Thanks, but no thanks to temporary home

By Kristen Peterson

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Forget renting. The Las Vegas Art Museum wants a permanent home.

As the museum was getting set to move into a temporary home, donors said they want a museum the city could call its own, even if it means buying the land and building one.

“Our donors wanted to invest in bricks and mortar,” said Libby Lumpkin, executive director of the Las Vegas Art Museum. “We hadn’t even begun the pre-capital campaign phase, and they said, ‘I wish we were investing in a permanent location.’ ”

The museum board derailed plans to lease the All-American Sportpark on East Sunset Road, which the museum planned to begin remodeling in June.

The move to the Sportpark would have given the museum more space and a central location while it raised money to buy land and build its own facility.

“We realized as we were planning for the interim step that we just didn’t need an interim step,” Lumpkin said. “We just had a greater response than we anticipated.”

The board is looking into buying an established facility that the museum could move into as early as this year. Or it could build a new museum. As Lumpkin put it: “We are going to acquire land, and we’ll build something beautiful and wonderful and take a bigger leap.”

Lumpkin said the museum is hoping to announce its plans within the month and there is a core of about seven or eight donors who are committed to the project. This would be the first time the 58-year-old institution would have a permanent home.

The Las Vegas Art Museum has been connected to the Sahara West Library in Summerlin for the past decade and has been working with less than 7,000 square feet of exhibit space.

Moving to a larger location with more than one substantial gallery would allow the museum to stagger exhibits and not have to close the museum each time it installs a new exhibit. Additionally, the museum could expand its educational program from about 7,000 students a year to 30,000.

The Sportpark location would have helped raise the museum’s visibility, allowed easier access to the community and enabled it to reach out to tourists. Plans for the 100,000-square-foot facility included a large lecture hall/event center, a storage facility, a library, a conservation laboratory, a restaurant and a store.

Board member Patrick Duffy called the reversal a “make-sense decision” against the lease. During talks about sinking a great deal of money into a building the museum doesn’t own, the board realized there was a more prudent path, he said.

The museum, which formed as the Las Vegas Art League in 1950, was renamed the Las Vegas Art Museum in 1974 and was located in a building in Lorenzi Park before moving to the Sahara West Library in 1997.

Lumpkin arrived in summer 2005. The next year, she and the board turned the museum into a contemporary art museum and started the process for accreditation. It has focused largely on cutting-edge artists such as Cindy Wright, Kaz Oshiro and Michael Reafsnyder. Trying to establish any other type of museum would be difficult because most of the older important works are in permanent collections or are out of the museum’s price range.

Recent shows have included:

• “Southern California Minimalism” with works by artists including James Turrell, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Peter Alexander, Judy Chicago and Robert Irwin;

• “Adventures in a Temperate Climate,” a retrospective of work by Martin Mull;

• “Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art From the Neon Homeland,” which received national attention and featured 26 artists who had studied at UNLV with art critic Dave Hickey between 1990 and 2001.

The current exhibit features artists Paul Morrison and Victoria Gitman.

The exhibits have been popular, and attendance has grown from 8,000 three years ago to about 15,000 last year.

“We won’t grow much more in that space,” Lumpkin said. “We achieved more than we thought we could in the present location. Our main thing was to become more visible. Well, we’ve become more visible.”

Museum representatives won’t reveal donors to this project, but there are 38 donors on a list of those who gave $25,000 or more to the museum last year, including board members Duffy; Joyce Mack; Andy Katz of Manpower of Southern Nevada; Thomas Lawyer of Lawyer Trane; Jim Murren of MGM Mirage; Glenn Schaeffer of Fontainebleau Resort Group; Wynn designer Roger Thomas; and James Zeiter of Insight Holdings. Corporate benefactors at the $25,000 level include American Nevada Company (owned by the Greenspun family, which also owns the Las Vegas Sun), Southern Wine & Spirits of Nevada and Eureka Casinos (owned by Ted and Doris Lee, who would have been leasing the Sportpark to the Las Vegas Art Museum).

The museum doesn’t have an acquisitions committee, but is already receiving important works of art.

Duffy and Goodman donated several significant works to the museum. Anonymous donations have been made by collectors from Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Acquisitions include works by Cindy Wright, Tim Bavington, Billy Al Bengston, Michael Reafsnyder and David Ryan.

“Pretty much, this town is ready,” Lumpkin said. “It requires an even greater commitment of our board members and donors, but they want it.”

Several board members were unavailable for comment Monday. One board member was contacted but chose not to discuss the new plans until the details of the project are confirmed. He agreed, however, that the decision to seek a permanent home was unanimous.

“Everybody is feeling pretty brave, and we’re going to forge ahead,” Lumpkin said. “Communities bond with museums. Everybody wants to feel that this museum is theirs.”