Mark Sink Photography

This annual award honors Denis Roussel's memory and legacy. His inspiration led many to take risks in their work, step beyond traditional images, and discover the magic of photography. The fellowship aims to nurture artists on their artistic journey and is entirely funded by Denis's family, friends, and other donors. The fellowship is open to all photo-based artists in the USA who are at least 18 years old. We encourage artists from historically marginalized groups to submit.

There is no submission fee.

Current fellow: Sidian Liu
Previous fellows: Beth Johnston
Kei Ito
André Duane Ramos-Woodard
Mariana Vieira

More information: https://c4fap.org/denis-roussel

Best of the best for the best !

If you ran out of time to enter Critical Mass, we've extended the entry deadline just for you! We know it's been a busy summer and you may have been traveling or enjoying some time off. Get those portfolios together and entries in by the new date. You really don't want to miss this opportunity!​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​New entry deadline - Monday, July 8th, Noon Easter Time!

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Have some work you want the world to see ? This is by far one of the best opportunities for a fine art photographer.

We're Back! Registration for Critical Mass begins tomorrow May 31st. Sign up before the Early Bird discount ends on June 10th and save $10 on your registration. Once you've registered, you can submit your images any time before the entry deadline on July 1st. LINK IN BIO​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​We have a great list of jurors shaping up including some new faces. You can view the most current juror roster on our website. LINK IN BIO

Please be sure to read the entry details before you begin - there are some new details this year! LINK IN BIO

We can't wait to see your entries!

Thank you for lending us your CM Top 50 images!

This is another GREAT great great great opportunity... great reason to visit the Northwest.

26th Annual Juried Exhibition: Being Present - Photographic Center Northwest Professional, mid-career, and emerging lens-based artists from all communities are encouraged to submit work on any theme. Those that are selected...

Colorado Photographic Arts Center presenting 2024 “Hal Gould Vision in Photography Award” to Denver arts luminary Carol Keller
April 10, 2024 Denver
This spring, former gallery director and curator Carol Keller will be formally recognized for her more than 40 years of elevating outstanding photography and photographic artists in Colorado and the Mountain West region. Keller will receive the 2024 “Hal Gould Vision in Photography Award” at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center’s Print Auction & Hal Gould Award Celebration at 6:30 p.m. May 2.

The event and auction are open to the public and will take place at CPAC’s beautiful new headquarters at 1200 Lincoln St. in downtown Denver. The auction will include more than 30 works by established local and national photographic artists. Guests can enjoy catered hors d’oeuvres, cocktails, wine, beer.

Tickets are $150 and can be purchased at cpacphoto.org/2024-print-auction.

All proceeds will benefit the center’s nonprofit mission to elevate the photographic arts and support artists through exhibitions, education, and community programs. Auction items will be exhibited at CPAC from April 18 to May 2.

About the Award

Colorado’s photography community is thriving today thanks to support from local museums, galleries, universities, and the region’s largest nonprofit photography center (CPAC). But it wasn’t always like this. In the early 1960s most formal art spaces in Colorado didn’t consider photography a “fine art” and refused to exhibit it. The Hal Gould Vision in Photography Award is a reminder of that history — and recognizes individuals and institutions that made significant contributions to raising awareness, value, and appreciation of the photographic arts in Colorado and the Western Region. CPAC established the award in 2013 in honor of Hal Gould, a well-known champion of photography who inspired countless artists and visitors through his legendary Camera Obscura Gallery in Denver. He was also a gifted artist, a commercial photographer, and a co-founder of CPAC.

About Carol Keller

Now retired, Keller is the former director of Emmanuel Gallery at Auraria Higher Education Center, former owner of multiple galleries in Denver including Carol Keller Art, River Gallery, and River Artworks, and a former CPAC Board member.

Keller began her career as an artist with a focus on ceramics and painting. She and her family moved to Denver from San Francisco in 1972 where she continued her education, receiving her BFA from the University of Colorado at Denver and a Master of Humanities in Fine Arts and Communication from the University of Colorado.

