Museums Can Engage

 

https://observer.com/2025/06/museums-gen-z-donors-shared-infrastructure/

ARTS  •  MUSEUMS  •  EXPERT INSIGHTS

How Museums Can Engage a New Generation of Supporters

With legacy funding faltering, museums face a critical test of relevance and resilience.

By Mazdak Sanii • 06/30/25 5:00pm

 
 
 

Faced with shrinking support and rising costs, museums must court new patrons and rethink outdated operational models. Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images

Cultural institutions are facing some of their greatest challenges in living memory. The systems that have sustained them for decades—major philanthropy, public funding, ticketing and other revenue streams—are creaking under the weight of new realities, and time and resources to respond are limited.

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The pandemic dealt a blow to visitor numbers that has yet to fully rebound. Average museum attendance in the U.K. remains 10 percent below pre-COVID levels; half of U.S. institutions report deficits double that figure. In a sector where the costs of staging and maintaining exhibitions are fixed, even modest reductions in footfall, tickets sold and other associated income streams can cause an institution significant financial strain. 

Across Europe and North America, the traditional donors who have underpinned museum finances are ageing. Successive global crises—from wars and pandemics to climate shocks and the cost-of-living crisis—have diverted philanthropic attention and resources elsewhere. Government support, meanwhile, is in an apparently inexorable retreat. In the U.S., proposed budget cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts signal a trend of diminishing federal support for culture. In Europe, which historically has had a more robust culture of central arts funding, culture is increasingly caught in the crosshairs of populist attacks and budgetary triage. Corporate philanthropy, too, is retrenching as institutions and companies alike are increasingly wary of the public relations quagmire of a declined donation or cancelled partnership in response to public backlash. Each cautious or principled step narrows the path to financial stability for institutions badly in need of major gifts or lucrative long-term sponsorship contracts.

None of this is new, but the cumulative effects have become impossible to ignore. From stagnating audiences to rolling rounds of redundancies and persistent structural deficits, many of the world’s most revered museums are confronting a moment of profound reckoning—not just around how they are funded but also whom they serve and how they sustain relevance. 

Having worked closely with museum leaders through collaborations at Avant Arte, I have seen how acutely these pressures are felt and how complex they are to solve. Fundraising editions have emerged as a way to generate revenue while cultivating new audiences, but there is no silver bullet nor any solutions that can enable our institutional cruise liners to turn on a dime. The broader consensus is clear: the existing institutional model must evolve.

This evolution will require a delicate balancing act: maintaining the lifeblood streams of income critical to sustaining our museums today while building structural resilience and sustainable new models for the future. Crucial to this effort will be rethinking how museums engage the latest generation, build donor pipelines and share limited resources more effectively across the sector. 

A generational shift in engagement and expectations

On a long enough timeline, the importance of the next generation is self-evident. They will shape the future of cultural philanthropy, and the institutions that earn their loyalty now will reap the benefits for decades to come, particularly in the context of the much-discussed 84 trillion dollar Great Wealth Transfer. But theirs is not a value solely decades deferred; they matter to museum income models today, already making up a significant share of museum audiences (35 percent of U.S. visitors last year were under the age of 34), membership and other earned income. Yet many of these younger audiences don’t feel that exhibitions, memberships or donation pathways are designed with them in mind. 

Engaged and passionate, with diverse and sophisticated tastes, this cohort is a far cry from the lazy stereotype they’re often saddled with: a chronically online generation who prefer Patek to Paul Thek and are disconnected from the great institutions that have long been central to discovery, education and scholarship. Data from Avant Arte’s most recent Collector Report, based on a survey of over 3,100 of our young collectors and enthusiasts, offers a revealing snapshot. Eighty-six percent of respondents believe that museums play a critical role in fostering a healthy society, and two-thirds visit a museum or gallery monthly.    

Although 83 percent of the young enthusiasts and collectors surveyed said they had both the means and motivation to support museums more than they currently do, almost half simply didn’t know how and need a clear pathway. While there is a vast opportunity to clearly steward younger audiences from visitor to member to supporter and patron, findings from the report elaborate on even more fundamental gaps. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said that they didn’t consider buying from a museum shop a way of supporting the institution. Once that link was clear, respondents were four times more likely to spend $500 or more. This underscores a fundamental communication gap as well as a missed revenue opportunity. 

Redefining what motivates giving 

Part of the challenge for museums today, amid this generational flux, is that the motivations of younger supporters are changing. Recognition or prestige—names on donor walls or grand capital projects memorialising their generosity—carry less weight than identity, connection and impact. Seventy-nine percent reported that they were more likely to donate funds if they shared values with the institution. Two-thirds said a specific connection between funds raised and the impact of those donations was critical. And 82 percent were more likely to donate when they received an artwork or meaningful gesture of appreciation in return. 

