Art Institute of Chicago raises admission 50 percent General public to pay $18; senior, student fees rise from $7 to $12

By William Mullen, Tribune reporter | March 12, 2009

People stand outside the Art Institute of Chicago the day it was announced that the admission price for adults will be raised to $18. (Tribune photo by Terrence Antonio James / March 11, 2009)

Come May 23, the cost of admission to the Art Institute of Chicago will jump by 50 percent—$18 instead of $12—after the Chicago Park District Board unanimously approved the museum's request for the steep increase Wednesday.

The increase will hit students and seniors even harder, with charges rising from $7 to $12. Children under 12 will be admitted free.

To soften the blow, the museum said it will not charge extra fees until at least the end of the year for ticketed shows, such as its current exhibit on Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, which carries a $20 charge for non-members.

The museum, which sits on Park District land and receives some district subsidies, must clear any admissions increases with the board.

The increase comes less than three years after the museum instituted mandatory admissions fees, in June 2006. Before, it had asked visitors to pay a "suggested" fee but allowed in those who did not, the last big museum in the city to do so.

Art Institute officials said the higher fees put the museum on par with other large museums in the city and other major U.S. art museums, citing the $20 fee for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the $17 charge at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

"We anticipated we would need to increase fees, that we hadn't increased them in five years," museum director James Cuno told the board. With the addition of a new 264,000-square-foot Modern Wing, visitors will have about a 30 percent increase "of museum experience," he said.

Museum spokeswoman Erin Hogan said the $283 million Modern Wing "has already been paid for, and the increase is not related to the current economic climate ... or about any shortfall or deficit. It is about keeping up with operating costs, which all museums are faced with. It is about not having an admissions increase in five years and about keeping up with our peer institutions."

Several visitors at the museum Wednesday, however, thought the admissions increase was unwise.

"I think in this economic climate, it's a big mistake," said Judy Locke, 72, a Near North Side resident who said she would continue patronizing the museum but worried how families with children could continue to come. "People will be cutting back. They won't go."

Art students Katie Koronkowski, 22, and Dianna McNicoll, 21, who said they are required to visit the Art Institute for their classes, also took a dim view.

"Any kind of fee for students is hard," Koronkowski said. "It just discourages them."

The museum offers a number of free admission days throughout the year and is free for the entire month of February. Admission is also free from 5 to 8 p.m. every Thursday and on Friday nights from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Chicago residents can get free admission through the Chicago Public Library. Admission also will be free during a celebration of the Modern Wing planned for May 16-22.

Tribune reporters Noreen Ahmed-Ullah and Robert Mitchum contributed to this report.

wmullen@tribune.com

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In the valley, a tepid market for the arts
Art museum made bold moves, but support didn’t keep pace

By Kristen Peterson | Thu, Mar 12, 2009 (2 a.m.)


The Las Vegas Art Museum closed recently, unable to raise enough money to remain viable and unwilling to “go back to running a museum with third-rate posters,” says its board president.

The Las Vegas Art Museum closed indefinitely last month because it was broke. After 59 years, there was no endowment, no public funding and little community involvement.

The abrupt closure sparked heartache and anger among longtime supporters. But the fact that there are only about 1,000 museum members and little attendance in a region of 2 million residents illustrates the disconnect between the Las Vegas Art Museum and the community.

How art museums take root and establish themselves in a community varies. The Las Vegas Art Museum had never done well. Its later mission as a contemporary art institute attracted new board members and national attention, but failed to grow the museum in the community before the recession hit.

“It’s not like we didn’t reach out,” board President Patrick Duffy says. “Everybody comes out of the woodwork now to say, ‘I can’t believe it,’ but where were their checkbooks?”

Duffy says the Las Vegas Art Museum, in a last-minute effort, tried forming partnerships with other institutions, including Opportunity Village. The board also considered hanging the permanent collection at the museum, which operates out of a library on West Sahara Avenue. The museum owns about 170 works, including pieces from the “Las Vegas Diaspora” exhibit and 50 from the Herb and Dorothy Vogel collection, held in storage. Duffy says displaying the permanent collection would have cost $500,000 annually and been poorly curated.

