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Reposted from the Houston Chronicle
Ronn Canon arrived about ten minutes before the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston reopened to members Wednesday morning.
That made him the first non-staffer, aside from Chronicle photographer Elizabeth Conley and me, to visit Houston’s largest art institution in more than two months.
Canon didn’t have to navigate much of the small maze of stanchions and two remote-sensor devices that look like iPhones on tripods just inside the main Beck Building doors, where visitors have their temperatures checked before entering the vaunted halls, wearing face masks.
Eager and purposeful, he wasn’t fazed by the process, which took a few seconds. A museum member for more than 50 years, he normally visits at least once a week and had last been there March 11, a few days before the MFAH closed.
Canon was headed downstairs, through the Turrell tunnel and up to the mezzanine of the Law Building, anxious to pick up where he had left off with the “Glory of Spain” show. “I only did about two galleries on previous trips,” he said. “It’s just a little overwhelming. It’s a big, big exhibition.”
More than a dozen museum staffers stood around in the entry hall, nearly outnumbering the first wave of visitors. “Good morning! Welcome back!” they said cheerfully from behind their face masks. “You’re free to explore as you will!”
Architect Peiwen Yu, like Canon, said she also normally visits weekly, partly to watch the construction progress on the Kinder Building. “Sometimes I just want to be part of this environment,” she said. “I like to visit a real gallery space. In the past month I’ve been doing a lot of streaming to see different galleries and videos, but it’s not the same as coming here and being part of this beauty. It’s just a place that makes you feel like part of the city.”
Yu also ambled off toward “Glory of Spain,” as did most of the visitors during that first hour. The museum logged 160 member visits that day and 486 on Thursday, with slightly longer hours. It opens to the public Saturday.
Happy to be back but still feeling cautious, I headed to the permanent galleries on the Beck Building’s second floor, knowing they would be near-empty. They were quiet even before the shutdown, except during school tours or patrons’ dinners, when a room could be stuffed wall-to-wall with party tables of well-heeled, shoulder-to-shoulder guests and a phalanx of waiters.
I wondered what would speak to me now in the galleries that hold the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Collection and works in the MFAH’s permanent collections of European art, with their color-coded walls of paintings spanning centuries.
Temporary exhibitions such as “Glory of Spain” and “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings,” both up through most of the summer, educate and entertain more dynamically. They keep visitors coming but also make it easy to forget that the soul of the museum is its own encyclopedic foundation.
The MFAH, and by extension all of Houston, owns more than 70,000 works of art covering the arc of history from antiquity to the present. Maybe we have not appreciated them enough.
Amid the many dramatic saint and sinner narratives from the Renaissance, when artists painted for churches and the aristocracy, Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Veil of Veronica” caught my eyes. It’s based on an early medieval legend about a pious woman who wiped sweat from Christ’s face on the way to Calvary, miraculously capturing his image on the cloth. The subject was a big seller for Zurbarán; his studio produced more than a dozen versions of it.
His minimal composition was unusual for the 1630s. The face is realistic yet doesn’t aim for a realistic perspective. It’s rendered expressively in fine, reddish-brown lines and tilted sideways, as if Christ is looking slightly back, over his shoulder.
I’ve seen other versions that are more refined, but the tour-de-force is still the shadowy, draping cloth, suspended ever-so-vulnerably from a couple of threads in a way that creates a voluptuous shape Georgia O’Keeffe would have appreciated.
I breezed by Sebastiano Ricci’s “Last Supper” except to notice that the apostles were not social distancing at the table. The graphically-strong “Geneological Tree of the Mercedarian Order,” by an unidentified Bolivian artist, struck me for the opposite reason: Its figures are isolated like the tapers of a candelabra on little leafy saucers atop each branch of a large tree. The way I see things has changed.
On this day, gold leaf became a magnet, like shimmering hope as I wove aimlessly through the galleries, ignoring their chronological order. The ornate Colonial frame of the 18th century Peruvian “The Child Mary Spinning,” a painting depicting the mother of Christ as a young aristocrat, would be stunning with nothing in it. But the golden lace details, the jewelry and the fine rays of the little girl’s halo looked as miraculous as anything across the street in “Glory of Spain.”
