Reporter
Picture This
A hip, art-loving city like Austin can't find a permanent home for its museum? Sad but true—but after two decades of big talk, it may finally get one.
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After setting aside plans begun by the Philadelphia firm of Robert Venturi in the mid-eighties, the museum hired another architect—nationally acclaimed, of course—Richard Gluckman, of New York's Gluckman Mayner Architects, to design a museum to cover an entire city block. He produced a sleek design for a 146,000-square-foot building including 34,000 square feet of exhibition space. In 1998, flying in the face of conventional fundraising theory, the museum took its capital campaign public with less than half of the $65 million in pledges it would need in hand—roughly $30 million. This included the remaining $11.4 million of the city bonds approved in 1984 and $13 million in personal pledges from five Dell Computer executives and their wives: Michael and Susan Dell, Mort and Angela Topfer, Tom and Deborah Green, Kevin and Debra Rollins, and Tom and Lynn Meredith (the latter through a family foundation). There were also a number of six-figure gifts. But the ground-breaking has yet to occur.
THE MUCH-PUBLICIZED $65 MILLION capital campaign was not the only fundraising AMOA was conducting. The museum also sought an additional $25 million for endowments—the minimum required to support what would likely be a $9 million annual operating budget for the new building. And the museum launched yet another campaign, this one for $15 million to restore the villa at the Laguna Gloria site and to expand the facilities for the art school there. Before long the museum's goals added up to $105 million, not counting a $12 million underground parking garage whose future revenues will pay off city-backed construction bonds.
Despite the flurry of activity bent on picking the pockets of Austin's ubiquitous new millionaires, the museum neglected to stay in touch with the broader community it is supposed to serve. No trustee marketing and development committee was appointed to oversee community relations or fundraising for annual operating dollars, and so those functions tended to be carried out by staff. "We had a very difficult time getting board members to chair certain things," says Hipp. A number of board members counter that Ferrer and Hipp didn't relish the oversight such a board committee might have provided. In any event, news stories about the museum in the Austin press were few and far between after the initial campaign-related announcements in 1999. On the other hand, the museum paid copious attention to national audiences. Hipp says the museum hired Ruder Finn, the New York-based public relations firm that represented the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, "to get us that national highlighted focus. That's how we got a piece in Newsweek and House Beautiful about Richard Gluckman." That is also how Art in America came to run an article last April about AMOA's scheduled May 2001 ground-breaking, which, of course, did not take place.
Perhaps a fully engaged trustee marketing committee might also have insisted that the Austin voters who overwhelmingly approved bonds for the construction of a downtown art museum deserved an explanation when AMOA voluntarily rescinded its right to use that money in August 2000. By doing so the museum relinquished more than one third of the dollars earmarked for the museum's capital campaign. And it took this step without securing private donations to replace those funds. AMOA's rationale—to avoid giving the City of Austin control of the museum's exhibits—may, in the long run, have been sound. One shudders to imagine the Austin City Council meddling with exhibitions after the example set by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who threatened to cut off city funding for the Brooklyn Museum over a show of British artists, one of whom included elephant dung in a painting of the Virgin Mary. But neither the trustees' decision-making process nor their underlying concerns were shared with the museum's supporters (myself included), let alone the general public. Folks outside the inner circle could reasonably assume that the museum didn't require community money to build the new building—not a smart message to send in the middle of a fundraising campaign.
Besides, why worry what the public thought when Dell was around? Dell executives certainly seemed eager to lead the way to a new era of philanthropy in Austin. And so the museum never bothered to commission a feasibility study to identify a broad base of donors for its new museum. David Gold, a chairman of the board in the nineties, credits AMOA with developing a "culture of philanthropy" in Austin where one had not existed previously. For the most part, however, the museum simply invited a slew of high-tech higher-ups and their spouses into the fold and confidently set their sights on the biggest, most magnificent, technologically advanced downtown facility anyone could imagine. In retrospect, Austin's prevailing dot-com mentality was replicated by AMOA, with the same dire results.
By the end of 2000 the economy had begun to stall, the stock market was struggling, and much of Austin's high-tech money was rapidly drying up or disappearing entirely. The museum staff, which had paid less attention to raising operating dollars than to the campaign, ran up a six-figure deficit. Fundraising slowed to a trickle. Dell's Mort and Angela Topfer, the second-largest donors to the museum, withheld the annual installment of their $6 million commitment. "Accountability is the most important thing," explains Angela Topfer. "We determined that they had not met the criteria that we wanted them to meet. To be perfectly honest, they missed eighteen months to two years of the best fundraising time there was in Austin."
While Topfer and others laid blame on the staff rather than the trustees, it is important to note that the responsibility of the latter is to monitor paid staff and support their efforts or send them on their way. But the board couldn't even find anyone who would agree to serve as board president. Instead, they altered the bylaws, directing O'Brien, their part-time staff CEO, to serve as the president of the volunteer board. O'Brien himself describes this as an "unusual governance structure." Soon after, board meetings were reduced in number. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that a board composed of high-tech CEOs, experienced community volunteers, bankers, bureaucrats, and lawyers could remain so thoroughly unengaged during this most ambitious period in the museum's life. They approved not one but two budgets that obligated the trustees to make donations to the museum and then failed to meet their own goals.
IN 2001, WITH THE MUSEUM facing a shortfall, two rounds of staff cutbacks occurred, one in April and another in June. O'Brien resigned quietly in April and McLellan, a former 3M executive and director of LifeWorks, which provides social services to Austin families, was brought on board in early June to clean up the mess. A month later Ferrer's resignation was announced. Dana Friis-Hansen, who continues as the senior curator, became the interim executive director in August and oversees the artistic side. Molly Hipp departed after September 11, and her fundraising duties were reassigned. The staff is now half the size it was during O'Brien's tenure. Also in late summer, the chairman-elect of the board, Tom Green, declined to move up as chairman, citing his need to look after business at Dell. Once again the board scrambled to find new volunteer talent.
This time, the museum got lucky. The next and, everyone hopes, final step toward building a downtown museum will be led by new board chairman Lynn Sherman, the executive manager of governmental relations and community affairs for the Lower Colorado River Authority. Working closely with him is new board president Bettye Nowlin, a self-described soccer mom with sufficient time and money (her husband founded a technology company) to devote to AMOA and a genuine passion for art. Sherman is someone who likes to assign numbers to the tasks before him. He had four goals back in September when he took office: poll the community, rewrite the museum's mission statement, reduce the operating budget, and reduce the capital-campaign goal. With the help of his newly energized board and AMOA's new top administrators, he says he has finished this initial work. The mission now is "to educate and inspire a diverse audience about the visual arts and their relevance to our time" without earlier language about "art of the Americas." The operations budget has been reduced 38 percent and the capital goal has been cut by 50 percent.
Much chastened, AMOA at last is concentrating on having a museum that can grow into "world-class status," as AMOA's press releases like to say, instead of starting there. Richard Gluckman, the museum's architect, went back to the drawing board to devise a way for his design to be constructed in phases, with a budget for the first phase not to exceed $40.6 million (not including the parking garage). The museum board is committed to raising $21.5 million to add to cash and pledges already in hand. Board president Nowlin serves, according to the bylaws, on all museum committees as a liaison to the board. On the acquisitions committee, she says she is learning a great deal about contemporary art. But at the same time, she and her husband, Bill, contributed $150,000 to support the Aztlan exhibition. She is equally generous with straightforward comments about AMOA's future. "We need to grow up and learn how to be a museum," she readily admits. "It's going to take us a long time to get where we thought we already were."
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