And the alternative? “We were not going to go back to running a museum with third-rate posters, like it was 10 years ago,” Duffy says. “You have to give people a reason to come.”

Better to just fold, the board decided.

Ellen Grossman, a former Las Vegas Art Museum staff member, says the museum may have tried too hard to grow too fast.

Board and staff members wanted to build a facility at a more central site to encourage support and attendance, but there were more immediate issues. Professional staff were hired and the payroll ballooned from $232,602 to $593,944 from 2006 to 2007, at a time when revenue remained stagnant at $1.6 million, according to federal tax statements.

Other hurdles: the museum’s location on the far west side of the valley discouraged visitors from across town, and its small size required it to close during installations, which complicated marketing.

On three occasions Libby Lumpkin, then-executive director of the Las Vegas Art Museum, personally drove tourists back to the Strip after they had paid cab fare to go to the institution, only to find it closed.

Mark Hall-Patton, Clark County Museum administrator and vice president of the Nevada Museums Association, said developing a successful museum requires patience.

He moved to the valley when the population was just under 1 million, which elsewhere might have provided an adequate base to support a cultural infrastructure. But he said Las Vegas was too young and transient to provide strong local support, and that tourists preferred the Strip’s attractions to cultural institutions. Some say a contemporary museum is a harder sell.

“The Museum of Modern Art didn’t get founded until 300 years after the city (of New York),” Hall-Patton said. “And it took another century to grow. For us to sit there and say, ‘We should have that,’ well, we will in a century.”

Lumpkin wanted to quicken the process with a cutting-edge contemporary art museum at a location where it could better tap the high-end tourist trade.

“It seemed like a no-brainer,” Lumpkin says. “Las Vegas is a place artists love to come to because of the visual spectacle of the Strip. Hotels are putting recording studios in. This place could be alive with creativity.”

Art certainly boosted tourism in Miami Beach. Art Basel Miami Beach started in 2001 and draws more than 35,000 to the main fair and satellite fairs. Hotels and restaurants are booked. Art in the community became important enough that Miami-Dade voters approved a bond in 2004 that included $100 million toward its art museum.

Las Vegas Art Museum board and staff members believe the museum would have survived had it not been for the disastrous economy.

The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the state’s oldest cultural institution, is booming, with locals providing 70 percent of its gate and a membership seven times that of Las Vegas’ art museum, despite the region’s smaller population.

Its four-level, 55,000-square-foot building opened in 2003 and houses 1,900 works, including modern art, contemporary art and landscape photos of the American West. It recently launched its Center for Art and Environment.

Amy Oppio, the museum’s deputy director, attributes its success largely to its education and community outreach programs that hit every socioeconomic demographic. “When people contributed to the bricks and mortar, they really felt like they were contributing to the community as well.”

The Phoenix Art Museum, founded nine years after the Las Vegas Art Museum, also is doing well. Director Jim Ballinger attributes its success to its diverse collection and exhibits. It has 18,000 works and a 203,000-square-foot building.

The much smaller Scottsdale (Ariz.) Museum of Contemporary Art, which shows mostly touring and showcase exhibits, averages about 40,000 visitors a year, almost triple the figure for the Las Vegas Art Museum. The Palm Springs Art Museum, established in 1938, has a mostly contemporary collection and is doing well this year following a two-year remodeling effort and revamped programming.

Stellar programming isn’t the end-all, however. The struggling Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts has an estimated $350 million collection of works by artists such as Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol — but wasn’t attracting significantly more visitors than the Las Vegas museum.

The Las Vegas effort began as art league in 1950, became the Las Vegas Art Museum in 1974 and in 1997 moved from Lorenzi Park to the Sahara West Library.

For decades the museum lacked a professional staff, accreditation, assets and a coherent mission.

