One example is Pittsburgh, a city of 300,000 that is home to 50 museums and cultural centers, the legacy of its industrial wealth at the beginning of the 20th century. Steven Knapp, the new executive of the four Carnegie Museums, began work on February 1, weeks before the government lockdown was declared in Pennsylvania.
During the early days of the pandemic, Knapp and the leaders of other local institutions (la Fallingwater de Frank Lloyd Wright, he Centro Cultural Afroestadounidense August Wilson) hosted bimonthly Zoom video calls to develop security guidelines and reopening protocols.
“For a city of its size, Pittsburgh is one of the richest cultural cities in the country. We wanted people to come back and feel like they had a pleasant experience, ”Knapp said. This meant that when museums began to reopen during the summer, there were social distancing stickers on the floor, guards ensuring the mandatory use of face masks and, in most establishments, timed entries.
Thanks to security measures, Pittsburgh museums achieved higher participation rates than national museums. «In July there was a quarter of the normal traffic. Now we have 40 or 50 percent and up to 80 percent of last year’s stake, “Knapp said. “It was a matter of managing traffic and maintaining one-way traffic patterns.”
In Ohio, the Toledo Museum of Art —With his impressive Renaissance works of art— has recorded an increase in first-time visitors during the pandemic. Why? “It’s normal, it’s a way to get out of the house,” said director Adam M. Levine. He believes that museum visitors seek entertainment, encouragement, and lessons on how other people have endured tough times in the past.
Museums adapt to tough times
Museums have a wide range of business models; Some rely heavily on donations, others on entrance fees or rentals for special events. Many don’t expect their income to return to 2019 levels for at least a year from now. But some museums supported by local taxes or large donations have less dire financial futures.
Even museums that are not threatened with extinction or cutbacks have been affected by the pandemic. He San Luis Museum of Art (SLAM), open since 1879 in the city along the Missouri River, has had to renew its exhibition program, as international lenders have been reluctant to send their treasures abroad without guarantees of how or when the works will return. Its exhibition curators decided to “work with what we have,” explained spokesperson Matthew Hathaway. This resulted in Storm of Progress (“Storm of Progress”), an exhibition of 120 works by German artists from the stock of SLAM.
“We pride ourselves on having a German collection that could rival anyone outside of Germany,” said Hathaway. «It has a direct link with our community and our culture. What we could do was obvious. The resulting exhibition shows works such as Christ and the sinner (1917) by the painter Max Beckmann, an ode to nonviolence, and the ironic diagrams of Sigmar Polke.
“Museums look at their own collections and think, ‘How do we reproduce this in a way that we hadn’t thought about?” Said Hathaway.
The pandemic as a creative catalyst
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