LOS ANGELES – Fulton Leroy Washington (known as Mr. Wash), who started painting while serving time for a violent drug offense, was looking forward to being part of the biennial Hammer Museum – his first museum show – before the pandemic forced doors closed a few months before the exhibition would open. “I started building excitement,” Washington said. “Then there will be disappointment.”
The show, “Made in LA 2020”, was installed in June and is still in place. But the public was not allowed to see it.
Los Angeles, where the coronavirus pandemic was particularly severe, is the largest city in the country whose museums have yet to reopen temporarily since the pandemic took place in March last year. The long-term closure cost its museums millions of dollars a day in lost revenue, putting the city back at an important moment when an influx of artists and galleries and a growing museum scene led some to pronounce Los Angeles as the creative center of the contemporary art world. .
“It’s frustrating to see crowded malls and retail spaces and airports, yet museums are completely closed and many have not been able to reopen for the past ten months,” said Celeste DeWald, executive director of the California Association of Museums. “There’s a unique impact on museums.”
The city is an outlier. In recent weeks, museums in Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, all of which have less severe outbreaks, have been allowed to reopen with less capacity. And the New York museums, which reopened in late August, remained open, even as virus cases and deaths increased again in the fall and winter.
While the virus outlook in Los Angeles has improved dramatically since last month, when a boom in hospitals and funeral homes was overwhelming, the country is facing more and more new virus cases than any other in America.
Some museum managers in Los Angeles are teeming with state regulations, which they say have forced them to stay closed, even though trading businesses could resume their business (and with art galleries now open by appointment).
“When they opened art galleries and indoor malls, I was like, ‘This does not feel right,'” said Hammer director Ann Philbin. “Our museums function as true places of rest and healing and inspiration – it helps people a lot.”
Some museums elsewhere in the state were able to reopen at least briefly, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which opened from October for two months before having to close again.
But now all museums in the state have to stay indoors (outside areas can be used), which according to the museum association costs $ 22 million a day. The total estimated loss of revenue for 2020 is more than $ 5 billion, the association said, including science centers, zoos and aquariums.
A statement from Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, said in a statement that “museums are critical to the well-being of our society” but warned that they ‘remain high-risk environments because they are visitors to across the state and country. , which increases the risk of transmission of the virus. ”
“In addition, visitors often stay in museums for a long time,” the statement continued, “which in turn increases the risk of transfer.”
In Los Angeles, the long-term closure of the museums required not only its admission for admission and membership, but also for event rentals, fundraising, and other income-generating activities.
“It hurts,” said W. Richard West Jr., president and CEO of the American West Autry Museum, adding that he hopes museums with limited capacity may reopen so the public knows we are not dead is not. . ”
The pandemic hit amid a spate of operations in Los Angeles museums: major renovation projects at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Hammer; the success of the Broad; the establishment of the Frieze Los Angeles Art Market; and new leadership at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Klaus Biesenbach) and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Anne Ellegood).
Two new flagships in the city had to push back their opening dates: the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, from spring to fall of 2021, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, from 2022 to 2023.
Smaller settings were particularly hard hit. Revenue from the Museum of African American Art, which is on the third floor of a Macy’s store, fell 68 percent. “We are inside a store that is open,” Keasha Dumas Heath, executive director of the museum, testified on February 2 at a hearing on the State Committee’s art committee on how to safely reopen art activities. “People do not understand why we are closed.”
Artists in particular are feeling the effects. One of the most anticipated exhibits of the year, the Hammer’s biennial “Made in LA 2020” – with its complementary offering in the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens – has been postponed until later this year. The delay left the 30 artists in the show without a major opportunity to get attention.
“The program can make or break careers,” Philbin said. “It’s a very important exhibition for these artists – it can get galleries for them – and it’s not happening for any of them right now.”
Due to the prolonged closure and the busy exhibition calendars of museums, some shows may have to close without ever being seen by the public. The drawing show of the Getty Museum was only open to the public for 15 days; another one, on Mesopotamia, would be planned after the museum’s closure on March 14.
Last April, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art expected to open the first international retrospective of Japanese painter Yoshitomo Nara. The artist, known for his disturbing portraits, traveled twice from Tokyo to Los Angeles to oversee the installation of the exhibition, but it never opened.
While trying to carry out the case that they should be allowed to resume their full operations, several museum directors in Los Angeles said that most of their attendance comes from city residents, not from tourists. And some suggested that museum-goers not linger over art as long as some would expect.
In an appeal for the reopening of museums last fall, the state museum association cited research from the California Academy of Sciences that shows that visitors typically spend less than 20 minutes on exhibits. (A group of researchers conducted a study at the Art Institute of Chicago and found that the time spent looking at a single work of art averages about 29 seconds.)
Michael Govan, the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said he was struck by the inconsistency in the museum shop that is allowed to remain open because it qualifies as a trade, just like art galleries, which are often significantly smaller than museums. . According to him, museums provide a public service.
“We can be part of the solution,” Govan said.
According to officials in Los Angeles’ largest museums, it would be easy to apply distance measures. “We have 100,000 square feet of space and a limited number of people in the museum,” said Terry L. Karges, executive director of the Petersen Automotive Museum.
Newsom’s recently proposed budget included $ 25 million for small museums and theaters, along with $ 15 million to the California Arts Council for the California Creative Corps – which would be funded by matching private donations – that would hire artists to send messages about public health. to deliver.
“We know they are struggling,” said another email from Newsom’s office on state institutions. “We also know that people of all ages look to these organizations to find hope, healing, commitment and joy.” But the statement added that the guidelines for museums “are aimed at keeping people safe to reduce cases and to ensure that we do not overload ICUs”
According to state guidelines, museums cannot open their doors if they are in provinces that have an average of more than seven new cases per day per 100,000 people. According to a New York Times database that follows the two-week trend, there are on average more than 40 new cases per 100,000 people per day in Los Angeles County.
The state legislature’s budget committees have asked the governor to increase his funding for cultural relief to $ 50 million. “California is the last state that enables indoor museums to reopen in certain capacities across the country,” the committee chairmen said in a Feb. 4 letter signed by 250 cultural institutions together.
“While we understand the need for caution to prevent the spread,” the letter continued, “we also know that no industry can survive for more than a year.”
Not all Los Angeles museums insist on reopening. “We need to put the safety of our staff and our audience first,” said Biesenbach of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), where total revenue fell by 26 percent, membership by 32 percent and admissions by 50 percent. percent.
“If the numbers are lower and the vaccine is no more,” Biesenbach added, “it would be appropriate to reopen.”
Others are eager to let people in again. “We did not give up,” said DeWald of the museum association. “We continue with the statement that museums can accept protocols and use the existing guidelines to make their spaces safe.”