CNY Museums Adapt
Shuffling sneakers and hushed whispers fill the Syracuse’s Everson Museum of Art, the familiar smell of canvas and dried paint tickling visitors’ nostrils as they explore the galleries and climb the museum’s signature spiral staircase, designed by famed architect I. M. Pei in 1968. Bright lights fill galleries as people document their pilgrimage to the first museum dedicated to American art. Paintings in ornate gold frames pop off the white gallery walls, and glass display cases beckon with colorful American ceramics.
Experiences like this may become the things of distant memories. Hundreds of the country’s cultural institutions remain closed as they grapple with the coronavirus pandemic. A new survey from the American Alliance of Museums found a third of all museums in the U.S. may permanently close as funding sources and financial reserves run out. The survey, conducted in June, received responses from 750 museum directors, many reporting an immediate loss of revenue after being forced to close this spring. Famed museums, like the MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, have been able to reopen while smaller cultural institutions in more rural areas across the country remain closed. The permanent closure of thousands of museums will devastate communities, economies, education systems, and cultural history, according to Laura Lott, president and CEO of the museum alliance.
And it is not as if the museum business was an easy one before the pandemic.
The Museum Association of New York has a total of 670 annual members across the state, including 40 members in central New York. A third of respondents to the organization’s 2019 State of NY State Museums survey were in a deficit position at the end of 2018, which greatly impacted their response to the pandemic.
“In Central New York, about 40% of the people who responded to the survey reported an unfavorable variance in their budget,” said Erika Sanger, executive director of the state museum association. “At the beginning of the year to the end of the year. So those 40%, when COVID hit, those were the weakest ones.”
That does not include the Everson, which, like many cultural institutions, has found ways to adapt by offering a variety of virtual experiences. This included virtual exhibition tours, take-home kits with activities for kids, trivia nights and video interviews with artists.
“We just kind of did the best that we could to create experiences for people, not just our members but the entire Syracuse community to still come together and connect with one another, during a really disconnected time,” said Kristin Sheehan, marketing consultant for the museum.
Of course, those efforts take money, and the timing of the pandemic proved tricky for many regional museums as it hit before some held their annual fundraisers. Chittenango’s All Things Oz Museum had to cancel its 43rd annual Oz-Stravaganza festival which accounts for 50% of its yearly operating budget. Director of Daily Programming Eilis Byrnes said the event normally raises about $40,000 each year.
Sheehan said the Everson is just entering its end-of-year fundraising push. It remains to be seen how the museum members and contributors have been affected economically by the events of 2020, so what they can afford to give the museum remains an unanswered question.
New York museums provided 60,000 jobs and contributed $5.4 billion to the state’s economy pre-pandemic, according to the state museum association. The organization did a deep dive into the Paycheck Protection Program and found that of the 81,075 loans made to New York businesses, only 142 went to museums. It also found that of the 7,062 museum jobs in the state that were protected, 5,338 were located in New York City. That only left 25%, or 1,724 protected jobs, for the rest of the state.
The Everson was approved for a PPP loan totaling between $150,000 and $350,000 in April, according to CNN. The Oneida Community Mansion House, another central New York cultural institution, received close to $98,000 from the program, said Executive Director Christine O’Neil. Some museums in Central New York, including the mansion house and All Things Oz, remain closed due to a lack of funding or aid while others remain closed to the public until next year out of an abundance of safety.
“The safety of our volunteers and the people coming to visit us is our number one priority so we've decided to just remain closed, even though we could kind of go through all the hoops of trying to open up by appointment and things like that,” Byrnes said. “And it may be something that we do in 2021.”
Both institutions are taking advantage of the prolonged closure to sort through their collections or perform much-needed maintenance. Byrnes is currently digitizing the museum’s 15,000-piece collection, which includes first and second editions of the Wizard of Oz books, while also helping run its newly-launched online store. O’Neil said the mansion house, which shares the history of the 19th-century Oneida Community commune, is currently working on an interior renovation project and will take the winter to do exterior renovations.
The local communities across the region have stepped up for their museums and cultural landmarks, making donations and offering help when and where needed. The Wizard of Oz and L. Frank Baum are part of Chittenango’s roots, Byrnes said, and All Things Oz houses many pieces of this history. O’Neil said donors have reached out to the Oneida Community Mansion House to offer continued support throughout its prolonged shutdown. The Downtown Committee of Syracuse’s “Put the ‘U’ Back in Syracuse” initiative encouraged residents to return to businesses that reopened, including the Everson.
“The community is coming together to make sure that our arts and culture organizations survive this and I think we're all confident that they will,” Sheehan said.
Central New York’s museums are important to local culture and history and permanent closure could greatly impact the region. Sheehan said that during difficult times, like the pandemic and the reckoning with racial inequality in the country, people need a way to find human connection and cultural institutions offer a place to forge those connections.
“And I think that we all know arts is one of those areas that kind of transcends differences, and it allows people to see different perspectives, it increases tolerance among people because they get to hear diverse stories and perspectives, which I think we bring with the different artists that exhibit in the museum and tell their stories there,” Sheehan said. “So, I think it has the potential and has already shown that there's a lot of power in what community arts organizations.”