On Museum Closures: What Happens to the Art?

After a 20-year run, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City closed its doors in 2024. Its building on West 17th Street in Manhattan, which represented a large financial drain on the museum’s overall resources, is in the process of being sold, and a spokeswoman for the museum of Himalayan art framed the shuttering thusly: “We closed the building so that we could reallocate these resources to pursue an ambitious global program to achieve broader impact but also set the museum on a more sustainable path for decades to come.” The objects from the collection will not be sold—and indeed, the Rubin just announced the acquisition of works by ​​Tenzin Gyurmey Dorjee, Shraddha Shrestha and Shushank Shrestha—but if you want to see those works and others, you’ll find them in exhibitions at other institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Loans will likely be the foundation of the institution’s decentralized “museum without walls” model.

By no means was the Rubin the only art museum closure of 2024. Washington state’s Bellevue Arts Museum—one of the very few art museums to grow out of an art fair—shut its doors in September, citing post-pandemic declines in attendance, fundraising and retail sales. And the University of New Hampshire closed its Museum of Art, the result of cuts mandated by the university’s president James Dean, JR., that resulted in the layoffs of seventy-five of the institution’s 3,700 employees to close a $14 million gap in its budget. “We needed to support our academic programs,” Michele Dillon, dean of the university’s College of Liberal Arts, told Observer. “There were very few places to cut, and I just decided that the museum was more expendable.” Nothing from the museum’s 2,500-piece collection has been, or is expected to be, sold, she said, “not that we haven’t been asked. Since word went out that the museum would be closing, I’ve received a lot of queries from people wanting to buy things—collectors, dealers, auction houses, nonprofit organizations.” Instead, objects from the museum’s collection will be displayed in buildings around campus.

Outside of the art sphere, a pair of automotive museums in California closed for good last year—the Automotive Driving Museum in El Segundo and the Murphy Auto Museum in Oxnard—that also could be attributed to strained finances. David Neel, the volunteer executive director of the Murphy Auto Museum and otherwise a lighting store owner, said that insurance premiums had risen 20 percent over the previous few years and the building rental (the museum did not own its 14,000-square-foot building) was “more than a dollar a square foot.” He had donated his time to the museum for eleven years and, for the last three, he “tried to find someone to take over the reins,” but with no success. The museum’s collection of cars amounted to forty vehicles, the majority of which were owned by private individuals who were taking them back. “The museum itself owned five cars,” he said, “and, so far, two of them have been sold. When we sell the others, we’ll be able to pay off our outstanding debts.”

The late Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen’s Living Computers: Museums + Labs in Seattle also closed for good in 2024 after COVID forced what ought to have been a temporary closure, and its collection of vintage machines, documents and other artifacts of the technology race is heading to auction.

How often do museums close?

If you shed tears when a museum closes, expect to do a lot of crying. Museums—a wide category of mostly nonprofit institutions that care for and display a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical or scientific importance and includes historic houses, zoos and aquariums—open and close with more regularity than people realize. Compounding this is an ever-looser definition of ‘museum.’ The Museum of Pinball in Banning, California (which closed in 2021 after eight years) and Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum (which closed in 2016 after three years and never recorded a single break-even month in all that time, according to its founder and creative director Joanna Ebenstein) may just have been novelty ventures. There are also numerous “museums” around the country that are little more than Instagrammable experiences, as with the Museum of Ice Cream.

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Rutland, Vermont, closed in 2021 after fifty years because owner Colleen Schreiber’s age (she’s in her 80s) and health issues (she has diabetes) limited her ability to keep the museum going. Still, she told Observer, a buyer has expressed interest in taking over the museum and hopes to restart it in a new location in the near future.

It’s worth considering that some museums may have a natural lifecycle. The Powers Museum in Carthage, Missouri, closed in 2021 after thirty-eight years. The museum had what its last board president, Kavan Stull, called “a huge collection” of newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, period clothing and furniture representing the years 1870-1940 in Carthage—most of it amassed by Marian Powers Winchester, who died in 1981 at the age of 75 and whose will set up the museum as a tribute to her parents. Winchester had left money to build a museum and an endowment to run it, but costs kept rising—“it needed a new roof and air-conditioning, it costs money to cut the grass,” Stull said—and the money just started to run out. Donations from the community were small, few and far between, and so it had to close.