Tailoring offerings to supporters around two distinct generations and their respective motivations is no small feat for development teams already stretched thin. But institutions that can build belonging and shared values to younger supporters, speak to their communities and offer meaningful ways to participate stand to unlock a generational opportunity.

Proven models for engaging new supporters 

The potential for museums to tune their offering to the new generation is far from just theoretical. From LACMA in Los Angeles to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Avant Arte has been able to collaborate with some of the most forward-thinking museums in the sector in recent years to launch fundraising edition programs that generated over $15 million in revenue and attracted thousands of new supporters.

Of those buyers, 40 percent made their first-ever art purchase through these projects. Many are taking their first step on a path that, correctly drawn, can one day lead to patronage. Over 12,000 fundraising editions have been sold through these inclusive, global and digitally-led campaigns, extending institutional reach well beyond local audiences and tapping into a more fluid, international collector base. 

Earlier this year, Avant Arte collaborated with artists George Condo and Lee Ufan to raise funds for Dia Art Foundation. Courtesy Avant Arte

In May, Avant Arte launched the second chapter of a fundraising programme with Dia Art Foundation, a collection of silkscreen prints by Lee Ufan, following a sold-out set of editions by George Condo. Together, the two editions are expected to raise over $5 million for the foundation and introduce a new cohort of supporters spanning San Francisco to Seoul. These are precisely the types of young collectors around the world who have the potential to be turned into a powerful generation of donors and patrons to help institutional income models evolve.

Rethinking institutional cost structures

There is a parallel challenge on the other end of institutional budgets: costs have spiked due to inflation and ongoing supply chain instability, compounded by rising protectionism and an increasingly complex and integrated global economy. Much of a museum’s operational spending goes toward essential, identity-defining activities such as curatorial programs, physical space management, community engagement and other external-facing efforts. But a significant portion is also allocated to “back-end” infrastructure: systems and tools that, while necessary, are rarely differentiated or unique to a single institution.

Most institutions procure independently, even though their needs are remarkably similar—from the software stack that enables invoicing, ticketing and HR to tailored CRM tools, sales and inventory management for museum shops and social media tools designed to navigate algorithmic volatility. Not only does this relinquish the efficiencies of volume discounts from the leverage of collective bargaining, it also siphons critical resources—stretched museum teams who need to assess, select, onboard and manage each from scratch.

The solution is as obvious as it would be challenging to implement: a shared pool of services, tools and expertise that institutions can subscribe to and draw from according to their needs.

A moment of opportunity

In some ways, these two opportunities—attracting a distributed younger generation of supporters and patrons and consolidating overlapping resources to eliminate cost duplication and waste—may appear distinct. However, both are easier to identify than to act upon, and both will require consistent efforts over the long term. They demand a deft balance between addressing the immediate challenges institutions face today and envisioning sustainable models for tomorrow. 

Meeting the many challenges the sector faces requires not only urgency but also openness—to new audiences, new models and new ways of working. The fundamentals are already in place: a generation of young supporters is already enthusiastic, engaged and eager to contribute—if museums give them a clear invitation to become the patrons of tomorrow.

More in Museums

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• These Are the World’s Most Visually Stunning Museums

• Raving in the Museum: Institutions Explore New Ways to Develop Audiences and Raise Funds

• Becoming a Museum Volunteer in 2025: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t

• How West Africa’s Arts Institutions Are Reclaiming an Artistic Legacy

• SEE ALSO: How Google’s A.I. Overviews Are Rewriting the Rules of Digital Commerce

radical slut

 

Argentina by Milei

 

Milei & Bukeke - Argentina & El Salvador

 

What Happens to the Art

 

ARTS  •  MUSEUMS

What Happens to the Art When Museums Close?

Some museum collections are preserved through transfers to other institutions, but when a museum closes with significant debt, artworks can end up on the market.

By Daniel Grant • 01/21/25 8:00am

 
 
 

The entrance to the Rubin Museum of Art at 150 West 17th Street in New York City on October 4, 2024—two days before the museum closed for good. Arno Reyes Baetz for Observer

After a 20-year run, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City closed its doors in 2024. Its building on West 17th Street in Manhattan, which represented a large financial drain on the museum’s overall resources, is in the process of being sold, and a spokeswoman for the museum of Himalayan art framed the shuttering thusly: “We closed the building so that we could reallocate these resources to pursue an ambitious global program to achieve broader impact but also set the museum on a more sustainable path for decades to come.” The objects from the collection will not be sold—and indeed, the Rubin just announced the acquisition of works by ​​Tenzin Gyurmey Dorjee, Shraddha Shrestha and Shushank Shrestha—but if you want to see those works and others, you’ll find them in exhibitions at other institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Loans will likely be the foundation of the institution’s decentralized “museum without walls” model.