In revamping the museum, Lumpkin had hoped to secure public funding to avoid the problems at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, which lacked government support. A 2006 financial survey by the American Association of Museums found that art museums, on average, receive 14 percent of their revenue from government funding, 46 percent from private donations, 24 percent from earned income and 15 percent from investments.

The Las Vegas Art Museum is a private nonprofit organization that received only 3 percent of its revenue from public funds.

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74 Are Laid Off at Met Museum; More May Follow

By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: March 12, 2009

The Metropolitan Museum of Art said Thursday that it would lay off more than a quarter of its merchandising staff, eliminating 74 jobs in addition to 53 already cut over the last year.

It also warned that the worsening economy would most likely force it to shrink its overall work force by 10 percent — as many as 250 full- and part-time jobs in all — before the summer, including some in curatorial and other pivotal departments.

These steps are partly a reflection of the problems that the museum’s merchandising arm, which a year ago operated 23 stores in New York and around the country, had been facing even before the downturn. But the new round of layoffs also signals how deeply the downturn is hitting even the most prestigious and popular art institutions like the Metropolitan.

The museum has imposed a hiring freeze, halted merit raises and curtailed staff travel and entertainment as well as the use of temporary employees. But it said that “prospective, significant, and long-term reductions” in annual operating income from its endowment had made layoffs imperative.

The endowment is estimated to have lost about $800 million, or 28 percent of its value, since last summer, when it was worth $2.9 billion. And that estimate does not include declines since Jan. 1.

In a letter to members last month, the museum’s chairman, James R. Houghton, said, “The Metropolitan Museum is a robust institution, but despite its manifest strengths has not been immune to the consequences of this turbulent economy.”

In a meeting on Thursday the museum’s director, Thomas P. Campbell, told staff members that no departments would be excluded from the expected reductions, which will affect a work force of about 2,500 people, from curators and administrators to guards and maintenance workers. But the officials added that the cuts would not affect the hours that the museum is open and that the museum would work to make the reductions have the smallest effect on exhibitions, conservation and other core functions.

“Because the Metropolitan is so large and complex an organization, whose staff possess skill sets crucial to maintaining its buildings and collections successfully, such a contraction requires a deliberate and delicate process, which museum management, while acknowledging the urgent need for reductions, is committed to undertaking with the greatest care,” the museum said in a statement.

Harold Holzer, a spokesman, added in an interview on Thursday, “The goal here is that the public will see no difference in the operations of the museum.”

Many other museums across the country are also retrenching in similar or more extreme ways, cutting budgets, staff and the kinds of expansion plans that seemed ubiquitous only a couple of years ago. Among the museums that have imposed layoffs are the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which has also reduced its director’s salary.

At the Metropolitan the endowment, one of the largest in the country for a museum, pays for slightly less than a third of the $220 million operating budget. The loss to that budget is expected to be $2.2 million in the next fiscal year, and that decrease could continue or grow larger for several years because of the way the museum, like many others, parcels out money from its endowment on the basis of a rolling average.

Aside from the endowment’s losses, the museum will receive $1.7 million less in operating help from the city this year and has been told to expect another cutback that could be as high as $2.4 million in the next fiscal year, which begins July 1.

Mr. Holzer said those problems had been compounded by a decline in foreign visitors, who account for 35 percent of the museum’s attendance, spend more on souvenirs and tend to pay the full amount of the museum’s suggested $20 entrance fee. He said after the first two quarters of this fiscal year, in which attendance was robust, the museum hoped it might meet its goal of 4.3 million visitors for the year. But it is no longer sure that it will do so, he said, even with highly anticipated exhibitions, like the Francis Bacon show opening in May and a show of treasures from ancient Afghanistan opening in June.

The drop in attendance has hurt other sources of income like parking fees and money spent in the museum’s restaurants, Mr. Holzer said, adding that officials had also noticed a “softening” in membership renewals.

In his letter Mr. Houghton appealed to the public for support as the museum contends with a crisis that could last many months longer: “It is stating the obvious — yet urgently necessary to do so — to acknowledge that now, more than ever, your attendance, your generosity, your understanding, and your enthusiasm for the Met are critically important to the future of this wonderful institution.”

