What Are the Causes of an Art Museum Being Closed
The Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles is a "micro museum" tucked abroad on the third flooring of a Macy'south in the city's Crenshaw district. The museum has been closed since March 2020. Keasha Dumas Heath hide explanation
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Keasha Dumas Heath
The Museum of African American Fine art in Los Angeles is a "micro museum" tucked abroad on the tertiary floor of a Macy's in the urban center's Crenshaw district. The museum has been closed since March 2020.
Keasha Dumas Heath
For many small-scale museums across the country, it's been over a twelvemonth since their doors have been open to visitors, putting them in the same life-or-expiry situation as much of the residual of the arts sector.
Some smaller museums have struggled with accessing federal grants. And unlike large institutions, they don't have large endowments and can't fall back on deep reserves.
Keasha Dumas Heath is the executive director of the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles. Her organization, which she calls "a micro museum," is tucked away on the 3rd floor of a Macy'southward in the city's Crenshaw district. The museum is best known for its large collection of paintings from Harlem Renaissance artist Palmer C. Hayden.
The museum has been closed since March 2020. That's because it'due south considered an amusement space — as opposed to Macy's, which as a retail space has been immune to exist open. For the museum, it's meant no gift shop sales, no events and no visitors wandering up and leaving a donation while they're at that place. In a usual year, that money fuels a lot of their programming.
Dumas Heath tells NPR they "don't run very well on empty."
This past year, the museum has had to rely on state and local grants and donations to keep from closing their doors for skillful.
It's non alone. Co-ordinate to an American Brotherhood of Museums survey of more than than 850 museum directors, a tertiary said their museums were at risk of permanently endmost. Some already have, like the Bellingham Railway Museum in Bellingham, Wash., and the World of Speed motorsports museum in Wilsonville, Ore.
American Brotherhood of Museums President and CEO Laura Lott says that when museums close, they usually take to disperse their collections throughout other institutions.
"Museums be to protect our cultural heritage and the things that nosotros as a club have decided are of import," Lott says. "Dissimilar a eating place or a store, which we would also hate to lose, but would, when economical times return ... probably come dorsum in some form, once a museum closes, information technology'southward closed forever, generally."
Like the Museum of African American Fine art in LA, the National Marian Anderson Museum in Philadelphia has been all virtual for over a year. The museum is dedicated to the Black performer best known for singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after beingness barred from Washington, D.C.'s DAR Constitution Hall because of her race in 1939.
The museum is in her one-time home, and it also runs a scholarship program for Blackness vocalists — a program that Jillian Patricia Pirtle, the organization's CEO, benefited from herself.
"It has been very devastating," Pirtell says. "We do not get the type of endowment funding that large corporate museums get. And so we rely very heavily on our 24-hour interval-to-day tour groups, in-person visitors, and the fact that we oasis't had that and nosotros've had to solely rely on their virtual attendance has been crippling."
A recent basement flood caused $forty,000 of damage to the house. Like the Museum of African American Art, they haven't benefited much from federal relief programs aimed at helping small businesses.
"I'm actually hoping that things change for the better in a positive manner with getting help and distribution of it evenly and equally for cultural institutions that don't fit their cookie cutter mold," Pirtle says.
In LA, Dumas Heath and her small staff are making preparations at present that the metropolis is allowing spaces like museums to open up upwardly their doors at a limited capacity again. But there'south a lot to do even so to get the space back up and running — like floor decals to straight traffic and acrylic barriers between souvenir store cashiers and guests.
She worries nigh another COVID-19 surge that would strength them to close their doors again.
"It does not feel like we're quite out of the woods even so," Dumas Heath says.
But she'south hopeful that it won't be too long until visitors can experience her museum again in person — whether they're longtime patrons, or folks who just happened to be at Macy'southward that day.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/03/29/980888150/once-a-museum-closes-its-closed-forever-the-struggle-to-keep-art-alive-right-now
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