That sent me back to a room of Italian paintings from Florence and Siena that date to the late Byzantine era, awash in gold leaf backgrounds that offset the pallid skin of figures rendered in tempera with fine eyes and blushing cheeks.
Bernardino Fungai’s deeply satisfying narrative panel, “The Beloved of Enalus Sacrificed to Poseidon and Spared,” from about 1512, is a richer masterpiece that deserves a deeper dive. There is so much classical history to be learned in these galleries, along with lessons in art. Knowing my ride would be arriving soon, I focused on the left corner of that painting, where thin gold strokes create the rays of a sun low in the sky and cast a glow on the leaves of trees.
I couldn’t leave without devoting time to Fra Angelico’s “Saint Anthony Shunning the Mass of Gold,” one of the smallest and best paintings in these galleries. Probably part of an alterpiece, it depicts an hallucinogenic episode from the life of a hermit who is regarded as the founder of monasticism.
The devil was tempting Anthony with luxuries: Fra Angelico places the saint on open ground, flanked by barren, jagged rocks and looking down at a chunk of gold slightly larger than his ornate halo. His right hand is raised: Is he shielding himself from daylight, thinking about giving in and picking up the treasure, or resisting it?
Exiting the museum, I pushed the door handles with my backside, removed my face mask and took a deep breath in the bright sunlight. I knew chunks of gold would be beckoning everywhere, in other forms — the desire to hug friends, to eat a nice meal in a restaurant, to shop without fear.
For now, a return trip to the museum will suffice.
Reposted from Artnet News
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will reopen this Saturday, making it the first major American art institution to do so since non-essential business closures went into effect nationwide in March.
Strict safety measures developed in conjunction with the city and state will be put in place, including mandatory masks for everyone in the building. Visitors will have their temperatures taken upon entering the galleries and plastic panels will be erected in front of the admissions desk and gift shop register. No food, drinks, or large bags will be allowed and the museum’s water fountains and cafe will be closed.
Visitor capacity will be kept at below 25 percent on a room-by-room basis, and social distancing rules will be enforced. As a result, the museum is encouraging the purchase of advance timed-entry tickets online. (Tickets were made available starting today; a representative from the museum says it does not yet have an estimate for how many people it expects this weekend.)
“We recognize that circumstances may change at any moment,” said museum director Gary Tinterow in a statement, noting the museum’s “close coordination” with city hall” and other institutions in the Houston museum district. “But we remain hopeful that we will be able to serve our public under the safest possible conditions and under new norms, ones to which Houstonians across the city are already becoming accustomed.”
Texas governor Greg Abbott announced in late April that the state’s own stay-at-home order would be lifted at the beginning of May, and that museums, among other venues, would be allowed to open then. But the Museum of Fine Arts chose to delay its reopening, saying that the institution’s reopening task-force was still in the process of putting together a strategy for ensuring a safe experience for visitors and its 650 staff members. (The sentiment was echoed by the Contemporary Austin, Dallas Museum of Art, and almost every other sizable institution in Texas.)
“We look forward to bringing some staff back into the buildings and welcoming the public,” a Museum of Fine Arts representative said in a statement at the time, “but we are evaluating all of our supplies, including masks and gloves, and assessing our infrastructure to ensure that we are ready to operate the museum’s offices and public areas safely and under social distancing.”
Another institution that previously chose to hold off on its reopening, the San Antonio Museum of Art, announced today that it too has a plan to return to work in a limited capacity. The venue will open its doors to museum members next Tuesday, May 26, and to the general public on May 28. Safety precautions similar to those devised by the Museum of Fine Arts will be implemented, including mandated masks and social distancing, though the museum will not require temperature checks upon entry.
See Original Post
Lockdown measures have started to ease in the European nations hardest hit by coronavirus. Across Italy, museums are opening their doors to the public again for the first time since March—though they have to adhere to serious new safety precautions.
Today, May 19, the Castello di Rivoli in Turin was among the first of the nation’s museum to allow the public back in. Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev expressed optimism about the transition measures to Artnet News. “Museums are carefully controlled spaces that have been designed to protect artworks from people,” she said. “To adapt that to protecting people from people is a small step.”
