Museums are always looking to acquire new works of art. A larger collection helps an institution draw audiences and build prestige and offers an opportunity to exchange art with other museums to keep variety in its galleries.
But the budgets to realize this ambition are tight, given how expensive it is to construct and maintain buildings, pay salaries and even store all the art that museums have previously taken in — costs that are all going up.
So at a time when every dollar counts, museums are thinking creatively about how to bring in new acquisitions.
At the Toledo Museum of Art, for example, the director, Adam Levine, has been ramping up purchases in anticipation of a museumwide re-installation of its collection. The museum has also been purchasing aggressively at auctions and taking advantage of a financial instrument, the auction guarantee, to make money for the institution in the process.
Some museums are exploring splitting the costs of a work of art with other museums and owning it jointly, part of a growing discussion about whether sole ownership really needs to be the end goal.
The Toledo Museum of Art, founded in 1901, has a privileged position, compared with many institutions. It has an endowment of some $330 million and a budget of more than $20 million a year, thanks in part to its co-founders, Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey, who gave generously from their glassmaking fortune. But no museum ever feels it has enough resources.
“We don’t only need to find quality objects that are a strategic fit, we also need to find value,” said Levine, who has been the museum’s director since 2020. “That’s hard, but that’s the job.”
To that end, the museum spent $3.7 million this spring on seven objects from a renowned trove of African and Oceanic art, the Barbier-Mueller Collection, which went on sale at Christie’s Paris and set a record in its category.
Two of the works go on view next month: a shoulder mask made by the Baga people of the Guinea coast of Africa in the late 19th or early 20th century and a mask fashioned in the 20th century by Toussian communities in the West African country Burkina Faso.
They are part of the show “Strategic Interplay: African Art and Imagery in Black and White,” an exhibition of 64 works that looks at symbolism and patterning in African art and juxtaposes that with European works inspired by the game of chess. It runs Nov. 9, 2024, to Feb. 23, 2025.
Levine said that it made sense to “skew non-Western” when it came to collecting for the museum. He called it a “global mission,” given that “Toledo looks more and more like the world” as its population diversifies.
Levine added, “We had a core collection of African art, but it was not significant enough, relative to the African contribution to art history.” Spending $3.7 million in one fell swoop represents a large portion of the museum’s acquisition budget; for the fiscal year of 2024, which ended in June, that pool of resources was just over $10 million.
But Levine said the offerings at Christie’s were of high quality and had good provenance, meaning that there was solid documentation of previous ownership. “It was a once-in-a-generation moment,” he said.
Normally, the museum devotes $5 million to $7 million a year to acquiring art for the collection. (For comparison, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently been spending from $36 million to $74 million a year.)
But Levine said the museum had stepped up its acquisitions ahead of a moratorium beginning next year. That’s when it’s set to begin the process of reinstalling all of its collections, a project that will consume the staff. “We won’t have curatorial bandwidth,” Levine said, since curators spearhead the buying of works in their areas of expertise but will be occupied with leading the installation strategy.
For most museums, a vast majority of collection growth continues to come from donations of works by patrons, said Stephan Jost, the director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the president of the Association of Art Museum Directors.
“That’s been a constant,” said Jost, who added that in his case, 85 to 90 percent of what enters the gallery’s collection is a gift.
But museums still want to acquire in other ways. In Toledo, Levine said that the museum sometimes used a line of credit to buy works. “In a low-interest-rate environment, that was useful,” he said.
Levine has also taken advantage of auction guarantees. If a bidder guarantees he or she will buy a work at a certain price but is outbid, the bidder will receive a portion of the purchase price — essentially a fee for committing to buy. The Toledo Museum of Art has made around $500,000 from auction guarantees this year, which it can put toward unrestricted acquisition funds.
“We’re hedging our upside,” Levine said. “We’re willing to take that risk.” (The risk being that after making the guarantee, the value of the work could plummet during auction, and the museum would still be committed to buying it.)
Jost said that a museum’s using the guarantee approach was atypical but not unheard-of.
“I have a feeling that others will start doing that,” he said. (The director of the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn Lowry, praised the idea in an interview with Artnet this year, calling it an example of “creative thinking.”)
Museums are also getting creative with the concept of ownership, with an increasing number electing to buy works jointly.
In August, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles announced they were establishing a joint collection of nearly 300 works by Los Angeles artists.
“Co-acquisition is an extremely smart way to do it,” said Katherine Brodbeck, the senior contemporary curator at the Dallas Museum of Art. “We have someone to share the responsibility with.”
Brodbeck points out that, in addition to sharing the cost of a work, storing works is expensive, and most museums can show only a very small percentage of their collections at any one time.
In acquiring a work of art, museums are “making a commitment to care for this object in perpetuity,” Brodbeck said. “That’s why we say no to gifts all the time — it’s not free; it actually costs us.”
To that end, this year the Dallas Museum of Art jointly acquired Garrett Bradley’s 2019 video “America” with Tate Modern in London and the Hammer Museum. Generally, the museum that is displaying or storing a work it owns with another museum is responsible for those expenses.
The sharing idea works especially well with videos and films, and the Dallas Museum of Art has previously collaborated with Tate Modern in those fields, as in 2020, when the two institutions jointly acquired three untitled digital works by the artist Trisha Donnelly.
“We’ve had great luck with co-acquiring time-based media,” Brodbeck said. “Sharing with a physical object is more complicated.” With a digital work, she added, “Everyone can have a copy of the file.”
When Stephen Reily was the director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., he worked on the Speed’s partial purchase of Amy Sherald’s portrait “Breonna Taylor” (2020), which it bought with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Taylor was killed by Louisville police officers in 2020, causing a wave of protests and outrage throughout the country.
“It’s a great model,” Reily said of sharing works. “Legacy systems in museums have reinforced this idea that an object should be all ours, and the field has been under-innovative in that way.”
Reily has been giving such ideas further scrutiny in his current position as the founding director of Remuseum, an independent program housed at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., that seeks to promote innovation among art institutions. Remuseum is funded by the Crystal Bridges Museum, the Art Bridges Foundation, the art patron David Booth and the Ford Foundation.
When it comes to acquisition strategies, Reily said, more innovation is coming. “The field is being called on to explore new modes of ownership,” Reily said. “On the acquisition side, the old ways have stopped working, given that increasing and perpetual costs of preservation are actually making it harder to put on a public program.”
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