ARTS

Mexic-Arte wants to stay put, remodel

Museum officials will ask city if they can change how $5 million in bond money will be spent.

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
AMERICAN-STATESMAN ARTS WRITER
Thursday, April 30, 2009

After asking Austin voters for $5 million in bond money for a new facility at a new location, Mexic-Arte Museum leaders now say they want to remain at their Congress Avenue site and improve the building they had decided to demolish.

In 2006, Mexic-Arte received $5 million as part of a voter-approved $567.4 million bond package. The money was earmarked to help build a $25 million museum on the city-owned Mexican American Cultural Center campus.

But now, museum leaders say a combination of the economic downturn plus a desire to stay at its highly visible downtown location at Fifth Street and Congress Avenue has led them to decide to stay put and consider a more modest plan to remodel their three-story building.

The museum seeks an agreement that would have the city lease the museum long-term and then re-lease it back to the museum. The city struck a similar agreement with the State Theatre, now managed by the Austin Theatre Alliance, which received $1.9 million in city bond money to help remodel the venue at 719 Congress Ave. (The State ceased operations in 2006 after a water main break flooded the stage and basement.)

Although the terms of the bond do not limit Mexic-Arte to building only at the cultural center site, any agreement to proceed with a bond-funded project would need the approval of the City Council.

"As the economy has shifted and there's new challenges to raising money for a big project, we started to think of staying" said Lulu Flores, president of the museum's board of trustees. "We thought that perhaps we could give better services to the community and be more efficient if we remain where we are."

Flores said that no timeline or budget has been set for any building project. "Right now, we're trying to see what is possible at this site and how far (the $5 million) would take us and how much more we might need," she said.

If the council approves Mexic-Arte's plan to stay put, the museum would be the second major arts venue to refurbish its Congress Avenue home. The contemporary arts organization Arthouse is about to begin work on a $6.6 million major renovation of its building at 700 Congress Avenue. The Arthouse project is being paid for entirely with private money. Arthouse bought its building, once a theater and then later a department store, with donations in 1997.

This isn't the first time Mexic-Arte has sought to upgrade the three-story, 22,000-square-foot building it has called home since 1988.

The museum, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this weekend, first leased the building, parts of which are thought to date to the 1860s.

In 1999, Mexic-Arte supporters asked the city to buy the building for them when Block 42 Congress Partners Ltd., owners of the 400 block of Congress Avenue, planned to develop the entire block and demolish the Mexic-Arte building.

In 2000, the city gave $740,000 to Mexic-Arte to purchase the building in exchange for the museum's promise to rehabilitate it and maintain it for 50 years. The city also provided $1.1 million in fee waivers to Block 42 Congress Partners, which passed those waivers on to Cousin Properties when the Atlanta-based development company purchased the property to build Frost Bank Tower.

But Mexic-Arte leaders soon set their sights higher than just remodeling the space. The museum received a $100,000 grant from the Houston Endowment for a study that recommended demolishing the building and replacing it with a seven-story facility.

In 2001, when Cousins Properties was building the Frost Bank Tower, the company promised Mexic-Arte $1 million in in-kind construction services if the museum fast-tracked its plans.

A public capital campaign fund was never launched, though the museum received $100,000 from Austin philanthropists Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long and $100,000 from the Mitte Foundation of Brownsville for a new building.

The plan for a new seven-story building was never realized because the post-Sept. 11 economic downturn hampered fundraising, Flores said.

Museum director Sylvia Orozco, declining to specify an exact amount, said that the majority of the $200,000 raised from the Longs and the Mitte Foundation is still in museum accounts earmarked for expansion.

After plans for the seven-story museum were set aside, Mexic-Arte leaders next envisioned moving to the campus of the Mexican American Cultural Center on the eastern edge of downtown on the north shore of Lady Bird Lake; the campus opened in 2007.

In 2006, Mexic-Arte proposed a 50,000-square-foot. $25 million building at the cultural center site, one of three planned phases of the campus. Mexic-Arte's project was added to the 2006 bond package as part of Proposition 4, which sought $31.5 million for cultural projects.

Mexic-Arte has an annual budget of $600,000. Last year, the museum received $120,800 from the city in cultural arts contract money.

jvanryzin@statesman.com; 445-3699