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By no means was the Rubin the only art museum closure of 2024. Washington state’s Bellevue Arts Museum—one of the very few art museums to grow out of an art fair—shut its doors in September, citing post-pandemic declines in attendance, fundraising and retail sales. And the University of New Hampshire closed its Museum of Art, the result of cuts mandated by the university’s president James Dean, JR., that resulted in the layoffs of seventy-five of the institution’s 3,700 employees to close a $14 million gap in its budget. “We needed to support our academic programs,” Michele Dillon, dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts, told Observer. “There were very few places to cut, and I just decided that the museum was more expendable.” Nothing from the museum’s 2,500-piece collection has been, or is expected to be, sold, she said, “not that we haven’t been asked. Since word went out that the museum would be closing, I’ve received a lot of queries from people wanting to buy things—collectors, dealers, auction houses, nonprofit organizations.” Instead, objects from the museum’s collection will be displayed in buildings around campus.

Outside of the art sphere, a pair of automotive museums in California closed for good last year—the Automotive Driving Museum in El Segundo and the Murphy Auto Museum in Oxnard—that also could be attributed to strained finances. David Neel, the volunteer executive director of the Murphy Auto Museum and otherwise a lighting store owner, said that insurance premiums had risen 20 percent over the previous few years and the building rental (the museum did not own its 14,000-square-foot building) was “more than a dollar a square foot.” He had donated his time to the museum for eleven years and, for the last three, he “tried to find someone to take over the reins,” but with no success. The museum’s collection of cars amounted to forty vehicles, the majority of which were owned by private individuals who were taking them back. “The museum itself owned five cars,” he said, “and, so far, two of them have been sold. When we sell the others, we’ll be able to pay off our outstanding debts.”

The late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s Living Computers: Museums + Labs in Seattle also closed for good in 2024 after COVID forced what ought to have been a temporary closure, and its collection of vintage machines, documents and other artifacts of the technology race is heading to auction.

How often do museums close?

If you shed tears when a museum closes, expect to do a lot of crying. Museums—a wide category of mostly nonprofit institutions that care for and display a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical or scientific importance and includes historic houses, zoos and aquariums—open and close with more regularity than people realize. Compounding this is an ever-looser definition of ‘museum.’ The Museum of Pinball in Banning, California (which closed in 2021 after eight years) and Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum (which closed in 2016 after three years and never recorded a single break-even month in all that time, according to its founder and creative director Joanna Ebenstein) may just have been novelty ventures. There are also numerous “museums” around the country that are little more than Instagrammable experiences, as with the Museum of Ice Cream.

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Rutland, Vermont, closed in 2021 after fifty years because owner Colleen Schreiber’s age (she’s in her 80s) and health issues (she has diabetes) limited her ability to keep the museum going. Still, she told Observer, a buyer has expressed interest in taking over the museum and hopes to restart it in a new location in the near future. Worth pointing out is that the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts—the only AAM-accredited museum of Rockwell’s work—is alive and flourishing.

It’s worth considering that some museums may have a natural lifecycle. The Powers Museum in Carthage, Missouri, closed in 2021 after thirty-eight years. The museum had what its last board president, Kavan Stull, called “a huge collection” of newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, period clothing and furniture representing the years 1870-1940 in Carthage—most of it amassed by Marian Powers Winchester, who died in 1981 at the age of 75 and whose will set up the museum as a tribute to her parents. Winchester had left money to build a museum and an endowment to run it, but costs kept rising—“it needed a new roof and air-conditioning, it costs money to cut the grass,” Stull said—and the money just started to run out. Donations from the community were small, few and far between, and so it had to close.

Closing a museum can be complicated

There is, of course, a process for closing a museum. The board of directors needs to take a formal vote to dissolve the institution and then devise a plan for transferring assets—the building, furniture and equipment, the collection—to one or more other nonprofit institutions (federal law requires a tax-exempt charitable nonprofit that is dissolving “to distribute its remaining assets only to another tax-exempt organization”) while paying off any remaining debts, perhaps with those very assets. That plan is filed with the office of the attorney general of the particular state; there usually is a division of nonprofit organizations and public charities in that office that looks over the submitted documents to ensure that no breach of fiduciary duties or other instances of fraud were committed by board members. Once approved, the actual dissolution begins.