As gallery director at Emmanuel from 1981 to 1998, she curated and coordinated exhibitions for the University of Colorado, Metropolitan State College at Denver, and Community College of Denver. She was responsible for procuring works for Auraria’s permanent collection and insisted on purchasing photography. She acquired works by 16 American photographers including Bernice Abbott, Sandy Skoglund, Imogen Cunningham, and Robert Adams.

While at Emmanuel, Carol met Lisbeth Neergard Kohloff, an educator and historian teaching at the University. Lis and her husband Skip were leaders in Colorado’s photography community and served on CPAC’s Board of Directors for over two decades. The Kohloffs assembled numerous influential exhibitions, including solo shows by internationally known photographers Jerry Uelsmann, Patrick Nagatani, and Betty Hahn.

In 1996, Carol juried CPAC’s Annual Membership Show, and in 1997, she partnered with the Kohloffs to present “Visions: Contemporary Colorado Photography,” juried by Patrick Nagatani. This important exhibition featured 52 photographs by 40 Colorado photographers including Kevin O’Connell, Mark Sink, Sarah Marquis Timberlake, Bob Coller, and John Bonath.

In the late 1990s, CPAC was struggling financially and did not have a physical space. The organization was at risk of folding when Carol stepped in. In 1998, she purchased a building on 1513 Boulder St. that became CPAC’s new home — and consequently saved the organization.

CPAC shared its Boulder Street space with Carol Keller Art, Keller’s own gallery specializing in photo-based and 3D works. In September 1998, they teamed up to present their inaugural exhibition, “Multiple Layers: Covered & Uncovered – Photographic Fabrications” with Patrick Nagatani in attendance. Over the next seven years, Boulder Street was a key exhibition space for local, national, and international photographic artists.

By 2005, the Boulder Street building was in desperate need of renovations, and CPAC entered another phase of transition. In 2006, Skip retired after 19 years leading CPAC, and he and Lis left the Board having served 27 and 24 years, respectively. CPAC became a center-without-walls for six years. In 2011, CPAC merged with another Denver organization, Working with Artists, and moved to Lakewood for two years. In 2013, Carol once again welcomed CPAC back to their former location on Boulder Street. She served on CPAC’s Board from 2011 – 2014 and again from 2016 – 2019.

Fast-forward to today, and CPAC is now the largest photo center in the region, designed specifically to meet the needs of its 600+ members, students, and more than 5,000 visitors each year. Most importantly, CPAC’s new space on Lincoln Street comes with 20 years of stability.

“Had it not been for Carol’s generosity and vision, CPAC might not exist today,” said Samantha Johnston, CPAC’s Executive Director & Curator. “We are honored to present her with CPAC’s 9th Hal Gould Vision in Photography Award for her faith in CPAC’s mission and her commitment to elevating photographic art in Denver and beyond.”

Previous Winners of the Hal Gould Vision in Photography Award

Bob & Betty Reed (2021), Owners of Reed Art & Imaging
Randy Brown, (2019) Professor of Photography at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design
Hamidah Glasgow (2018), Executive Director & Curator, Center for Fine Art Photography
James Milmoe (2017), Photographer and Founding Member of CPAC
Eric Paddock, (2016), Curator of Photography, Denver Art Museum
Paul Harbaugh & Kevin Gramer (2015), Byers-Evans House Gallery
R. Skip Kohloff & Lisbeth Neergaard Kohloff (2014), Former CPAC Directors
Mark Sink (2013), Artist, Founder/Curator of Month of Photography Denver
Hal Gould (2013-Honorary Award), CPAC Founder and Owner of Camera Obscura Gallery
*CPAC did not present an award in 2020 due to the pandemic and in 2022 due to its relocation to Lincoln Street.
About the Colorado Photographic Arts Center

