PANDEMIC TURNS KAHLO- RIVERA SHOW INTO A CHALLENGE
Denver’s Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera show will test limits of patience and planning
Excitement bubbled over when Denver Art Museum announced its latest foray into big- ticket exhibitions last year. “Let’s plan a girls day!” wrote Facebook user Andrea Stanley in November 2019 — one of thousands who took to social media to tag friends and make tentative plans for a modernism show featuring Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and other influential Mexican artists.
With 150 rare paintings and international name recognition for its stars, the show promised to be another general- audience hit in the vein of last year’s “Claude Monet: The Truth of Nature.” That exhibition drew visitors from outside Colorado, given that it was the only U. S. stop of the biggest Monet show in years.
But “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican
Modernism from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection,” announced a little less than a year ago, is facing new challenges before its Oct. 25 premiere — namely, the coronavirus kind.
“It’s really hard to gauge how many people to expect. Attendance is relative to capacity, and our capacity is now about
25% of what it would normally be,” said Jeffrey King, director of visitor services at Denver Art Museum. “I think this show has the same reach as Monet, where we sold about 97% of the available tickets.”
King’s job since midMarch has been to figure out how to welcome back people safely. What once seemed like an opportunity to lure new visitors and add museum members with a major show now looks like a health challenge in a time of social distancing and mandatory masks.
There are more questions than answers. Will people still feel comfortable coming back in large numbers? Even with reduced capacity, just how large will those numbers be? And what can the museum do to ensure people’s safety while making them understand this will be an exhibit unlike any other?
“We started the planning process more than a year ago, but we’re constantly making adjustments,” King said. “You start conservatively and try to grow it from there, because we know the demand is there. Right now there will be 30 people moving through each time slot, which is exponentially lower than what we typically operate on. With Monet, it was more like 100 or 120.”
The forced reduction due to city and state health mandates doesn’t just affect Denver Art Museum’s ticket revenue and budgeting. ( Admission to the “Mexican Modernism” show is $ 26 for non- members; tickets are on sale Oct. 12 via denverartmuseorg.) Visit Denver, the city’s tourism and convention bureau, also typically brokers promotional partnerships with the museum for these types of exhibitions, which in the past have included 2016’ s ” Star Wars and the Power of Costume” and recent, wildly popular, high- fashion exhibitions from Cartier and Dior.
The deals include hotels and local restaurants — for visitors who may want to turn the exhibition into an overnight or weekend trip — and help send people to surrounding cultural institutions, such as the Clyfford Still Museum ( next door), History Colorado Center ( across the street) and Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art
( one block away).
They also financially benefit the surrounding Golden Triangle and Capitol Hill neighborhoods with increased foot traffic and business for their independent galleries, boutiques, cafes and bars.
“Those go back years and have been very successful,” said Justin Bresler, vice president of marketing for Visit Denver. “We did them in
2010 when they brought in that really excellent King Tut exhibit and have done them for Star Wars, Degas, Cartier, Van Gogh — all exhibitions that Denver had never seen before.”
Following years of record tourism growth, Denver welcomed 17.7 million overnight visitors in 2019, including both convention travelers and tourists, who spent $ 6 billion in the metro area in the form of meals, drinks, transportation and lodging. As it has been for years, Denver Art Museum was one of the top attractions drawing visitors from out of state in 2019.
In 2020, those deals don’t make sense. Travel in the U. S. was down by as much as 70% year- overyear in the spring, although in recent weeks the drop has leveled out to about 50%. Since the beginning of March, the COVID- 19 pandemic has resulted in more than $ 396 billion in cumulative losses for the U. S. travel economy — including a loss of $ 50.9 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue since March 1, according to an Oct. 1 report from the U. S. Travel Association.
Bresler thinks the total may end up being more like half- a- trillion dollars in national tourism losses before the year ends.
“Fortunately, the social media and PR components of that are a little more flexible,” said Bresler. “We still have these promotional tools and an events calendar we can use for upcoming events, like when our website pivoted to offering a list of 1,000 Denver restaurants offering to- go food in the spring.”
Visit Denver helps with promotion, but it’s still up to cultural institutions to deliver on the experience. In recent months, that included shifting both the shows’ formats and audium.
ence expectations to be in line with our current reality.
“Art of the Brick,” the Lego- art exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, is one of the only other major, generalaudience touring shows to open in Denver since midMarch ( including Denver Art Museum’s Norman Rockwell retrospective, which closed Sept. 7).
The kid- friendly museum’s success — happy, safe crowds; brisk ticket sales; and ongoing publicity for an otherwise quiet institution — was far from assured when “Brick” debuted on June 25.
“We decided to bring it in long before COVID, but had the opportunity before it actually opened to figure out our visitor strategies by relying on survey responses from thousands and thousands of people that were shared among many museums — including the Denver Art Museum,” said Jodi Schoemer, co- director of experiences and partnerships at Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
In addition to shifting health protocols, organizers have responded to safety concerns by limiting the number of visitors and volunteers on- site, as well as nixing interactive displays that would increase face- to- face contact with others.
“On a busy weekend, we’d normally expect about 250 people in an exhibit like ‘ Art of the Brick’ at any one time,”
Schoemer said. “Right now, we never have more than 70 people in the gallery — and that’s 70 people spread out across 13,000 square feet.”
That may end up being a bonus for museum- goers who prefer quieter, less crowded visits. But as with “Mexican Modernism,” both perception and reality are important. While Denver Art Museum plans on hiring 35 to 40 parttime workers to help people safely navigate a redesignedfor- COVID exhibition, visitors- services director King anticipates some confusion from visitors who won’t be able to linger or gather inside the museum before their timed, ticketed entrances.
“We’re expecting a lot of sell- outs because of limited capacity, so the big thing will be getting the word out about how it works,” he said. “We don’t want people congregating before their time, so we
won’t be letting anyone in earlier than 10 minutes before their tickets say. That’s a big operational change for us.”
A “worst- case scenario,” King said, is that all this effort goes into an exhibition that few people are able to see.
“We don’t want ticketing to be too competitive, like the Nathaniel Rateliff concerts at Red Rocks,” he said, referring to that summer series of sold- out shows, which were limited to 175 audience members per set. “So we’re extending hours and adding tickets around the holidays when people like to visit. People have been planning trips to see this months in advance, and that’s out of our hands, but we can at least try to have tickets ready for them when people are ready to buy.”