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Orange Lounge at South Coast Plaza to shut down
O.C. Museum of Art's high-tech location will close after 5 years.
By RICHARD CHANG
The Orange County Register
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The Orange Lounge, the Orange County Museum of Art's satellite venue located in South Coast Plaza, is due to close in June.

A museum official confirmed Tuesday that the lounge, which opened in July 2004 as a dedicated space for digital and video art, will shut its doors around June 15. That's when the five-year, rent-free lease agreement with South Coast Plaza ends.

"We're concentrating our efforts on the new building," said Chivan Wang, director of communications for the museum. "Our lease is up, also. … Everything will be absorbed into one building."

The Newport Beach-based art institution plans to relocate all its operations to Costa Mesa, to a 1.64-acre space next to the Orange County Performing Arts Center and across the street from South Coast Plaza.

OCMA announced last year that it aims to break ground for the new structure by 2013 and open by 2016.

While the museum's spokeswoman was clear about the lounge's closure, OCMA's director was not as forthright. "We have nothing to confirm about the closing of the Orange Lounge," Dennis Szakacs said Tuesday. "Nothing has been determined yet. The Orange Lounge is open and will remain open. If there's any change in status, you'll hear about it from us."

When it opened in 2004, the Orange Lounge was touted as the first museum space on the West Coast devoted exclusively to digital and video art, as well as the only venue of its kind located in a major retail complex.

The lounge, which cost about $250,000 to complete, is located on the third floor of South Coast Plaza's modern Crate & Barrel wing.

The lounge essentially replaced a prior OCMA site at South Coast Plaza – a ground-floor satellite venue near Sears that mostly sold art and art-related objects.

Over the years, the Orange Lounge has hosted a number of video art exhibitions, including works by Diana Thater, John Baldessari and pieces done in conjunction with the museum's California Biennial.

The 2008 edition of the California Biennial is scheduled to end Sunday. After that, the Newport Beach location will close through April 11 to prepare for upcoming exhibits. The lounge will remain open with works from OCMA's permanent collection, Wang said.

The shutdown of the Orange Lounge will not cause any layoffs, Wang said. The handful of employees who work at the lounge will continue to work at the main museum's store, she said.

"They did some good projects there," said Mike McGee, art professor and gallery director at Cal State Fullerton. He's been a longtime observer of the local arts scene. "It seemed like, the way it was set up, it was cool and not that accessible to people. It's really off the beaten track. It wasn't all that inviting. …But I hate to see any art venues going away."

Representatives for South Coast Plaza declined to comment for this story.
Register staff writer Candice Shih contributed to this report.

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AGO considers axing 108 employees
Union demands to know why and when
Last Updated: Thursday, March 12, 2009 | 1:16 PM ET The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto has confirmed it has named 61 full-time employees for possible layoff in order to cut costs.

Another 47 temporary positions are also being considered for elimination.

In an interview Wednesday, Susan Bloch-Nevitte, the AGO's executive director of public affairs, told the National Post that the layoffs were still only a possibility.

"We have made no decisions with respect to staff reductions yet," she said.

The Ontario Public Service Employees Union has demanded to know by Friday the reasons for the layoffs and when they might take place.

"We want to know why these layoffs are necessary and discuss reasonable alternatives," Paula Whitmore, union steward of Local 535, which represents the gallery's non-security staff, said in a news release. "So far, the employer has stonewalled our attempts to get information, and only wants to discuss severance packages and eliminating full-time jobs."

Bloch-Nevitte said the 47 temporary employees were hired for the $276-million Transformation AGO project, and were expected to leave by a certain date.

She added that the AGO is not in a financial crisis, but that attendance has been about 20 per cent lower than expected since the gallery reopened to the public last November.

"The people who manage the AGO are doing it with taxpayers money, and they must be accountable," Whitmore said. "The first line of accountability is to the employees who work at the gallery so we can maintain the high standards that are expected of the AGO. Any plans that will harm programs or the care of the collections are short-sighted and irresponsible."