Elsewhere, blockbuster shows are starting back up again. The highly anticipated Raphael exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale was an early victim of the lockdown, closing just three days after it opened in March despite having pre-sold 70,000 tickets. The show includes 120 works by Raphael, thanks to loans from 52 museums and collections to mark the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance great’s death. Almost all of the loans have been extended as needed, according to the Art Newspaper. The exhibition will now run from June 2 to August 30.
Museums that are typically swarmed with visitors from around the world will now be both eerily and joyfully calm. The Castello di Rivoli likened the shift to the slow food movement, which requires a gentler pace of work and, in many ways, more consideration for process. “I think museums can be the prototype for the new normal, which I hope only lasts the time of the pandemic because I actually like the old normal,” adds Christov-Bakarglev.
Yet the lowered visitor numbers will spell financial trouble for some. The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, which on a typical spring day would see visitors numbering around 2,600, will only allow 200 people in per day. “We are very worried,” a spokesperson tells Artnet News. “For the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, the private institution that owns the monuments of the Duomo of Florence, it is a dramatic situation because our earnings all come from the tickets sold, we have no state contributions.”
The visitor numbers and strategies vary depending on the museum. For the Raphael exhibition, tickets for the show must be booked online in advance. Groups of six visitors will be taken in by a guard who will act as a “chaperone,” and groups will head into the gallery in staggered five-minute intervals. Each group gets 80 minutes with the once-in-a-lifetime show.
At the Galleria Borghese, which reopens today, May 19, to the public, will allow 120-minute visits of up to 80 people at a time. “This necessity actually provides an opportunity to appreciate the Museum’s marvels with more tranquillity,” says the museum in a statement. And the privately-funding Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo reopened on May 18 and allows 15 people at a time.
At the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, a 13th-century Gothic cathedral that is expected to open this week, free devices will be given out to visitors to notify them when they are not social distancing. The novel gadget, which will dangle around visitors’ necks before being disinfected between wears, flashes and vibrates when visitors get too close to each other. It is the first institution to introduce such a device.
In a statement, the cathedral boasted of being first in the world to use the technology in the museum context, adding that “this system guarantees the maximum of security and comfort during the visit.” The EGOpro Social Distancing necklace by Florence-based company Advance Microwave Engineering has four red lights that begin to turn on and flash in succession, depending on closeness.
The Castello di Rivoli, which operates with a relatively small budget of €6 million says it lost €1 million due to the lockdown. Christov-Bakargiev says the institution had to invest about €60,000 to upgrade its premises to meet sanitary guidelines. That coupled with the loses incurred by fewer ticket sales over the usually bustling summer months will spell trouble for many museums and institutions.
The loses incurred will be weathered differently depending on the scale and backing of the museum. The Italian federal government issued a €55 billion “Decreto Rilancio” (relaunch decree) aid package last Wednesday. According to the Art Newspaper, the assistance includes €100 million set aside to support state museums for losses in ticket sales, as well as a €210 million emergency fund that covers bookshops, publishing companies, and arts organizations to fill the gap for cancelled events and exhibitions. Another €100 million goes to a “Culture Fund” that is to provide cultural businesses with long-term loans for investment in physical structures and cultural production for the remainder of 2020 and 2021.
Reposted from Art News
To mark International Museum Day, which took place on May 18, UNESCO and the International Council of Museums (ICOM) released the findings of two studies assessing the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on art institutions around the world. Their findings suggest a dark future that, with some museums forced to close because of the ongoing health crisis.
UNESCO’s study reveals that 90 percent of museums worldwide—a figure that represents over 85,000 institutions—shuttered temporarily as a result of the pandemic. For some, that closure will likely be permanent: around 13 percent of art institutions may close permanently after major financial losses, the report claims. UNESCO also reports that only 5 percent of museums in Africa and Small Island Developing States were able to offer online content amid the pandemic.
“Museums play a fundamental role in the resilience of societies. We must help them cope with this crisis and keep them in touch with their audiences,” UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay said in a statement. “
Research conducted by ICOM focused on the ways in which museum professions have been affected by the pandemic and how a lack of ticket sales have decreased museums’ incomes.
