A major donation means a renovated Tucson Museum of Art
February 22, 2017 | In the PressFrom Tuscon.com (http://tucson.com/entertainment/arts-and-theatre/a-major-donation-means-a-renovated-tucson-museum-of-art/article_9931cd1a-3bbb-5ce5-89e4-a3cedeb5efdb.html)
A $500,000 gift to the Tucson Museum of Art is the catalyst for a fundraising campaign and renovations for the downtown museum.
TMA Board of Trustees member James J. Glasser and his wife Louise made the donation, and a new gallery will carry their name. James Glasser is the former head of Chicago-based GATX Corp. He and his wife have been active in the arts in both Chicago and Tucson, where they have a home.
The renovations will increase the 3,500 square-foot museum by about 1,500 square feet. When they are completed in mid-October, the museum will have new galleries, a new gift shop, a beefed-up sculpture garden, and a new interactive education area. The cost is about $150,000, said Jeremy Mikolajczak, chief executive officer of the TMA.
“They are small renovations, but they are impactful,” he said.
The Moore Courtyard, between the main building and the John K. Goodman Pavilion, will house an expanded sculpture garden once it is renovated, Mikolajczak said.
Among the new galleries is a small one to display recent donations to the museum, and another that will be devoted to exhibits pulled from its 9,000-piece permanent collection — an important element if TMA wants to entice donations of art, Mikolajczak said.
“One of the big deterrents for donors is that when they give and don’t see the art exhibited, the perception is it’s locked in a vault.”
The fundraising campaign consists primarily of what Mikolajczak calls “naming opportunities.”
A gift of $100,000 will place the donor’s name on a gallery within the museum.
“We have about $1 million in naming opportunities in the short term,” said Mikolajczak. “In the long term, there are about $5 million in naming opportunities.”
Those kinds of gifts allow the museum to spread the money around. “They benefit the entire campus,” he said.
TMA’s annual budget is about $2.5 million, and a successful campaign will make the museum sustainable and allow for ongoing investment in the galleries, Mikolajczak said.
Renovations will begin in July. While the main gallery will be closed, TMA’s historic properties, such as the J. Knox Corbett House and La Casa Cordova, will remain open. The Goodman Pavilion, which will house the new gift shop and the interactive education area, is expected to reopen in September.
But don’t expect a low-key TMA while the renovations are going on, Mikolajczak said. “We have a robust education program, and we’ll focus on our historic properties, with some new collections going in.”
The mid-October celebration to mark the completed renovations will also be the opening of an exhibit pulled from the permanent collection. Among TMA’s holdings are works by Jasper Johns, Olivier Mosset, Jim Waid, Robert Bechtle, John Singleton Copley, Jacques Lipchitz, Fritz Scholder, Maynard Dixon and Charles Marion Russell.
“It will be the best of our collection, the big names we have,” Mikolajczak said. “The depth of our collection is quite extensive.”