Founded in 1963, the Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC) is the only nonprofit organization in Denver dedicated exclusively to the art of photography. In 2023, CPAC moved to 1200 Lincoln St. in Denver’s Golden Triangle Creative District, a space CPAC custom-built to meet the needs of photographers, its 600 members, over 300 students, and 5,000 visitors it serves annually. Each year, CPAC presents up to 10 photography exhibitions, offers classes and workshops, and hosts dozens of events to raise awareness of excellent photography and the artists who create it. Additionally, CPAC hosts the biennial Month of Photography Denver Festival (denvermop.org), a celebration of photographic art with more than 100 exhibitions and events. CPAC’s exhibitions and many events are free to the public and located at 1200 Lincoln St., Ste. 111, near the Denver Art Museum, restaurants, and shops. CPAC’s onsite darkroom and digital lab are available for rent at affordable rates. Gallery hours: Tues. – Fri. 11-5; Sat. noon-4. Learn more at www.cpacphoto.org. FB: Colorado Photographic Arts Center; IG: ...https://yourhub.denverpost.com/blog/2024/04/colorado-photographic-arts-center-presenting-2024-hal-gould-vision-in-photography-award-to-denver-arts-luminary-carol-keller/316103/

LOVE Norma ! .. such a honor to share pages with this inspirational talent.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN’S POSTHUMOUS PATH TO A-LISTER

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/03/13/francesca-woodmans-posthumous-path-to-a-lister

FRANCESCA WOODMAN’S POSTHUMOUS PATH TO A-LISTER

This story begins where most end: the artist dies. On 19 January 1981, Francesca Woodman, a 22-year-old photographer distraught over personal and career issues, jumped to her death from the window of a Manhattan loft. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978, she had shown in a handful of small commercial galleries and alternative spaces, sold a few prints for modest sums and received brief write-ups from a couple of Italian publications but otherwise was largely unknown outside her circle of friends and family.
Improbably, 43 years after her su***de, Woodman’s photography—much of which was made while she was still an art student—has reached the uppermost echelons of the art world. This month, a 60-work solo show opens at the Gagosian gallery in Manhattan (13 March-27 April), as does Portraits to Dream In, an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery that will display 160 photographic prints pairing Woodman with Julia Margaret Cameron, the pioneering 19th-century British photographer.
Woodman’s staged images often focus on the human figure, frequently her own, frequently n**e, with a “sense of moving in space or even disappearing into architecture”, says Lissa McClure, the director of the Woodman Family Foundation. Woodman sometimes achieved this goal by means of image blurs and, like Cameron, other “photographic techniques to create dream spaces where others might expect reality”, says Magdalena Keaney, who organised the Portraits to Dream In exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery during her time as the institution’s curator of photography.

