Halfway through its six-week emergency fundraising campaign, the Bellevue Arts Museum (Bam) in Washington state has announced that it is nearing its goal of $300,000 to keep its doors open. A generous $145,000 donation from an individual and as yet unidentified patron has bumped up other gifts of $10 to $10,000 to bring the museum’s current total to just over $223,000.
“It was an amazing week,” Kate Casprowiak Scher, Bam’s executive director, tells The Art Newspaper. On 15 February, Scher went public about the museum’s “dire” financial crisis, telling The Seattle Times that if the money was not raised to cover operational costs, the institution might have to close. When Scher walked into work a week or so later, however, she heard that a donor from Minnesota had reached out to offer help through his family’s foundation—after reading about Bam’s need in The Art Newspaper. “He said, ‘I don’t know you, you don’t know me, I’ve never been to Bellevue, but I read the article in The Art Newspaper, and I knew I had to help,” Scher says. “So that’s given us a really nice shot in the arm.”
If the $300,000 goal is reached, it will tide operations over until the summer, when the museum’s next big revenue streams are due to take place, including its popular annual art and craft fair, held in neighbouring Bellevue Square since 1947 (and which eventually led to Bam’s creation).
But Scher’s efforts to put the museum back on financial track are far from over. “I would really like to see a similar reaction from our state or local stakeholders,” she says. “And that’s what I need the end of this campaign to stir up, for some of our local corporations and individuals to rally around us. Because this Save Bam campaign is really just the beginning.”
Scher’s focus in the coming weeks will be bringing together a core group of about six potential partners—a mix of city government, businesses and private patrons—who would become central to building Bam’s future on solid ground. While she is not yet ready to name these partners, Scher points out that Bellevue has a high concentration of major tech companies—the city is just a 15-minute drive from Seattle.
“It’s Microsoft headquarters, we have Google, we have Meta, we have Expedia, we have T-Mobile. I mean the list goes on and on and on,” Scher says. “We have the right people here, they just have to trust us. And they have to see this as an opportunity to reinvent the art museum. Because it’s different than, say, the Seattle Art Museum, or a more established, healthier institution. Somebody can come in, and they can have an enormous impact in a very important, rapidly growing global city.”
Once a core group is established, Scher’s next goal will be to finally create an endowment for Bam, starting with a seed fund of around $2m to $5m. This was part of the museum’s original capital-campaign plan, when its Steven Holl-designed home was being built in the late 1990s, but rising construction costs, the early 2000s bursting of the dot-com bubble and the subsequent recession led Bam to use these funds to cover operations instead.
Not having an endowment is a key reason for the museum’s current crisis, Scher says, and establishing one would solve many of its long-running concerns. “From there, I have partners that have talked about helping grow that in the ten-year span to a $150m endowment,” she says, although she acknowledges that this is easier said than done. “Obviously, I need the right partners. And from there, we develop the new strategic plan and hopefully do things that are innovative.”
Among the ideas Scher has to achieve this are regular virtual-reality experiences in the galleries or offering visitors trackers to wear through an exhibition that would provide a readout of their emotional reactions to the art of view. “We’re at the nexus of all this technology,” she says. “It would be really neat as an institution undergoing change if we could harness some of those relationships and actually make it happen.”