“We are fully aware of and confident in the tenacity of museum professionals to meet the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic,” ICOM president Suay Aksoy said in a statement. “However, the museum field cannot survive on its own without the support of the public and private sectors. It is imperative to raise emergency relief funds and to put in place policies to protect professionals and self-employed workers on precarious contracts.”
These are not the only recent surveys to highlight the pandemic’s consequences for the art world. Last month, findings from the initiative Artist Relief—a coalition of seven arts grant makers in the United States—showed that 60 percent of artists in the U.S. became unemployed because of the crisis. An ADAA survey also revealed that U.S. galleries are facing massive financial losses because of the pandemic, and a SMU DataArts and TRG Arts report revealed that nonprofit organizations are expecting to lose billions of dollars over the next year.
It looks like it’s going to be a long, less-than-art-filled summer in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is extending its closure until at least mid-August, and is officially cancelling its star-studded Met Gala for 2020.
When the museum does reopen, guests can expect to see reduced visiting hours, according to a statement issued by institution on Tuesday. The Met is also cancelling all in-person tours and events through the end of the year—planned celebrations of the museum’s 150th anniversary will be delayed until 2021.
The institution, which has been closed since March 13, had previously been targeting a July 1 reopening.
The gala, the Costume Institute’s annual benefit hosted by Vogue, had been indefinitely postponed. Although fashion’s biggest night out is taking the year off—aside from an online version staged by precocious Gen Zers on the traditional first Monday in May—”About Time: Fashion and Duration,” the show the evening would have celebrated, will be on view from October 29 through February 7, 2021. The party has been cancelled twice before: once in 1963, after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and in 2002, following the 9/11 attacks.
The Met’s extended closure has already taken a devastating financial toll on the institution, which is predicting a $150 million shortfall. The museum laid off 81 employees and cut executive level pay in April. The institution did not respond to inquiries as to whether pushing back the reopening would necessitate additional layoffs or furloughs.
The Met was one of the first museums in the country to shut its doors in response to the global health crisis. Other New York institutions will likely look to the Met as they craft their own plans to resume normal operations—even if that new normal requires temperature checks and face masks upon entry, with dramatically scaled-back capacity limits to allow for appropriate social distancing and other health considerations.
This weekend, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will become the first major US institution to reopen, following in the footsteps of museums in Asia and Europe. As the epicenter of the US outbreak, New York City is being extremely cautious in its reopening plans.
“The Met has endured much in its 150 years, and today continues as a beacon of hope for the future,” said Met president and CEO Daniel H. Weiss in a statement. “This museum is also a profound reminder of the strength of the human spirit and the power of art to offer comfort, inspiration, and community. As we endure these challenging and uncertain times, we are encouraged by looking forward to the day when we can once again welcome all to enjoy the Met’s collection and exhibitions.”
Reposted from Pinnacol Assurance
Colorado businesses are beginning the gradual transition from pandemic-induced closings to reentry mode.
While every business must make changes to reopen safely, there’s no single approach that will work for everyone. Employers must stay flexible and focused.
“This will be a continuous improvement process — not something where you set up your plan, open your doors and you’re ready to go,”says Jon Vonder Haar, safety consultant at Pinnacol. “It will be constantly evolving. Guidance may change based on the information coming in.”
To help you prepare, we have put together tips for creating your reentry strategy, broken into four critical areas.
Knowing who can report to work is critical to operations planning. Many workplaces can have only half of employees present under the Governor’s “Safer at Home” order.
Start by identifying vulnerable populations who remain under the stay-at-home order, such as workers overage 65 or those who have diabetes or heart conditions. You cannot compel these employees to return to on-site work, and you must continue to provide accommodations for them to work from home.
You should have the right equipment and support available to enable remote workers, such as storing key information off-site and creating a communication protocol.
You should also offer flexible schedules or remote work opportunities to employees with eldercare or childcare responsibilities and to those who have a vulnerable individual in their household.
Once you know who can and can’t return to the work site, make adjustments that accommodate changes in work, such as:
Make your building a healthy environment where your team can thrive.