The Gagosian show will be Woodman’s first there since the gallery announced in June 2023 it would be representing her work. Mark Francis, a director at Gagosian, calls her “part of an extremely interesting generation of artists which includes Cindy Sherman and Sally Mann”; Mann is also represented by the gallery. The works on view will range from roughly Polaroid-sized gelatin silver prints to a monumental diazotype collage. Prices, which start at $80,000, “are based on rarity and scale”, Francis says.
Parental promotion
Pivotal to Woodman’s rise to prominence were the efforts and art world connections of her parents, the sculptor Betty Woodman (1930-2018) and the painter and photographer George Woodman (1932-2017), who tirelessly cared for and championed her work after her death. The elder Woodmans meticulously archived their late daughter’s prints—including selecting about 250 to be printed as posthumous editions—and eventually hired a part-time curator to manage the archive. They also set up the Woodman Family Foundation, a New York-based non-profit organisation, to preserve and promote their three artistic practices in tandem.
Betty and George’s accomplished, socially connected lives in the art world provided a head start. Beyond knowing how to position Francesca’s work and whom to show it to, their stature often inclined the right people to listen. But the process was still slow and painstaking.
Francesca’s first significant exhibition opened in 1986 at the Wellesley College museum (now the Davis Museum) in Massachusetts. McClure says that, around 1984, Ann Gabhart, the museum’s director at the time and a friend of Betty’s, visited the Woodman home and was “completely blown away by” the photos of Francesca’s on view there. Gabhart quickly decided to do a show and later asked the revered critic Rosalind Krauss, her friend and former Wellesley classmate, to help “organise it and give it a critical take”.
The exhibition toured to multiple university galleries and larger public institutions in the US from 1986 to 1988. It also inspired curators at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, Mexico City’s Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo and other institutions to include Francesca’s work in group shows, broadening her exposure.
Building market momentum
By the 1990s, the market for Francesca’s work was quiet, “but the photography world was well aware of her”, according to Peter MacGill, the former president of the photography-focused Pace/MacGill Gallery (which became part of Pace Gallery in 2019). “A friend of mine who also is a collector asked me to help get her work, and that’s when I met Betty and George,” he says, adding that the two “knew just what they wanted”.
Pace/MacGill began representing Francesca’s work in the early 90s and staged a one-person show in 1994; at that time her prints were selling for $4,000 to $10,000, “which was a lot of money back then”, says MacGill.
By the end of the decade, however, the Woodmans’ ambitions for their daughter’s legacy had grown. McClure says: “They had decided that Francesca didn’t need to be pigeonholed with the photography gallery, as she actually was more of a contemporary artist. And Marian Goodman Gallery came into focus.”
Goodman, who knew the Woodmans socially, took over representation of Francesca’s work in 2004. Prices had risen to between $20,000 and $36,000 at the gallery’s first exhibition of her prints that year. McClure says the partnership initiated “an important shift in the perception of Francesca’s work”, and she credits Goodman with “brokering” a retrospective on the artist that travelled from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2011 to the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2012.
After Betty’s death in 2018, her estate was revealed to include more previously unshown and unavailable prints of Francesca’s work, bringing the total to around 800 images, along with some negatives. Although the Woodman Family Foundation’s board of directors chose to print no more posthumous editions, it also judged “that a new gallery partnership—a different approach and global reach—was needed to carry out our goals, for which Gagosian is uniquely suited”, says McClure.
Francis, the Gagosian director, says he was told by “a long-standing friend and colleague” at the Woodman Family Foundation that the board was “thinking of making a change, and would the gallery be interested”. He added: “I brought the matter up with Larry [Gagosian], who said that he had always loved her [Francesca’s] work.”
By the time the foundation uncoupled from Goodman in early 2023, the starting price for Francesca’s prints had risen to $80,000, a twentyfold increase over roughly 30 years. Her work first crossed the auction block in 2001 and has since gone under the hammer in cities from New York and London to Paris and Vienna. Her record stands at $200,000 (with fees) for Polka Dots (1976), sold at Sotheby’s in New York in October 2019.
Francis says Woodman’s “innovative approach to the body in photography and performance has deep and haunting relations to the history of culture and the work of her contemporaries”. Her international profile and the corresponding demand for her work now reflect as much, with room left to grow. _Daniel Grant_ArtNewspaper

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PIGCASSO, SAID TO BE THE “FAMOUS PAINTING PIG,” HAS DIED.
Soon to become the new Francis Bacon.
_ChristopherKnight

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THOMAS HEATHERWICK: THE ARCHITECT OF OUR NEOLIBERAL HELL by Andrew Russeth

Years later, it still seems unbelievable. A designer is tapped to build a grand public structure, with a budget of $75 million, as the centerpiece of a Manhattan real estate project. As he works, the cost rises above $150 million—more than the annual expenses of the Whitney Museum, more than the price of an F-35 fighter jet, more than any artist before could ever possibly hope to have at their command. Eventually, it is said to climb further, to $200 million, with some landscaping added.
The design is closely guarded until 2016. Then, renderings are released. The grand reveal: this designer is planning to make … a tower of stairs—154 flights, to be exact, all arrayed in a kind of upside-down cone, like shawarma on a spit, stretching 16 stories (some 150 feet) into the sky. In 2018 the designer offers a wan explanation: “What I like about stairs—as soon as you start using your body, it breaks down potential artistic bu****it, because there’s just an immediacy to straining your leg,” he tells the New Yorker’s Ian Parker.
Then, early 2019, Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel opens to the public in Hudson Yards, the crowning jewel of a complex of towering corporate offices, luxury apartments, luxury stores, and a luxury hotel developed by a luxury gym chain. Its pristine copper-colored cladding gleams in the sun. It looks alien and a little menacing, like a digital creation clicked and dragged from a computer screen into real life. It is vacuous in its celebration of vertigo-inducing capital and private ambition, and even though it closes to visitors not long thereafter, in May 2021, it has to rank as one of the defining architectural projects—one of the defining artworks—of the era.
Miraculously, this managed not to derail the 53-year-old Englishman’s career. Gargantuan, eye-catching Heatherwick schemes continue to crop up around the world. Boris Johnson has compared him to Michelangelo. Diane von Furstenberg has termed him a “genius.” For engineer Tony Fadell, the “father of the iPod,” he is “a creative genius.” Billionaire Stephen Ross, the man behind Hudson Yards, is said to view him as “the ultimate genius.”
It is no crime for artists and designers to be adored by the wealthy and powerful, of course. It’s essential. (Michelangelo certainly knew this.) But Heatherwick has become the go-to artist of the ultra-rich. Why?

