[ Golden Gater Online - December 4, 1997 ]
Jesse Garnier
Staff writer
The white wine flowed freely at a fifth floor reception Monday night, but beneath the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the SF State museum studies program were some somber warnings about the future of museums.
Speaking before a largely female audience, a panel of Bay Area museum experts agreed declining visitors and declining funding are creating struggles for museums entering the next millennium.
For Deborah Klochko, panel member and director of the Ansel Adams Center for Photography, her museum's struggle is more immediate.
In October, a discouraged board of directors at the center brought up the b-word for the first time: bankruptcy. An unfavorable lease and other high costs were dragging down the San Francisco photography museum. But a major board restructuring, staff cuts, and a new director - Klochko - have given new hope to the struggling photography museum.
"The 1990s are very difficult times financially for museums," Klochko said. She said the center had to lay off seven of its 16 staff members in order to survive, and is looking for other ways to trim its $1.5 million annual budget.
"Smaller non-profit museums are always in jeopardy," said Stephen Dobbs, president of the Marin Community Foundation. His foundation funds artists and arts programs in Marin County through the Marin Arts Council.
"Larger museums often have a built-in constituency, but they're not out of the woods either," Dobbs said. He cautioned future cutbacks of federal art funds will make things worse before they get better, but added, "they will get better."
Most museums are funded through membership, individual and foundation support, and, in some cases, government funding. A portion of a museum's funds also come from visitor admission, and members of the panel said increasing attendance at museums is a critical part of their future survival.
Attracting a more diverse audience is a key hurdle to museums, said Nina Jablonski, curator of anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences. "We still have a largely white, middle-class audience as paying visitors," she said. "Our outreach programs have tried to make it more heterogeneous, but it's been very challenging."
One way museums have succeeded in attracting diverse visitors is through special multi-cultural exhibits. But Jablonski said the benefits from such exhibits are often fleeting, and too often the museum audience reverts to its usual composition.
Although panelists saw a future for museums in cyberspace, they were less hopeful the Internet would help bring diversity to the museum audience. Richard Rinehart, information systems manager with the Berkeley Art Museum, said the audience on the Internet and the audience of museums is very similar. "It's really the same group: white, and well paid," Rinehart said.
Instead of looking to the Web to build diversity, Rinehart said the Internet should supplement, but never replace, actual museums. "The Internet is too cheap of a way to achieve too many goals to be ignored," Rinehart said. "For a tenth of the price of an exhibit catalog, I can give you ten times as many people."
Students in the SF State museum studies graduate program can look forward to being on the front line of museums' struggle for survival. Jonathan Yorba, a 1989 graduate of the program, splits his time between research at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and an adjunct professorship of museum studies at John F. Kennedy University in Orinda.
"A lot of people think museums are stuffy, and don't go there because they don't see themselves mirrored in their content. The question is how are we really, really going to make these museums sing for the average Joe and Jane?"
Yorba said one way of attracting a wider audience is to place more emphasis on popular culture. "Pop culture is often denigrated and looked down upon, but for a majority of people, that is their culture."
[ Golden Gater - December 4, 1997 ]