CULTURE:

In the valley, a tepid market for the arts

Art museum made bold moves, but support didn’t keep pace

Steve Marcus

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.

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Thursday, March 12, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Drop in revenue explains cutbacks at Nevada Ballet

Las Vegas Art Museum

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LVAM is closing, but it don't bother Jim (2-22-2009)
Strapped Las Vegas Art Museum plans to shutter (2-21-09)
Las Vegas Art Museum closing next week (2-20-09)
New, on display, from L.A. (12-12-2008)
With Lumpkin’s exit, museum must be ‘creative’ to survive, interim director says (12-5-2008)
Museum gift shop will be missed, but it’s gone for good reasons (12-3-2008)

Las Vegas Art Museum

Las Vegas Art Museum

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.

Discussion: 12 comments so far…

By neiman1

3/12/09 at 6:47 a.m.

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How unfair. The "artists" deserve some of our money. Let's raise taxes on someone and give them what they want so they can continue to be artistic. What else can we do, they don't know how to work.
By nvpatentlawyer

3/12/09 at 7:21 a.m.

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If Las Vegas is ever to diversify its economy, it must attract people who are interested in more things than playing slots. We need a cultural environment with excellent institutions. We need excellent higher education. And we need to think beyond the casinos. It is not just a tragedy to lose yet another cultural institution; it is another nail in the economic coffin that is Las Vegas.
By redferret

3/12/09 at 8:55 a.m.

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Neiman, they do know how to work. Unfortunately they don't have a market right now. Of course you didn't read the article or at least the last sentence that stated, "The Las Vegas Art Museum is a private nonprofit organization that received only 3 percent of its revenue from public funds."
3%. Wow, that must've really hurt your allowance from mom.
By MWCRob

3/12/09 at 9:19 a.m.

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The museum was a treat, and it's sad to see the facility close its doors.

Too bad that the museum's opening didn't coincide with the Sun's online media efforts. I've read more about the museum and its exhibitions, etc. in the lvsun.com during last year or so than I've seen in countless years in our more widely circulated newspaper.

Culture and creativity are critical to the city's growth, and that's were the real shame is found. There is culture here, but people don't know much about what's going on. People need to see things a few times before it resonates with them, and that's where media is important. Too bad what resonates most in the city comes from shoddy journalism and boilerplate editorial found in that other paper's printed pages.

As digital media rises, and old mind agendas lose their voice, art will rise in this city. Those who appreciate art will just have to do what they can and be patient while the process continues its evolution.
By neiman1

3/12/09 at 9:24 a.m.

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When your producing something no one wants enough to support, your not working, your following your dream. Keep hoping, maybe the change will require people to support the arts, all they have to do is be favored by those in power. We all support green energy now, we have to, the rest will be taxed away and the money given to the favored. It's a whole new world.
By JayeTT

3/12/09 at 9:46 a.m.

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There are 2 million people here, we shouldn't need to rely on tourists to keep cultural institutions afloat. WE, the residents, should be keeping them afloat, because they really exist for us.

Sure, big city museums and performing arts organizations see a lot of tourist traffic, but they also see plenty of traffic from people in their communities. The art museum has closed and we have a Philharmonic that isn't far behind, and I think that most of the 2 million people in Vegas have hardly an idea that either of these groups exist(ed).

Furthermore, their PR efforts are so disgustingly miserable that it's not even possible to point our fingers at residents of Las Vegas--if these groups were really out in front of the public we *might* see some support...but it requires people to know about them in the first place before they pull out their checkbooks.

And if we want more cultural institutions to diversify our economy and we want to see tourists patronizing these institutions, then everyone should rally behind the Mob Museum, because that's exactly the kind of place a tourist is likely to visit and its getting the publicity it needs to draw a crowd.
By boftx

3/12/09 at 10:32 a.m.

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Get a clue, people. Las Vegas IS NOT a city for culture. There is an entirely different mindset here. Tourists certainly don't come here for culture, and a large percentage of the population (rightfully) only care for what the tourists want. At the very least the museum should have been located close to the Strip or Downtown to have any hope of drawing visitors.

The Mob Museum, located downtown, would be a much bigger draw than an art museum simply because it would be unique. There is/was nothing special about the LVAM and it paid the price accordingly.
By karenb2k

3/12/09 at 4:58 p.m.

