-lane highway down here because there wasn’t enough traffic to justify 4-lane traffic on US Route 1. No one would have conceived of a stop light in the middle of Chadds Ford then, it was just so unnecessary.”
With the growth of the region also came the growth of the museum.
Today the museum has over 300 volunteers and five buildings on a 12 acre campus filled with wildflowers and indigenous trees. But the Brandywine, like most museums, has not had an easy time of it. “These times have been difficult,” Duff confesses,” especially the last two years, but right now with endowment coming back nearly to what it was 3 years ago, and with attendance increasing, we’re very hopeful about the future.
“Most not for profit institutions take their income based on a trailing average of the market value. When you do that,” Duff adds, “the effect of a declining endowment hits you even years after the actual decline. But with the market coming back we look forward to what we hope will be years of able and growing income.”
Duff also believes that the Brandywine collection will grow, and mentions that the last two exhibits related to the Civil War have been drawing in all kinds of people.

In nearby Bucks County, the place where William Penn called home, there are historic stone cottages, gourmet country stores, the canal, and two museums: the Henry Chapman Mercer Museum and the James Michener Museum.
The Michener Museum, says museum director Brice Katsiff, was one of hundreds of regional museums built in the late 1980s and early 1990s when 1.2 museums a week were opening around the country. These institutions celebrated local cultural history. As for the museum’s namesake, Katsiff says that many people coming into the museum today don’t know who Michener was.
“He’s not in the pantheon of American Literature by any means. Young people will come to the museum and they will know that there’s a museum named after him, but that’s it. When the museum started out there were some people who said that the entire museum should be about Michener.
“Like most museums,” Kistoff says, “the majority of things that come to us come to us through gifts, but we do have modest, limited acquisition funds and we are buying new work. If we give an artist an exhibition we try very hard to buy something from the exhibit for the collection.”
The economy has forced the Michener to cut back on staff through hiring freezes, some layoffs and early retirements. The museum also shrank a portion of its programming. The Michener is a leaner institution than it was 5 years ago.
It also experienced a radical 50% cut in State Arts Funding, declining federal support and the end of a State run program called the Legislative Initiative Grants.
“In the current climate there’s even more negative pressure on government support, witness the effort to eliminate funds for NPR,” Katsiff says, adding that he doesn’t think all the factors in the current government support for the arts cultural climate are the byproduct of the cultural wars. “Some factors are the by product of financial pressure; the cultural war issue may be lingering a little bit in the minds of some people but I don’t think it has the power that it had 10 or 15 years ago.”
For the Michener, the silver lining in the crises is that it is forcing museums to find more diverse funding sources. “The final outcome,” he says, “may be a strengthening and one of the options may be that not all Non-profits or all cultural institutions are going to survive. The question is what degree of government support is healthy.”

Perhaps the most traumatic change for the Michener was the forced closure of its satellite facility in New Hope sometime before the financial collapse. It closed because the museum was not able to support it.
“Look,” Katsiff says, “I think we saw that 20 years ago when Canadian cultural institutions were almost entirely dependent on government money and then there was a shift. Reagan came in and there was a shift in thinking about government money for cultural institutions and the Canadian institutions really suffered serious cutbacks because there had been only one source of money—the government. An institution has to have multiple sources of income so that no one agency ‘owns’ it.”
Despite its financial woes, the Michener added a new wing designed by Philadelphia’s Hillier Group and a new project, by the prestigious Kieran Timberlake firm (currently involved in the design of the US embassy in London) is set to begin soon. The museum is also opening a pavilion for concerts, lectures and jazz night entertainments, a “must do” development in an age when museums must be multi-purpose. Fortunately for the Michener, it is located in a county of almost 700,000 people, many of whom have some financial means.

While life at the Allentown Art Museum may not be all Billy Joel songs, it’s still looking up.
Brooks Joyner, President and CEO of the Museum since May 2010, says that the nation’s financial crises has caused the museum “to hit rock bottom with a bare bones budget.”
Founded in the 1930s, the Allentown Art Museum has a diverse collection of American and Renaissance painting. The museum’s famous Samuel H. Kress collection includes some important Old World Masters, Italian, Dutch and Flemish masterpieces that have been in storage since the museum’s temporary closure since November 2010 until the construction of new gallery space. The museum is scheduled to re-open in October 2011 with a grand opening in February.
Staying open during construction was an option but an expensive one that Joyner says would have cost the museum at least a quarter million dollars. Joyner, who hails from the Josyln Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, has had plenty of experience in budget cuts that approach the shock level of a radical mastectomy.
At the Joslyn, he recalls at July 2001 meeting in which the museum was told by its controllers and financial officers that the institution would come up a 1.2 million short and literally run out of money to pay its obligations. “Jaws dropped on a number of Board members and our Chairman’s face when we heard this,” he said. “And this was before 9/11 and the great economic disaster.”
Joyner says that the museum has been suffering since 2008 when it lost government funding at the federal, state and county levels. The last 2-3 years have been Lentil soup ones, with the museum eliminating Tuesday hours, reducing personnel, establishing a hiring freeze and reducing salaries by 5% across the board. It also had to re-do employee benefit packages and order Departments to reduce their budgets. The bold pairing down, while seemingly inhumane, produced results: By June 2010 the museum was able to balance its budget.
Joyner tells me, “We hope to do that this year. We’ve turned the corner on the losing proposition that had reduced benefits, morale and salaries. Our plan is to restore salaries to the level where they once were.” Just as importantly, the museum has achieved this without, as Joyner says, selling out the integrity of its programs in any way when it lost government funding.
“We’ve been able to supplement with private, corporation and foundation support.” If that happens, the museum can look forward to a significant rebound when it reopens in October; a rebound that Joyner expects will “hit some of our all time highs next year.”

As if the American museum financial crisis needed more bad news, Joyner reminds me that over the last couple of years there’s been “a generational die-off” among the nation’s top museum directors.
“The greatest museum directors in the country have been dying quite frequently,” he says. “It’s unbelievable. A few years ago the Cleveland Museum director was going to speak at our museum in Omaha but we got a call from his secretary who said he was ill, not feeling well, and he was dead in 5 days. We also lost Jim Woods, the Chicago Art Institute director, and most recently the Getty President, and then Anne d’Harancourt and 2 months ago the director of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Some die of age and infirmity, but some die suddenly and unexpectedly.”
But that, as they say, is another sad story.

Thom Nickels