Champions of Innovation
In December 2023 Remuseum gathered leaders and organizations exploring new business models and opportunities with the capacity to generate greater revenue and greater relevance for their work. Examples include:
Andy Warhol Museum’s Pop District, where one of its programs employs hundreds of young digital creatives to generate content for the museum while also earning money from outside contract and generating both revenue, degrees, and sustainable careers for these young residents of Pittsburgh (a majority of whom are BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+). This is an example of a museum making its own work more relevant to its community while also using art and creativity to build a better community for all. Andy Warhol would have loved this.
The Andy Warhol Museum’s Pop District. Photo by Elisa Cevallo. Courtesy of The Andy Warhol Museum.
Perez Art Museum Miami’s partnership with Orange Barrel Media as a pilot to develop an architect-design billboard that promotes the museum and its work, features art, and generates meaningful revenue from advertising. This solution makes the work of the Perez more relevant to all the people in Miami while also helping pay for it.
Photo courtesy of Orange Barrel Media.
Art crating is currently both expensive and wasteful, and it doesn’t always protect art as well as possible. If museums are going to share more art outside their walls, they will need solutions that makes art shipping more sustainable and more protective. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has found such a solution, applying its expertise in art protection and crating to develop a patented technology for art crates that are both re-usable AND more protective of paintings. The museum has now created a for-profit spinoff to develop this opportunity as a benefit to the field and a revenue-generator for its mission and operations.
The vibration reducing Alpha case, created by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and other partners, at the Polytec Inc., testing facility in Dexter, Michigan. Image: Courtesy of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
The Toledo Museum of Art, whose innovative Director & CEO is Adam Levine, has plenty of endowed funds for buying art but, like every other museum, never as much operating revenue as it would like. Fulfilling a project he started researching a decade ago, Levine placed guarantees on two works at auction that the museum wanted to acquire, at prices they were prepared to pay. In both cases, bidding went high and the museum did not acquire the work, but it did earn guarantee fees totaling $500,000 – dollars that can support its operating budget.
Artnet News reporter Katya Kazakina tells the story fully in this article, quoting Museum of Modern Art Director Glenn Lowry on this innovation: “That’s creative thinking. And we just need more and more of that.” Lowry first heard about this work at a Remuseum convening, and Remuseum hopes to celebrate more museums like Toledo finding new ways to serve their missions AND their bottom lines.
Adam Levine in his office. Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art
Remuseum supports a group of museums that are exploring the changing boundaries between the museum and the marketplace. This “Art & Commerce” working group includes the Museum of Modern Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and CAM Houston, and allows members to compare notes and support an informed exploration of this work.