Open-and-shut, up-but-mostly-down year
Many museums reopened in summer, only to close down again in autumn
Amuseum on the end of a yo-yo string is not an easy image to conjure. The buildings are heavy, for one thing, and not particularly aerodynamic. Plus, there’s so much fragile stuff inside.
But that is precisely where Chicago’s museums found themselves this year as the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to close in the middle ofMarch. Many of them cautiously reopened in summer, and then the resurgent public-health crisis and the government attempting to manage it yanked the string again in mid-November and shut them all back down.
Meantime, as with almost everyone else in this nation’s oddly prioritized economy, therewere federal relief funds available to help the not-for-profit sector through June. Since then, it’s been crickets or tumbleweeds or, more aptly, the heavy quiet of a big, empty, marble-floored hall.
That a country that doesn’t value the arts generally should also fail to value museums specifically is probably not a surprise. If theMuseum of Science and Industry converted its 14 indoor acres to growing soybeans— or, rather, agreeing not to grow soybeans— itwould likely have all the federal subsidies it could handle.
It already has those big John Deere machines on display downstairs to do (not do) the tilling and such.
Butmaybe this is not the appropriate forum to discuss ag policy.
We’re talking about the hellish year Chicago museums have gone through as they, like most of the rest of the entertainment industry, have seen their revenue streams slowto a trickle at best.
The shutdown on theweekend ofMarch 15 came suddenly, it felt like. The Field Museum had just opened its superb “ApsáalookeWomen andWarriors,” its first major exhibition curated by aNative American scholar and a harbinger of what’s to come as it remakes its antiquated Native American galleries for a planned late-2021 unveiling.
The close look at a northwest plains people combined older pieces fromthe Apsáalooke (Crow) culture held by the museum with contemporarywork: photography, beaded horse regalia and human fashion, all against unusually vivid backdrops.
Itwas the last museum showI visited and wrote about before the shutdown, and thankfully itwas still on view as the Field reopened— at the required limited capacity— in the summer.
Another first-rate exhibition caught by the viruswas theMCA’s “Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago,” a kind ofChicago art raid conducted by the London-based, Nigerianborn fashion designer.
Frommy review:
Alove letter to the city written in visual language, “DuroOlowu: Seeing Chicago” is composed of pieces that normally live in Chicago museums and in the homes of its art patrons, and it feels like a new and thrilling mode of presentation. The sheer volume of art is a little overwhelming, yes, but the arrangement is warm and welcoming as it helps you spot howMartin Puryear works with ReneMagritte works withWesley Willis works with Cindy Sherman.
After being initially open for just a couple ofweeks, “Seeing Chicago,” too, was extended and still up whenMCAreopened in July, but it is a profound shame that more people did not get to see this intoxicating take on howto organize amuseum show.
At least it lives on in the also innovative exhibition catalog, entitled “Seeing,” recently named one of TheNewYork Times’ top art books of the year.
I’m pretty confident the Olowuwould have beenmy favorite museum exhibition in a normal year. But this is no time for a list. After the initial shutdown, the pace of new shows slowed and so— to be frank— didmy typical pace of visiting them. Like, I suspect, many of the people who go to museums I adopted a less expansive, much more deliberate approach to public life.
It’s not that museums, whenwewere re-allowed to visit them, seemed unsafe. I certainly feltmy health less threatened in the airy, 25-percent-full-at-most halls of the Field and the Art Institute than I did duringmy lone post-March visit to the local Trader Joe’s.
(And I know I’m not alone in wondering why, in the latest Illinois shutdown, health clubs are allowed to stay open at quartercapacity while museums must close. My droplet expulsion volume standing in front of an Ivan Albright is not nearly as profuse as it is on the abs machine.)
I did see and delight in “Monet and Chicago,” when it opened at the Art Institute in September (postponed fromMay).
And therewere other just-mounted shows I visited inNovember, just before the re-closure, that I hope will still make sense to write about when coronavirus infection rates decline.
In parallel withCOVID-19 as a shaping force, the social justicemovement inspired by Black LivesMatter protests challenged institutions to reexamine who they hire (and furlough), what they display and how theywill better serve the country’s diverse population in the future.
“I write today to acknowledge the impact of this pivotal moment and to commit the Art Institute of Chicago to both support and model racial justice and equity,” museum Director James Rondeau wrote in a public statement June 3, amid the protests in Chicago and around the country
NewFieldMuseumCEOJulian Siggers, a British archaeologist who formerly ran
theUniversity of PennsylvaniaMuseum of Archaeology and Anthropology, said the museum’s forthcoming strategic plan will make matters of “diversity, equity and inclusion” central to the entire enterprise.
“With theBLMmovement justmoving so front and center, there’s a real urgency — and it’s fromthe staff, too,” he said upon taking the reins at the museum in September. “I mean, they reallywant to make headway in this area.”
The next month the MSI announced a new leader, its first Black and firstwoman CEO. ChevyHumphrey, aHouston native who most recently ran the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix, takes over on Jan. 11. Her plan is to inspire young people to imagine themselves in the STEMfields, she said, but it also includes listening and learning the lay of the land.
Part of that, she acknowledged, involves discovering howbig a financial hit the museum has taken this year.
Indeed, the bulk of museum coverage this yearwas about the business of museums.
The outdoor places, particularly Chicago Botanic Garden andMorton Arboretum, closed down last and, along with the big zoos, opened back up first. They are remaining open this month for their annual outdoor holiday lights shows, although both zoos have said they plan to go into extraordinary hibernation, shutting down for essentially the first two months of the new year.
It took the indoor ones a while longer to reopen— mostly during July— and even then, the heads of the Shedd Aquarium and Art Institute told me, theywere believing the science and preparing for exactly what has happened: a second cycle of closure as theweather cooled and people moved indoors.
Some institutions big and small have not reopened at all and don’t intend to untilwe return to whatwe thought of as normal society. Among them: Adler Planetarium, PeggyNotebaertNatureMuseum, the DuSableMuseum. of African American History, Chicago Children’sMuseum and the Ed Paschke Art Center.
Almost all of the institutions pivoted, in oneway or another, to online presentations, which brings wide access but no fiscal support. Almost all laid off and/or furloughed staffers, dipped into their endowments or cash reserves or planned on it, and/or reshaped or diminished their plans. By summer, the FieldMuseum, for instance, was anticipating a $20 million, or 36%, budget shortfall for 2020.
Chicagowas not unique. In anOctober survey of more than 800 museum directors nationwide, more than half said they had less than six months of operating cash on hand.
“The financial state ofU.S. museums is moving frombad toworse,” Laura Lott, president and CEO of the American Alliance ofMuseums, which conducted the survey, said in a statement. “Thirty percent of museums remain closed since the March lockdown and those that have reopened are operating on an average of 35% of their regular attendance— a reduction that is unsustainable long-term.”
With no further relief yet forthcoming from Congress, despite the depth and breadth of the pandemic’s economic impact, the situation could become particularly dark in 2021.
Chicago’s museums have yet to announce their year-end reckonings, but the news seems certain to be bleak, probably even bleaker thanwas projected at midyear. More layoffs and other compromises to the mission couldwell be in the offing.
Being able to partially reopenwould restore only that unsustainable trickle of income, and even that possibility seems months rather thanweeks away, given the current state of COVID-19 in Illinois.
Fully reopening will require widespread population vaccination— followed by however long it takes for people’s psyches to recover enough that they feel comfortable standing next to strangers again.
In otherwords: There’s no untying that yo-yo string anytime soon.