AGUSTíN ARTEAGA Director, Dallas Museum of Art
FOUNDED 1903
PRE-CORONAVIRUS EMPLOYEES 266
EMPLOYEES NOW 266
PPP LOAN $2.5 million
OPERATING DEFICIT FOR FISCAL YEAR ENDED JUNE 30, 2020 None
PROJECTED REVENUE DECLINE FOR FISCAL YEAR 2021 15%
PROJECTED COST DECLINE FOR FISCAL YEAR 2021 9%
On March 11, Agustín Arteaga donned his “happy” bright-blue suit and headed to the Dallas Museum of Art. There he presided over a members-only preview of the exhibition “For a Dreamer of Houses,” which explores how the spaces we inhabit represent our values and desires.
It was a somewhat subdued affair. Covid-19 was raging in Europe, shutting down leading arts institutions there. In Dallas, elbow bumps replaced handshakes and finger food gave way to serving stations.
The following day, with the number of infections in the area rising, Arteaga called an emergency board meeting to notify the trustees of the museum’s decision to close. “What are your plans for the staff?” was the first question he was asked.
Although museums around the country were furloughing or dismissing employees—New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art eliminated 400 jobs—DMA succeeded in keeping all of its staff employed during the lockdown. It helped maintain morale as people worked from home and moved the museum’s programming and content online.
“I wanted to make sure that everyone would have a benefit of taking care of themselves and their families,” Arteaga says. “That people wouldn’t worry about being laid off.”
In the months that followed, Arteaga would visit the museum from time to time, using a flashlight on his phone to illuminate darkened halls.
Reopening was delayed twice. The first attempt coincided with protests following George Floyd’s death, in which some local museums were damaged and boarded up for their protection. Damage to the DMA was minor, but the museum decided to pause and digest current events. A second attempt to reopen was foiled when Dallas became a Covid-19 hot spot and authorities asked people to stay indoors.
The social and political tension led Arteaga to rethink the museum’s mission. “We used to be evaluated by how many visitors we have, how many works of art we acquire, how many articles in the press we get,” he says. Now it’s about slowing down and making a larger impact.
The museum owns Arthur Jafa’s seven-minute video Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death, depicting the variety of the Black experience in America. So one weekend in late June, DMA joined 12 other international museums in streaming the piece online, for free. And the DMA will keep it on view until March 2021, Arteaga says.
“The role of the museum is to provide the opportunity to learn about the other,” he says. “So we can find the common ground that we all share as human beings.”
On Friday, Aug. 14, five months after the DMA shut down, Arteaga put on his bright-blue suit again and waited amid the museum’s new sanitizing stations and orange signs explaining social distancing procedures.
As the 11 a.m. opening approached, a line formed outside in the 104F heat. The day’s 600 free tickets—each for a two-hour visit—were claimed quickly online. The first visitor drove for almost 45 minutes to get to the museum on her birthday.
Within hours, all of the opening-weekend tickets were taken. This was repeated in the following weeks, leading Arteaga and his team to increase daily visitor capacity to 900 people after Labor Day.
“We tried to open sooner, but I think we needed time to learn what we know now,” he says. “How to keep the museum safe.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.