Claremont Museum of Art is on verge of closing doors

Two and a half years after bursting into life in a historic, former fruit packing plant, the Claremont Museum of Art is on death’s door, the victim of a financial shortfall. Three expected donations suddenly failed to materialize, leaving the institution without enough money to support itself, said board president Frank Chabre.

The museum’s five full-time employees, including director William Moreno, have been laid off and the shop closed. The current exhibition, “Ten Pound Ape: Your Mother was Beautiful Once, part vier,” will continue for two weeks — or longer if funds are found, Chabre said.  He and other board members are developing plans to maintain the education program and keep the collection intact, in the hope of reviving the museum when the economy improves.

Founded as “a regional museum of international significance and breadth,” the privately funded Claremont showcase has presented edgy new work and retrospective exhibitions of prominent veteran artists Karl Benjamin and James Hueter.

The museum, which operated on an annual budget of about $780,000 in its glory days, received a promised gift of $10 million last year, but the bulk of it was in the form of annuities, trusts and real estate to be disbursed after the death of the anonymous donor.

-- Suzanne Muchnic

Photo: William Moreno in front of the Claremont Museum of Art. Credit: Alex Gallardo/Los Angeles Times 

Comments

[William Wray]

I'd be curious on how all the modern shows went over. Ten Pound Ape show sounds like 10 people might have gone to it. A lot of weak contemporary artists and student shows over the years will not carry a museum. People want art they can relate to, museums big and small need to accept they need to show art the public wants, not what they want them to want.

[Donald Frazell]

Thre are simply far too many art museums, and far to little art worth seeing to put in it to excuse the huge ballooning of wallspace in the last decade. I like the idea of reusing an older building, as with the Temporary Contemporary, which was ultimately ruined by Gehry by painting over the original skylights and arranging the space in a fashionable, but non functional way.

There is a winnowing out of the overabundance of space, as with all businesses, to get ot what is needed, not desired. now, if we can get back to basics wiht art, back to its musical essence of line-melody,color-harmony,and structure-rhythm, where learning them si actually taught, and each artist goal to create his own language, but one built on the real world, about humanity, nature and god, rather than internalized academic non-questions.

Poeple are beginning to be interested in art again, and those who can supply it, not the absurdist entertainers and exhibitionists of the academies, will prosper. People want quality, not over-refinement, passion, and intelligence, Layered meaning of life, not simplistic cleverness of one dimensional concepts.

Back to basics, the fundamentals of what art is, and begin to define arts purpose. Each will do so, to compete and reflect truth, in their own way, but those with the most life in it, the deepest understanding, the broadest connection to humanity, will win out. It will take time, but a reassesment of all human activities is now essential. And nothing has become more decadent or irrelevant than contempt art.

And those museums and galleries which cut out the nonsense of multiple curators, literariness, academic glorfication, and cleverness will win out. Time to cut to the chase, and cut out the sugary coating. Time for nutrional art, that feeds the soul. Time to grow up. Time to get to work.

art collegia delenda est

[Daniel Wright]

The Claremont Art Museum's problem is similar to that of the Autry Museum's in Griffith Park. In 2000, Jackie Autry made a big splash in philanthropic newspapers and blogs all over the country when she announced that the Autry Foundation, a family foundation of Gene and Jackie Autry, had established a $100 million endowment for the Autry Museum.

It was the alleged existence of this ample endowment that the Los Angeles Times culture reporters and editorial board touted as rationale for the "wealthy" Autry to merge with the "cash-strapped" Southwest Museum. In the merger, Autry promised to maintain the independent identity and operation of the nationally significant Southwest Museum, if expert studies showed it feasible.

When the experts said it was feasible to restore the dramatic Southwest Museum site, the Autry Board rejected it without anything more than its own opinion. The experts be damned. Later investigations by the community revealed that the 2000 "endowment" announcement was actually a pledge of the Autry Foundation to pay $100 million on the death of Mrs. Autry, even though that foundation has never had more than $17 million in assets to pay the pledge. For the last eight years, the Autry and its accountants have been booking a $100 million asset on its books that has no visible means to be paid unless it is going to come from Mrs. Autry's will. Accounting rules strictly forbid the booking of non-profit assets based upon a provision in a will -- subject to challenge of heirs or the whims of the maker of the will.

On the day of the 2003 merger, the "cash-strapped" Southwest Museum had $3 million MORE of actual invested endowment funds than the "wealthy" Autry Museum that was supposedly riding to the "rescue." Immediately on completion of the merger, Autry obtained about $5 million in Southwest endowment funds and asked donors/foundations to divert another $2 million in pledges for a Southwest collections storage building planned by the former Southwest Museum Board into a different project -- Autry's conservation of the Southwest's collection. Autry touts itself as the "savior" of the Southwest's collection which is a half-truth because about half of the cost of the conservation effort was funded by pirating the building program for the new collections building in Mount Washington.

Similar trickery appears in recent claims by Autry that it had raised over $100 million in cash and pledges for its proposed expansion in Griffith Park. Financial records of the Autry show that on January 1, 2009, the Autry had only $20 million of its capital campaign in hand to build the massive expansion it desired in Griffith Park to replace the Southwest Museum. It was only a matter of time before this charade collapsed as it did. The City's "delays" cited by the Autry as the reason for the cancellation are just one in a series of sad misrepresentations.

The difficulties at the Claremont, stemming from a splashy gift announcement that was not backed up by its donor with current endowment funds, is a cautionary tale for the Autry.