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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > June > 04
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Austin Museum of Art makes cuts to budget, staff
Responding to an across-the-board dip in private and corporate donations, the Austin Museum of Art has made another round of cuts to its operating budget and staff.
Dana Friis-Hansen, the museum’s executive director, said the institution’s budget has been reduced from $3.6 million to $3.45 million, and five full-time positions have been eliminated, leaving 25 employees. Senior staff have also taken a 10 percent salary cut, and all staff will take one-week furloughs.
In January, the museum made a 10 percent cut to budget and staff. “As an organization, we just have to respond to current economic circumstances,” Friis-Hansen said. However he added that there were to be no dramatic restrictions to the museum’s programming.
Museum hours will remain the same but instead of hosting two simultaneous traveling exhibits at its downtown Congress Avenue location, Friis-Hansen said the museum will bring in one traveling exhibit at a time, initiate a new exhibit series that will feature Austin artists and add another series of exhibits that will draw from the museum’s permanent collection and private Austin collections. Friis-Hansen said the museum is also looking to broaden its programming at its historic Laguna Gloria site in West Austin, where exhibits are staged in the 1916 Driscoll Villa and sculpture fills 12-acres of grounds on the shores of Lake Austin.
“We’re trying to do more with less,” Friis-Hansen. “Our donors are giving; it’s just that many of them are only able to give less than they have in previous years.”
People may have cut back on their charitable donations, but they haven’t stopped visiting the museum. Friis-Hansen said that attendance has stayed steady with an annual average of about 75,000 visitors to the museum.
Other arts groups have experienced some cutbacks in recent months, though not as drastic as the museum’s. In February, Grammy-nominated choir Conspirare laid off one senior staff person. At Austin Lyric Opera, senior staff salaries were cut by five percent. “It’s the smaller donations that have been much more sensitive to this economy,” said Kevin Patterson, general director of Austin Lyric Opera. Patterson said his organization was on target to meet its annual budget of $5 million.
Overall, Austin’s arts groups are faring better than many around the country. In March, the the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles — long-recognized as the world’s richest museum — announced that it was cutting its operating budget by 25 percent and slashed its staff by almost 14 percent after its endowment fell to $4.5 billion, down from $6 billion. In Florida, the 51-year-old Orlando Opera ceased operations in April, the sixth professional company in the country to go under or declare bankruptcy in recent months.
Closer to home, at the Dallas Museum of Art, attendance at the blockbuster traveling exhibit “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs.” which ran from November to May, drew 600,000 visitors, far less than the 1 million the museum had initially projected.
