ShareThisEven the arts are suffering in these tough economic times, at least in Las Vegas.
After 59 years, the Las Vegas Art Museum closed indefinitely last month because it was broke. 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.
"It's not like we didn't reach out," board president Patrick Duffy said. "Everybody comes out of the woodwork now to say, 'I can't believe it,' but where were their checkbooks?"
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.
Does this signal a national trend? Apparently not.
The Phoenix Art Museum, founded nine years after the Las Vegas Art Museum, 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 (Calif.) 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 Warho -- but wasn't attracting significantly more visitors than the Las Vegas museum.
The Vegas museum owns about 170 works 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.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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