Articles of clothing in the collection of the Powers Museum were transferred to the Joplin Mining Museum, while furniture went to a nonprofit in Joplin that restores old houses. An entranceway counter was given to the Harry S. Truman Birthplace Historic Site in Lamar, Missouri. The museum’s display cases were donated to Joplin’s Freedom of Flight Museum, while bookshelves went to the Neosho Newton County Library in Missouri, and photographs and newspaper clippings went to the library in Carthage. The museum building itself was donated to the Carthage public schools, which repurposed it as an alternative school for students with learning challenges. A small amount of money remained in the bank, which was turned over to other nonprofits: a Civil War-era house ($15,000) that needed to fix its roof and a community foundation for scholarships ($25,000). “There also was a piano,” Stull said. “I sold it.”

In some cases, an entire collection is transferred to another institution that agrees to display or dispose of these objects in some way. The Philadelphia History Museum turned over its 130,000 artifacts of city history to Drexel University, while the 2,000-piece collection of arms and armor of the Higgins Armory went directly to the nearby Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, which closed in 2014, sent its 19,000-plus artworks to the National Gallery of Art and twenty-one other art institutions in the Washington, D.C. area, and the Newseum sold its building to Johns Hopkins University for $372.5 million while its collection will remain in the hands of the museum’s founder and principal funder, The Freedom Forum, which plans to organize traveling exhibits.

SEE ALSO: When Nations Go to War, Museums Must Spring into Action

As part of any museum closure, the executive director and board members need to establish who owns the objects in a collection. In a for-profit institution, the founder likely is the owner and may do with items as he or she chooses. In a nonprofit museum, it is more likely that objects belong to the institution itself. There can be complications in this, for instance, if a donated object enters a museum collection with restrictions (such as the piece must be permanently displayed or never sold). An object with restrictions is not considered to be completely owned by the museum, and museum officials need to contact the donor if still alive or go to court if the donor is deceased to remove those restrictions before they can proceed with the transfer of the item to another institution.

Susana Smith Bautista, who became director of the Pasadena Art Museum in 2017 and began the process of permanently closing it the following year—her experience led her to write the 2021 book How to Close a Museum: A Practical Guide, published by Rowman & Littlefield—told Observer that she “scrambled to look for paperwork” indicating how and when pieces came into the museum’s collection. “For the artwork where we could either not find any documentation, or the documentation did not require us to return it to the artist/donor, we tried to think of museums that would most benefit from these works, and so we approached them with the offer.”

There may be limited opportunities for private buyers to purchase objects from a closing or closed museum’s collection, particularly if it is an institution that owes money and needs to sell items in order to square its debts. “If the museum owes money and looks to sell some or all of its collection, a buyer could call the executive director to ask about purchasing one or more items,” explained Jason DeJonker, a bankruptcy attorney at the law firm Bryan Cave’s Chicago office. However, the museum director would more likely hire an outside broker, such as a dealer or auction house, to sell objects than make one-off sales to private individuals, he added. The individuals may still be able to acquire sought-after pieces but in the competitive arena of an auction.

Finding a new home for everything in a collection following a museum closure is not always easy. The Peoria Historical Society in Arizona, for instance, dissolved in 2019 following years of internal disputes about how to govern the organization. The board of directors split and the two entities each sued the other for “ownership.” After several years in mediation and court appearances, the Maricopa County Superior Court ordered the dissolution of the organization, placing the collection with the City of Peoria. The city placed the historical society’s collection at the Arizona Science Center, largely because that was local and had storage space to house the numerous items. “We’re all hoping that the Science Center transfers the collection to other museums,” Janice Klein, executive director of the Museum Association of Arizona, told Observer.

But not every museum that closes ceases operations for good. The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, which took out loans to construct a new building in 2008 just as the Great Recession hit and found itself with $30 million in unrepayable debts, declared bankruptcy in 2020. Dr. Misha Galperin, president of Zandafi Philanthropic Advisors, which works with Jewish nonprofits and was brought in as a consultant in 2019, floated the idea of making the museum a part of the Smithsonian Institution. “They have museums of African-Americans, of Native Americans, of Latinos. I think we belong in that category,” he told Observer. However, a number of current and former museum trustees ponied up to pay off the debt, and luxury shoe designer Stuart Weitzman made a gift last December of $30 million that will establish an endowment in his name for what is now the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History.

More in Museums

• Mapping Asia Society Texas’ Place in Houston’s Global Art Identity

• How Museums Are Opening Their Doors to Visitors With Vision Impairment

• Cultural Reckonings: Architect Kulapat Yantrasast and the New Language of Museums

• These Are the World’s Most Visually Stunning Museums

• Raving in the Museum: Institutions Explore New Ways to Develop Audiences and Raise Funds

• Becoming a Museum Volunteer in 2025: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t

• How West Africa’s Arts Institutions Are Reclaiming an Artistic Legacy

• SEE ALSO: Young Fair Art Antwerp Leans Into the City’s Centuries-Old Collecting Culture