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The Las Vegas community consists of 23% Asian,and 40+% Hispanic residents. If Las Vegas Art Museum's recent management wanted to continue to be viable it might have helped to consider the findings of the Board sponsored focus group report, funded by the LVAM Foundation. In this 2004 qualitative marketing study, our residents, community leaders and political participants said they wanted a broad-based museum with a variety of exhibitions. The museum was for their children and it should focus on education. While Mr Duffy did not appreciate the extensive poster exhibion by renowned Colunbian artist, Botero, over 5,000 Las Vegas residents did come to see it. I doubt if there were over 5,000 visitors to LVAM in all of 2008. That exhibition reached the hispanic community in a meaniful way. There was a student art competition tied to it and a fundraiser. It was a financial success that had meaning to the community. Before the Boards decision in 2006 to focus on Contemporary art, LVAM exhibitions included Chihuly, Monet, Hart, Dali, and a Smithsonian Asian exhibit. They were quality exhibitions, and of interest to the community. These exhibits were interesting enough to keep the museum funded.
In their education program, management discontinued their support of the Scholastic Art and Writing competition. This year another community group had over 700 student entries and participation from 27 schools. (The successful community funded Reno Museum hosts this program for northern Nevada.) While the current focus of LVAM was contempory art, maybe it missed the point--the community wanted a different vision. It was a public institution that ignored its consitituency.
By Ginger_Bruner

3/12/09 at 5:26 p.m.

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The LVAM did not move out to West Sahara because it was convenient. They moved out there because a beautiful exhibition space became available at the Sahara West Library, and they felt able to make the leap to utilize the space.
The Contemporary Arts Collective also contemplated moving into the space, but concluded that it wasn't feasible to do so, partly because of the cost. In 1997 the CAC calculated that it would cost $100,000 a year just in operating costs, not including any staffing, to make the space workable.
The CAC also wanted to stay in the nascent arts district.
As far as the most recent direction of the LVAM, to concentrate on contemporary art, in my opinion a single museum in a community is going to really need a broad spectrum to survive. The Museum in Reno has many different stylistic areas, as well as a rich education program, which help to broaden its reach into the community.
The space at the Sahara West Library which has been the home for the LVAM was not designed for the wide range of uses that really could make it a vibrant, multi-use space. It was designed specifically for Smithsonian-style travelling exhibitions. Unfortunately, the LVCCLD (Library District) decided they didn't want to use the space, and that's how it came to need a tenant.
And now, it all starts over again...
By ilovart

3/13/09 at 3:29 a.m.

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Hats off to Libby Lumpkin and the vision of the LVAM board! These people made me proud to be part of a city that could compare itself to others with great contemporary art museums. The artwork was challenging, and that is what I want from a contemporary art museum, not the safe standards that a different kind of museum is expected to offer. But I think they were trying to make Las Vegas a city it is not (yet) and were trying to do it in a location it could not survive in, at an overly ambitious price tag. Location is so important, and I am sorry they did not go to the Smith Center or even at the south end of the strip. The Contemporary Arts Center tried moving two blocks from the First Friday festival (5,000 attendees every month) and that decision almost meant their demise. LVAM needs to be downtown in the arts district (not the 18b ....an expensive label that no one uses). Also, the staff salaries were fair for L.A. or New York, but consider that the CAC is 20 years old this year, and has never paid had a full-time staff member. I wish it could, and I know the organization is working towards that goal. Now that they have outlived Allied Arts, NICA and LVAM, I hope more art enthusiasts will join me in helping the CAC strengthen its position in the community by donating generously to it. The CAC once had its own educational outreach programs that brought students to its doorstep, and with our support that can happen again.
By LVPaco

3/13/09 at 6:02 a.m.

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Long live the Contemporary Arts Center!!!
By Martin_Treinen

6/30/09 at 4:30 p.m.

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Everything you can imagine is real.
Pablo Picasso
Now is the time to imagine a New Las Vegas Art Museum rising out of the ashes of the old. Starting with a new mission, a new board, creative vision and some new direction to take advantage of all of the press that has developed over the past year. To just leave it to die with no desire to resurrect it is the worst thing that this community can do to itself. I want to see a group of people with real intent and desire, commitment and a willingness to think outside the box, and to reinvent a NLVAM. This community is so underestimated and the tourist population so over rated. Let's take all that we have as a community and make the decision to take all of the best the LVAM had to offer and take all the creativity, drive and effectiveness that this community has to offer, and create something completely new. As a present member, NOW is the time to move imagine and move forward. I'm in.

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