Museum reaccreditation stalled by crumbling building
A decision regarding the reaccreditation of the Milwaukee Public Museum will be delayed for a year because of significant problems with the county building where the museum is currently located.
The fallout if the museum were to lose its accreditation would render it unsustainable, according to its president and chief executive officer.
“The materials the Commission reviewed are clear and convincing that the building, suffering from years of structural neglect and deferred maintenance, is utterly inadequate to meet even the most minimal standards of care for the collections,” Evans Richardson, chair of the Accreditation Commission at the American Alliance of Museums, wrote in a letter last month.
Losing accreditation would jeopardize the museum's ability to borrow from and loan to other museums' collections, host major touring exhibits and obtain government grants, museum President and Chief Executive Officer Ellen Censky said in a statement.
The threat of losing accreditation raises the stakes in the process to move the museum to a new building, she said.
“Any major delays in the future museum project are a real threat to the safety of our collections and to the legacy and public service of this nearly 140year-old treasured institution,” she said.
The delay is meant to allow the museum and Milwaukee County to demonstrate they can care for the collections while progress is made on constructing and moving into a new building, Richardson wrote in the letter to Censky.
It will take years to get into the new building while the risk to the collections is “critical now and requires urgent attention,” Richardson wrote.
The museum's new building, which would also house the Betty Brinn Children's Museum, would be located on the downtown corner of North 6th Street and West McKinley Avenue.
The new site will keep the museum in the same general area while also moving a little closer to neighborhoods near downtown and allowing easy access from the highway to people from across the state, Censky told the County Board's Committee on Parks, Energy, and Environment Tuesday.
Construction on the new building is expected to begin in late 2022 or early 2023 and be completed in late 2025 or early 2026.
The project is expected to cost $240 million, including the site purchase, the children's museum space, endowment funds and the cost of moving the collections.
Gov. Tony Evers recommended in his 2021-23 state construction budget that the museum project receive $40 million.
Museum leaders are asking state legislators to approve the funding, Censky said in the statement, calling the budget proposal a “significant milestone” to collecting public and private funds needed to move the project forward and be reaccredited.
“We are also committed to working with Milwaukee County to secure their assistance as owners of the collections and our current facility and to leveraging the support of the private sector, which will fund a majority of the project's costs,” she said.
The museum is located in a countyowned building at 800 W. Wells St., where it has been since 1963. The current building has $30 million in deferred maintenance projects and would cost more than $100 million to renovate, not including the cost of updating exhibits, a museum study found.
The Betty Brinn Children's Museum has been at 929 E. Wisconsin Ave. in O'Donnell Park since 1995.
The Milwaukee Public Museum holds more than 4 million objects and has 150,000 square feet of exhibit space.
“Despite storing our collections in a structure that is quite literally falling down around us, we have not had any irreparable damage to the collections,” Censky said.
Richardson wrote that the museum will be required to submit a progress report by Aug. 13 and the museum's final report will be reviewed at the commission's June 2022 meeting.
A decision will then be made regarding reaccreditation based on the museum's progress in addressing the commission's concerns.
Richardson also commended the museum for its financial management, board engagement and oversight, and its staff providing “exceptional public service ... despite facing severe challenges with an inadequate facility that imperils the collections and diverts resources from other areas of need.”