Workplaces with more than 50 employees on-site must implement more strategies. Either develop a business policy or setup stations for temperature checks and symptom screenings, close your common areas, and implement mandatory cleaning and disinfection protocols.
Have a target date in mind to reopen. Consider the unique aspects of your operations while planning reopening. It could take hours or weeks to get ready.
“So much depends on the scope of the business’s operation,” notes Tom Jensen, OHST and senior safety consultant at Pinnacol. “Are they a small retailer with 1,000 square feet of space where everyone does the same job, or are they a larger business with multiple operations and types of work, with vehicles, tools and equipment?”
You may need to set new hours of operation if you lack the staff to maintain your old hours. Staggered starts and shifts can reduce the number of employees on-site at any given time.
Reduce peak traffic in and out of the facility by setting off-peak office hours, such as after 5 p.m. or before 8 a.m. This is one way to offer scheduling flexibility to vulnerable workers or those with a vulnerable person in the household.
Eliminate shared workspaces if you can and assign equipment mindfully. The more people who use that one space or thing, the more you have to clean.
Determining how to implement changes may be the most challenging aspect for many businesses. “Give different things a try and see what works. As mentioned earlier, this is a continuous improvement process,” Vonder Haar says.
To promote the health and safety of employees, employers must follow measures required by the public health order. These activities include:
Your coordinator can also study industry-specific guidance and requirements from the CDPHE, which cover:
Your coordinator can also study industry-specific guidance and requirements from the CDPHE.
In addition to looking out for the safety of your employees, you also need to account for customers, patients or vendors who come through your doors.
Eliminate direct contact when possible by using electronic correspondence, no-touch trash containers, gloves and masks, and contactless payment methods. Other precautions include:
“This whole process can be confusing and difficult,” Jensen says. Ask Pinnacol if you aren’t sure about something, such as whether a stated guidance is a requirement or a suggestion.
What will reopening look like for the Vatican Museums, which have been closed since March 9? Mandatory face masks, temperature checks at entry, and strict social distancing requirements.
As Italy, one of the countries hit hardest by the ongoing global health situation, continues its recovery, the nation’s museums are preparing to welcome the public beginning May 18 as part of phase two of its reopening. The government shuttered all museums on March 9 as the outbreak swept the country.
The new normal won’t look much like the old one. The Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism has drawn up guidelines requiring advance reservations for museums, with all tickets being purchased online. Inside the galleries, social distancing will be a must.
Vatican Museums, which used to welcome up to 20,000 visitors per day, will implement even stricter measures. “For the incoming public, we are completing the installation of thermoscanners for temperature readings,” secretary-general of the Vatican City State Governorate, Bishop Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, told Vatican News. The museum is also suspending large group visits and asking all guests to wear face masks on the premises.
Social-distancing guidelines that call for six feet between museum guests will mean a far more intimate experience inside the famed Sistine Chapel, with its frescoes by Renaissance great Michelangelo. The museum has worked over the years to increase access to the chapel, installing a new climate control system in 2014 that meant maximum capacity jumped from just 700 to 2,000 visitors at any given time, but will now reverse course to prioritize health concerns.
The Vatican did not respond to inquires from Artnet News about how many tickets will be available upon reopening, and whether guests will also be able to visit the adjoining St. Peter’s Basilica.
During the shutdown, most employees of the Vatican Museums have remained at home, with about 30 essential workers on site daily, as opposed to the normal staff of over 1,000.
For the normally bustling institution, now reduced to a pale imitation of itself in online tours, the lockdown has amounted to “months of silence,” said Vérgez. “Virtual reality can never replace reality. Let us not forget that what brings museums alive are people. To enjoy art, you need your eyes and heart.”
Reposted from Bloomberg
When the Museum of Modern Art in New York reopens, it will do so with 17% fewer staff members, a budget that’s $45 million smaller, and likely a fraction of the visitors it had just two months ago.
In a Zoom conference with other museum professionals whose recording was reviewed by Bloomberg, Glenn Lowry, the director of the MoMA, described plans to pare down exhibitions and publications and radically reappraise the visitor experience. While the museum’s reopening plans remain provisional, one thing is certain: Post Covid-19, the MoMA will be a very different place.