One answer is that Heatherwick really can make punchy spectacles—edifices that become landmarks that patrons tout with easy pride. An early success was the Rolling Bridge, conceived for a London office and retail development where it was installed in 2004. More a kinetic sculpture than a bridge, it unfolds grandly from an octagon into a now-nonfunctional 36-foot-long footbridge over a canal in Paddington Basin. (Comprising thousands of complex moving parts that stopped working in 2021, it may never be repaired.) A few years later, his UK Pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, covered with 60,000 thin acrylic rods, was a shimmering Op art tour de force. And his similar starburst of a sculpture for Manchester, England, the nearly 200-foot-tall B of the Bang (2005), emanated the thrill of a vision brought improbably to life. Sadly, it was removed because parts of its 180 spikes kept falling off. Even the lobbying of Antony Gormley, another lover of bombast, could not save it.
But these are essentially razzle-dazzle, one-note pleasures, perfect examples of Ed Ruscha’s old line about the reaction that bad art elicits: “Wow! Huh?” Whereas good art draws those same words in reverse. Heatherwick’s 2007 Spun Chair, rendered in polished copper and stainless steel, could be a mascot for his methods: a sleek chair (picture a thread spool pinched at the center) that sitters can tilt at an angle and spin in a complete circle. It’s fun for a few spins.
Heatherwick’s competitor (and collaborator on a 2022 Google building in California), Bjarke Ingels, nailed it when he told the New Yorker: “There’s a Harry Potter-esque, Victorian quirkiness in the work. An element of steampunk, almost.” He comes bearing showy designs that aim to be icons for a development, a neighborhood, a city. A prime example is his 2017 plot with Mayor Johnson to build a $260 million Garden Bridge—a tree-filled pedestrian walkway—across the River Thames in London, scrapped after having sucked up $48 million in public funds.

The Heatherwick phenomenon is not a tale of gentrification. That work has usually been done by the time he gets the call. Long ago, white-cube galleries in West Chelsea and the rent-spiking High Line paved the way for Hudson Yards, which was helped along by almost $6 billion in tax breaks enacted by dubious rezoning that made Harlem, Central Park, and Hudson Yards all one low-employment district (never mind that only one of these had people living in it: the latter is a former train yard). He is, instead, an exemplary architect for a time when cities have become unbearably expensive and the wealthiest do not believe they should have to pay taxes.
Heatherwick, however, positions himself as a man of the people. In his new manifesto of a book, running nearly 500 pages, he goes on the attack against the past century of design. “Some architects see themselves as artists,” he writes in Humanize: A Maker’s Guide to Designing Our Cities. “The problem is, the rest of us are forced to live with this ‘art.’” He inveighs against buildings that are “boring”—too flat, plain, straight, shiny, monotonous, anonymous, serious. Some 50 pages are devoted to a diatribe against Le Corbusier, “the god of boring,” whose theories “gave permission for repetitive order to utterly overpower complexity,” which Heatherwick prizes.
“Modernist architects think boring buildings are beautiful,” Heatherwick grouses. Their minimal, theoretically loaded work has lent cover for the cheap, knockoff stuff that sits alongside it. Against these elites and their “emotional austerity,” their buildings that “make us stressed, sick, lonely, and scared,” he adopts the language of the populist politician. “I am going to make a promise to you,” he writes in a lightly condescending letter to the “passerby” that closes Humanize. “I will dedicate the rest of my life to this war. But I need you … to join us. Our aim is modest: we just want buildings that are not boring!” And if boringness sounds difficult to measure, do not worry: Heatherwick Studio has made a “Boringometer” to determine how interesting a structure’s shapes and textures are, on a scale of 1 to 10.
The obvious irony is that many Heatherwick structures read like desperate, failing attempts not to be boring, via some whiz-bang trick. They illustrate Sianne Ngai’s theory of the gimmick—a device induced by late capitalism that falls flat for appearing to work both too little and too hard. Bulbous, grenade-shaped windows monotonously line his 2021 Lantern House apartment building in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, while his newly opened 1,000 Trees mall in Shanghai features, yes, 1,000 trees, each sitting on its own mushroomlike column high in the air around the stepped building. It suggests a videogame environment, as do renderings for his overwrought multifarious proposal for an island in Seoul’s Han River.

