Washington state’s Bellevue Arts Museum faces ‘dire’ financial straits

Washington’s Bellevue Arts Museum (Bam)—a Pacific Northwest mainstay within the Seattle suburbs devoted to the intersection of wonderful artwork, craft and design—is going through a “dire” monetary disaster, prompting the cash-strapped establishment to launch an emergency marketing campaign in hopes of elevating $300,000. The cash could be used to handle operational prices like salaries, constructing maintenance and catering for its upcoming gala. In line with govt director Kate Casprowiak Scher, closure is on the horizon if the funds don’t materialise inside the subsequent six weeks.

In a dialog with Margo Vansynghel of The Seattle Occasions, Scher declined to touch upon the museum’s present money circulation however admitted that Bam has been counting on board donations to maintain afloat for the previous six months. “We’re on the place the place the straw breaks the camel’s again,” she mentioned. Because it buckles below the load of excellent money owed, the pandemic’s sector-wide toll and philanthropic reprioritising throughout the trade, Bam faces an unsure future. The museum additionally lacks a large endowment—the investing revenue that nonprofits use to plan forward.

“Lots of our issues began 24 years in the past when this constructing opened. They constructed this beautiful, 40,000-square-foot constructing by Steven Holl, however they didn’t increase cash for an endowment,” Scher advised The Seattle Occasions. “It’s like having an incredible huge trendy house and never planning for its future.”

Between Bam’s absence of a nest egg and the dearth of a everlasting assortment, Scher maintains that the museum has discovered itself in a “doom loop” of yearly fundraising, a recipe for institutional precarity. “This marketing campaign… it’s for this dedication that we’re going to do one thing totally different, and that we’re going to be extra conscious of our neighborhood and our demographic, and be very intentional about how we attempt to join with them,” Scher mentioned.

Bam’s tax paperwork reveal that the museum has ended nearly yearly since 2010 in a deficit. A majority (about $1.6m) of Bam’s income in 2022 got here from authorities grants and donations. Rampant employees and board turnover has additionally been a problem. In 2021, then-executive director and chief curator Benedict Heywood resigned after community-wide allegations of disrespect in direction of artists of color and the museum’s first Black girl visitor curator. The successive director stayed lower than two years on the job. Scher’s appointment as everlasting director was introduced solely this previous week.

“Whereas it’s unhappy to see what’s taking place at Bam, it’s not shocking,” Joseph Steininger, a former museum board member, advised The Seattle Occasions. “Since 2019 the Bellevue Arts Museum has persistently misplaced the belief of its neighborhood and their donors… I resigned from my place as a member of the board of trustees when it grew to become evident that this lack of accountability was systemic. After studying their plea to be ‘saved’ I’ve no purpose to imagine something has modified.”