“The first step was what to do to eliminate the maximum amount of expense we could,” Lowry said on the call. “We had [about] 60 open positions at the museum—we didn’t freeze them, we eliminated them.” Before the shutdown, the museum had around 960 staff members, Lowry said. Through a combination of voluntary retirement packages and general attrition, the new staff count will be about 800. “We will learn to be a much smaller institution,” he said.
The museum administration also took what Lowry described as a “chainsaw” to its exhibition budget, cutting it from $18 million to $10 million for the fiscal year that begins July 1 and runs through June 30, 2021. It also cut its publications budget by about half. Overall, the museum will have slashed its annual budget to about $135 million, from close to $180 million. “You don’t take $45 million out of a budget elegantly,” Lowry said. “You take it out in very large units, and you take it very quickly, and you spend a lot of time not just with your key trustees but with key staff, sharing why you’re doing this.”
The reductions come less than a year after the opening of a $450 million expansion/renovation, when the MoMA expanded its footprint by 47,000 square feet in an almost universally lauded design by the firms Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Gensler.
As part of the expansion, the museum rehung its galleries and committed to rearranging 30% of its permanent exhibition space every six months. It’s unclear if, with the museum’s exhibition cuts, that program will continue. “The Museum is re-examining the frequency at which it will rotate 30% of its permanent collection,” wrote a MoMA spokesperson, in response to Bloomberg’s questions.
The cuts at MoMA could have wide-ranging implications for other not-for-profit museums and arts institutions.
MoMA, as Lowry noted in his conversation, has an endowment of $1.2 billion, with about $200 million in pledges that have yet to be received. Along with several other museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, his museum has a “sufficiently large endowment that I’m not worried about whether we’re ultimately going to go under,” Lowry said. “We’re not.”
But, he continued, he’s “extremely worried about smaller more vulnerable institutions.” He used MoMA PS1, MoMA’s contemporary offshoot in Long Island City, as an example: “It had to furlough 47 out of 64 people. It had virtually no endowment, it now has no endowment, no resources,” he explained. “The city has already told it it’s [likely] going to cut its contributions back, it’s going to be a very long hard road for them.”
PS1 will survive he said, “because we’re going to make sure they survive.” But there are dozens of less well-funded organizations across the country where, “if they do survive, they will survive in such a meager state,” he continued, “that you’ll have to make a very complicated argument that they’re still serving their community. That’s just my anxiety.”
He noted that “I don’t mean this in any mean way. I mean it just as a description of how crippled places will be.”
Lowry made no promises about when the museum will reopen, though he estimated that it would be between July and September.
When the museum does open its doors, nearly everything about the visitor experience could change. “We should be the safest place to visit,” Lowry said, “so that means ensuring you have a contactless experience and ensuring that you don’t have to worry about social distance because we’ve dispersed viewers through the institution.”
The museum is considering time-ticketed entry, with as few as 1,000 visitors in the museum at a time. (The museum can and does host several thousand a day in normal times.) When the museum closed in March, it was on track to have about 3 million visitors this year; now, it expects to have less than 1.5 million.
MoMA is even reconsidering wall labels. “Are labels beneficial, or are they points of anxiety because people cluster to read them?” Lowry asked rhetorically. “What is the right spacing in this gallery for the number of works on display? We have to ask ourselves if this is the most popular painting in the museum, can we have it on a wall with eight other paintings now, or do we have to find some other space in which to show it? Or should we show it at all, because if we show it, it will force people to come and aggregate in uncomfortable ways?”
And that's before, he said, the museum turns to “the issue of should we change the content of what's on display because of the moment?” The answer, Lowry concluded, is that “I think there isn't a museum worth its salt that isn’t going to try to address the moment. It has to. That’s what we do anyway.”
Last week, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney revealed his revised budget proposal for fiscal year 2021, which, if approved, would implement drastic cuts to the arts in an attempt to counteract losses incurred by the pandemic.
Among those cuts would be the elimination of the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, a government branch that provides grants to hundreds of cultural organizations in the area, and which cost the city $4.4 million last year. Kenney’s budget would also do away with the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, a 25-year-old program that distributed $3 million through nearly 350 grants to creative institutions last year.