While purporting to speak on behalf of everyday people, Heatherwick is careful to do nothing that could actually offend the ultra-rich. In a revealing passage in Humanize, he praises Antoni Gaudí’s curvaceous Casa Milà in Barcelona for “wanting to fill us up with awe and break us out in smiles.” Says Heatherwick: “Even though this building was made to provide high-end apartments for wealthy people, I believe it is a gift.” We should be grateful.
Heatherwick’s pitch sounds precisely attuned to the ears of politicians who are disinclined to pursue projects that might actually benefit the public at a time of government austerity (forget about the emotional strain). Self-styled technocrat Michael Bloomberg blurbed Humanize, praising it as “a powerful prescription for buildings that put the public first.”
“Our most vulnerable people live in the most boring buildings,” Heatherwick writes on a page that is illustrated, bizarrely, by the burned-out Grenfell Tower, where 74 people died in 2017. “Why should absence of boredom be a luxury good?” Heatherwick, it should be noted, has not pursued any large-scale, or affordable, housing projects that I am aware of.
Making buildings and cities that are more hospitable, livable, and generous is a noble pursuit, but the designer of a cold and imposing nine-figure stairway to nowhere does not feel like the right man for the job—not least because he and his developer-patron declined to install safety features after a series of su***des there. (Following the fourth, they finally closed it; nets are reportedly being tested.) Standing below it, I do not feel that I am receiving a gift.

Still, it is easy to share a common enemy with Heatherwick: boring buildings that exhibit little regard for those who use them. We all spend time in places made with little imagination and even less care. We deserve more. As he writes, “we’re richer than we’ve ever been at any point in history.” Heatherwick, making that pitch to deep-pocketed developers, has not often been able to deliver satisfying structures, but his brio should inspire everyone, whether commissioned architects or apartment renters or voters, to ask for more.
In any case, some ideas that Heatherwick floats in his tome for creating better buildings are sensible mainstream ones that practitioners and activists do advocate, like reducing regulations and simplifying planning processes. (Such moves could also assist wealthy developers, to be sure.) But my favorite Heatherwick prescription is an eccentric one, and absolutely peak Heatherwick: “Sign buildings.” Instead of “staying in the shadows,” he says, a building’s creators should “be proudly named at eye level on the outsides of their projects.”
“Why would anyone involved in the process of building buildings be against this?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t you be proud? Why wouldn’t you want to sign your canvas?” _ArtInAmerica

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MEXICAN ARTIST CRUSHES TESLA UNDER GIANT STONE HEAD
This Tesla 3 car crushed by a nine-ton Olmec-inspired head is the doing of Mexican artist Chavis Marmol _AFP

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THE DAWN OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL MUSEUM

