What will your next visit to the MFAH be like?
Remember when you could go to an art museum and stand shoulder to shoulder with other people ogling a Van Gogh they’d never seen live before? Don’t expect that to return any time soon, even when the doors reopen.
“I’m already mourning the loss of the life we lived and the extraordinary momentum we had at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,” said Gary Tinterow, the museum’s director. “But I’m also embracing the notion of change and hoping to be nimble in identifying opportunities in the new environment we’re going to be living in.”
During a Zoom interview Thursday, Tinterow explained what visitors might find at the MFAH by midsummer, how the COVID-19 pandemic could impact the museum’s bottom line and what’s keeping him motivated through the shutdown.
Q: When do you expect the museum to reopen, and what will be different?
A: I check my mail every day, but the crystal ball hasn’t arrived yet. Opening by July 1 seems to be feasible, given our most pessimistic models. The pandemic will bring permanent change to art museums such as ours. We’re going to have to live with this virus for quite some time. Our biggest challenge is learning gradually; it’s going to have to begin with baby steps. We’ll all learn how to visit a museum differently. We are adopting procedures for low-touch entrances, exits and visits. We’re going to change the way we deliver information to individuals so they won’t have to touch things or pick up things that aren’t their own. An attendant with a mask and gloves will open the door. You’ll probably be wearing a mask. We won’t hand you gallery guides unless they can be sanitized; you’ll probably download material on your own device.
Many museums provide a textbook case of how to live in this new world. For a survey of the Association of Museum Directors, we calculated how many visitors we could admit based on the square feet in our display spaces. If they have 6 feet of circumference around them and move through the space as equally distributed as atoms of oxygen, how many people would there be? Probably 800 at a time. We can easily accommodate that. They won’t be in one space; they’ll be throughout our campus in multiple buildings. Maybe, if we have a film program in Brown Auditorium, people can be seated on every other aisle and alternate seats. There is room at the MFAH for social distancing.
Q: Pandemic lockdowns are draining museums everywhere financially. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art expects to lose $100 million, nearly a third of its annual budget. Staff layoffs and furloughs are inevitable in many places, and Houston’s institutions have the added disaster of a collapsed oil economy. What losses are you predicting for the MFAH?
A: For the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, we have a $67 (million) to $70 million budget. A month ago we were expecting to end with a surplus of about $700,000. Three weeks ago, we were looking at a possible deficit of around $4.7 million. Tuesday it looked like about $2.6 million.
We’ve been able to dramatically cut costs while we’re closed. We have not cut costs by furloughing full- and part-time employees. We did terminate a few temporary contracts with about two dozen people who were working in ticketed exhibitions that are now closed. Those jobs would have ended in April, May or June depending on the projects. We gave them severance pay, and about five had health benefits that will continue through June.
If we can open by July 1, we think we will be OK. Thanks to a century of philanthropy, we have
this extraordinary endowment, which provides a cushion. We’re not going to be dipping into it, but we have a reserve fund of surpluses from previous years that sits in a cash account. We’ll use that to plug the hole in this year’s budget.
Each year half of our annual budget is guaranteed. Thank God for that. On July 1, we take 5 percent from our endowment for the new fiscal year. (The endowment lost value during the stock market’s tumble but has recovered somewhat. Last week it totaled nearly $1.2 billion, down about 7 percent from an all-time high.) The other half comes equally from fundraising and the earned income of admissions, membership, gift-shop sales and parking. That’s a big question mark.
There is a pent-up demand to visit. But we don’t know how many will come, so we’re reducing our earned and fundraising income projection by 20 (percent) to 25 percent. That is going to impact the budget. Our contribution from Houston’s hotelmotel occupancy taxes will go down dramatically, more than 50 percent. Hotels are currently 2 percent occupied. And the local economic crisis with oil prices will affect some of our members and donors.
Part of the problem has taken care of itself with exhibitions being postponed to future years, eliminating some expenses for the next fiscal year.
Q: How much financial aid has the MFAH received since the pandemic began?
A: We have heard from almost every foundation who has supported us in the past. In many cases, they are saying, we want you to make it through this intact, so here’s a check. (The largest to date is from the Hearst Foundations, which gave emergency grants of $250,000 each to the MFAH, Houston Ballet and Houston Symphony as part of a $2.5 million gift to Houston health, social service and cultural organizations.) That’s been enormously helpful to us.
Many members of our board are third- and fourth-generation supporters, and they have voluntarily stepped forward to help. They want to see us not just endure but rise like the phoenix from this pandemic. We had a virtual board meeting on Tuesday with 65 people, and as it was happening, were getting emails with contributions. Our supporters are phenomenal. That’s not particular to our museum, but it is a distinction of our city, the way people have gathered around their institutions and how loyal they are in their support.
Q: What’s the plan for the shows that are still up?
A: We can have “Glory of Spain” until Labor Day and “Francis Bacon: Late Paintings” until just before Labor Day. We also will have “Radical Italian Design” up. We don’t know yet whether we will mount our planned summer immersive by Ernesto Neto. It depends on the mood, the environment and the social restrictions in place. It’s like a big starfish or octopus made out of crocheted fiber that’s suspended from the ceiling of Cullinan Hall, that you would crawl into. It might be the ideal social-distancing, immersive exhibition because it already has restrictions. Only a handful of people can be in it at the same time, and they have to be spaced out at intervals. “Soul of a Nation,” an important touring exhibition that was scheduled to open in April, is trapped in San Francisco. We plan to install it as soon as we can get it here.
Q: Many of the museum’s employees have hands-on jobs — conserving, unpacking, moving and hanging objects. How are they working remotely?
A: An enormous amount of catch-up work is occurring. Despite the anxiety, many of our staff are happy to have had this moment to put things in order. I know I have. The art world had gotten itself into an unsustainable position with travel; art fairs every two weeks and so on. This crisis has provoked a reckoning and a long-needed pause for us to reprioritize and understand what we’re really about and focus more clearly.
Conservators are cleaning up digital archives. We have records on thousands of works of art, but we’re always rushed. After this, our curators will be able to see the condition report of an object that was treated last year or 10 years ago from their offices. Other staff are making masks. Some are creating art-making projects that we’re getting online. We’re looking for the day we can safely bring hands-on staff back. When the mayor and the county judge allow that to occur, we’ll do that in phases. Others will continue to work from home because we think it’s a good thing for now.
Q: Construction has continued on the Kinder Building, which is scheduled to open Nov. 1. Has anything changed with that plan?
A: No. We’re on track. I’m hoping the lockdown will be lifted by then. I can’t imagine a world in which it isn’t. The walls are plastered, ready for paint. We can see how the clerestory light works. The spaces are inspiring.
Q: It will give the whole city something to celebrate.
A: Yes. It’s going to feel cathartic to open that building. It’s what keeps us going. It’s a huge motivation for us.