Mural Arts, which promotes and funds public works of art in the city, would have its budget reduced from $2.45 million to $2 million, and the funding provided to the Philadelphia Museum of Art—the city’s biggest institution—would be slashed from $2.55 million to just over $2 million.
For the city’s cultural leaders, the news came as a sign that the city devalues their work.
“The mayor taking this kind of action during a pandemic just underscores the notion that the arts are disposable, that they are something that we don’t need during this moment of crisis,” says Christina Vassallo, director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. “It sets up this false dichotomy that pits culture against the livelihood and the economy.”
Like many major institutions in the city, the Fabric Workshop and Museum receives only a fraction of its budget from city grants. (It was awarded $10,000 in operational support last year from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.) But to smaller organizations, such money is critical.
“That’s a small part of our budget, but it means the world to many smaller organizations that receive this funding,” says Vassallo, explaining that the mayor’s decision could “completely decimate the grassroots cultural scene in this city.”
Symbolically, she adds, the loss is much greater. “It further supports the notion that those of us who work in a non-profit arts field should just get used to doing more with less,” says Vassallo. “We’re constantly expected to do more with less. It’s an affront to humankind, really!”
“The sweeping reductions to arts and culture in the revised budget sends a message to these organizations—and their dedicated employees—that their work isn’t valued,” says Maud Lyon, president of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, which counts more than 450 arts organizations across the five-county Philadelphia region as members.”
Lyon notes that the arts and culture sector is a significant economic force in the region, generating an estimated $4.1 billion annually and more than 55,000 jobs, according to a 2017 economic impact report conducted by the Cultural Alliance.
“Ultimately,” she says, “our audiences are hurt the most by these proposed cuts as we risk eliminating the performing arts, community arts programs, and diverse creative expression, which have defined Philadelphia for decades and even centuries.”
The 2021 fiscal year begins June 1. Prior to that date, the mayor’s budget proposal will be reviewed by the city council before it’s formally adopted.
“Potential elimination of the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy would be a difficult loss because it would limit the city’s ability to work collaboratively with one of the region’s great economic drivers, the arts and culture sector comprised of many organizations small and large,” says Timothy Rub, the director and CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in a statement.
“I hope that the city can continue to recognize that this public-private partnership will be an important part in helping Philadelphia recover from the pandemic and prosper in the future.”
For many cultural organizations in Philadelphia, the news from the mayor’s office came at the end of a particularly hard week. In an effort to reduce his own budget, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf directed the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to retract grant money already awarded to certain arts organizations across the state, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Reposted from The Art Newspaper
“If I saw a disaster film in which a city is struck by an earthquake during a global pandemic, I’d stop watching such a nonsense”, says Miroslav Gašparović, the director of Zagreb’s Museum of Decorative Arts, while working in a face mask and helmet with his curators to evacuate parts of his seriously damaged museum.
This is the forgotten earthquake. On 22 March, a 5.4-magnitude convulsion struck Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and because of the coronavirus (Covid-19) lockdown, the full extent of the damage is still unknown. It was the worst convulsion for more than a century and it has caused damage to 26,197 buildings, of which 4,228 are classified as unsafe or dangerous, among them numerous palaces, churches, university buildings, hospitals and museums.
The Museum of Decorative Arts, modelled on the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, was about to celebrate its 140th anniversary, but now it is partially open to the sky. Religious sculptures, clocks, glass and modern design have been damaged, in some cases destroyed, and the roof’s collapse is a serious threat. The museum has been classified as unsafe for use, but the director and curators have found a way to take the most fragile objects to safety even as 150 aftershocks have continued to shake the building.
A large number of objects have been destroyed or damaged in the Archaeological Museum. This is not the first time its rich collections have been hit by earthquake; the one of 1880 shattered the most valuable assemblage of Greek vases in Croatia, and now 20% of the rebuilt collection are in pieces.
The minister of culture Nina Obuljen does not want to speculate about the extent of the damage while it remains uncertain, but there is no doubt that the seismic protection measures for buildings, collections and museum staff need to be upgraded, since all hazard assessment studies clearly point to earthquakes as one of the biggest risks in Croatia.
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