Picture this. You are walking around a water-recycling facility in Ventura, California, admiring its surprisingly forward-thinking public art. On the drive home, you spot an ad for the local symphony on a passing billboard. You walk through your front door, sit down on an $18,000 sofa by the Detroit-based designer Evan Fay and start scrolling Instagram, where you watch a dynamic video about MSC Cruises. What if I told you that these wide-ranging experiences had one thing in common? They were all brought to you by art museums.
This is not a prediction of a faraway future. It is happening right now. The activities above come courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, respectively. In an effort to shore up their finances, museums across the US are engaging in unconventional partnerships and launching spin-off businesses that extend far beyond their walls, even across the country.
For decades, art institutions of all stripes have relied on the same traditional tactics to raise money: dazzle donors, sell tickets, rent out facilities, operate a restaurant and gift shop. But at a time when costs are up, philanthropy is waning and government funding and museum attendance are down, many are realising they need outside-the-box solutions to secure their financial futures. Welcome to the age of the entrepreneurial museum.
This year, PAMM will erect a digital billboard facing a highly trafficked highway on its campus. The screen will be used to promote the museum’s activities, showcase artist commissions and host advertising. The company facilitating the project, Orange Barrel Media, estimates that the latter will generate as much as $2m a year for PAMM—the equivalent of adding $45m to its endowment.
The dawn of the entrepreneurial museum brings two new challenges. First, non-profits must prove that their money-making activities are substantially related to their charitable missions in order to avoid paying additional taxes. (That is why you do not see museums spinning off, say, an investment firm or a tech start-up.) Secondly, museums need to get these ventures off the ground without siphoning resources, staff and energy away from the business of actually, you know, running a museum.
Curating beyond exhibitions
CAMH began offering what it calls “curatorial services” to clients ranging from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to California’s VenturaWaterPure recycling facility in 2020. The museum’s director, Hesse McGraw, credits the initiative with increasing CAMH’s earned income from near zero prior to the pandemic to just over 10% of its annual budget in 2023. How does public-art consultancy align with CAMH’s mission to “present extraordinary, thought-provoking arts programming and exhibitions to educate and inspire audiences nationally and internationally”? McGraw says: “It’s an opportunity to create a larger platform for artists who want to work outside the frame of exhibitions, and it allows the museum to take up larger civic challenges.”
Perhaps the most ambitious—and controversial—entrepreneurial initiative is taking shape in Pittsburgh, where the Andy Warhol Museum is developing the so-called Pop District. The $80m, ten-year plan involves redeveloping a four-block area with public art, an event venue and the Warhol Academy, billed as a creative-economy “workforce programme”. “This is based on Warhol the creative entrepreneur, Warhol the innovator, Warhol the disruptor,” says Dan Law, the museum’s associate director, who oversees the project.
The Warhol Academy includes a fellowship programme for students and young adults as well as a boutique content-creation studio designed to generate revenue. The studio employs ten full-time producers and editors to create TikTok posts and other promotional videos for more than 20 clients including MSC Cruises, Dell and the Miami City Ballet. In 2023, the programme generated more than $500,000 in revenue to sustain itself; the museum’s goal is for it to generate $1m annually and contribute to the overall bottom line.
“The Warhol is a learning institute, and it is an experience business,” Law says. (Asked if traditionalists freak out when they hear him say that, he confirms: “They freak out.”) While Warhol was the ultimate artist-entrepreneur, his museum’s approach has ruffled feathers. WESA, Pittsburgh’s National Public Radio affiliate, reported in December that five director-level staff members left shortly before or after planning for the Pop District began in 2021. “The museum has been taken over by the alien that is the Pop District,” one employee told the station.
A few key questions remain in this grand experiment. Can museums accommodate additional activities without driving away already over-extended staff? (Few of the museums I spoke to had hired dedicated teams for their revenue-generating initiatives.) And can they funnel the money, buzz and donor goodwill generated by initiatives outside their walls back into the institution?
The answers—whatever they may be—will have a large impact on the future of US art museums. But most stakeholders agree that something has to give. “Museums are realising that the ageing donors that have kept us alive are going to be moving on,” Reily says. “They need to find new donors and new audiences. The search for revenue is really related to the search for increased relevance.” _ArtNewspaper