Closing a museum can be complicated

There is, of course, a process for closing a museum. The board of directors needs to take a formal vote to dissolve the institution and then devise a plan for transferring assets—the building, furniture and equipment, the collection—to one or more other nonprofit institutions (federal law requires a tax-exempt charitable nonprofit that is dissolving “to distribute its remaining assets only to another tax-exempt organization”) while paying off any remaining debts, perhaps with those very assets. That plan is filed with the office of the attorney general of the particular state; there usually is a division of nonprofit organizations and public charities in that office that looks over the submitted documents to ensure that no breach of fiduciary duties or other instances of fraud were committed by board members. Once approved, the actual dissolution begins.

Articles of clothing in the collection of the Powers Museum were transferred to the Joplin Mining Museum, while furniture went to a nonprofit in Joplin that restores old houses. An entranceway counter was given to the Harry S. Truman Birthplace Historic Site in Lamar, Missouri. The museum’s display cases were donated to Joplin’s Freedom of Flight Museum, while bookshelves went to the Neosho Newton County Library in Missouri, and photographs and newspaper clippings went to the library in Carthage. The museum building itself was donated to the Carthage public schools, which repurposed it as an alternative school for students with learning challenges. A small amount of money remained in the bank, which was turned over to other nonprofits: a Civil War-era house ($15,000) that needed to fix its roof and a community foundation for scholarships ($25,000). “There also was a piano,” Stull said. “I sold it.”

In some cases, an entire collection is transferred to another institution that agrees to display or dispose of these objects in some way. The Philadelphia History Museum turned over its 130,000 artifacts of city history to Drexel University, while the 2,000-piece collection of arms and armor of the Higgins Armory went directly to the nearby Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, which closed in 2014, sent its 19,000-plus artworks to the National Gallery of Art and twenty-one other art institutions in the Washington, D.C. area, and the Newseum sold its building to Johns Hopkins University for $372.5 million while its collection will remain in the hands of the museum’s founder and principal funder, The Freedom Forum, which plans to organize traveling exhibits.

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As part of any museum closure, the executive director and board members need to establish who owns the objects in a collection. In a for-profit institution, the founder likely is the owner and may do with items as he or she chooses. In a nonprofit museum, it is more likely that objects belong to the institution itself. There can be complications in this, for instance, if a donated object enters a museum collection with restrictions (such as the piece must be permanently displayed or never sold). An object with restrictions is not considered to be completely owned by the museum, and museum officials need to contact the donor if still alive or go to court if the donor is deceased to remove those restrictions before they can proceed with the transfer of the item to another institution.

Susana Smith Bautista, who became director of the Pasadena Art Museum in 2017 and began the process of permanently closing it the following year—her experience led her to write the 2021 book How to Close a Museum: A Practical Guide, published by Rowman & Littlefield—told Observer that she “scrambled to look for paperwork” indicating how and when pieces came into the museum’s collection. “For the artwork where we could either not find any documentation, or the documentation did not require us to return it to the artist/donor, we tried to think of museums that would most benefit from these works, and so we approached them with the offer.”

There may be limited opportunities for private buyers to purchase objects from a closing or closed museum’s collection, particularly if it is an institution that owes money and needs to sell items in order to square its debts. “If the museum owes money and looks to sell some or all of its collection, a buyer could call the executive director to ask about purchasing one or more items,” explained Jason DeJonker, a bankruptcy attorney at the law firm Bryan Cave’s Chicago office. However, the museum director would more likely hire an outside broker, such as a dealer or auction house, to sell objects than make one-off sales to private individuals, he added. The individuals may still be able to acquire sought-after pieces but in the competitive arena of an auction.

Finding a new home for everything in a collection following a museum closure is not always easy. The Peoria Historical Society in Arizona, for instance, dissolved in 2019 following years of internal disputes about how to govern the organization. The board of directors split and the two entities each sued the other for “ownership.” After several years in mediation and court appearances, the Maricopa County Superior Court ordered the dissolution of the organization, placing the collection with the City of Peoria. The city placed the historical society’s collection at the Arizona Science Center, largely because that was local and had storage space to house the numerous items. “We’re all hoping that the Science Center transfers the collection to other museums,” Janice Klein, executive director of the Museum Association of Arizona, told Observer.

But not every museum that closes ceases operations for good. The National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, which took out loans to construct a new building in 2008 just as the Great Recession hit and found itself with $30 million in unrepayable debts, declared bankruptcy in 2020. Dr. Misha Galperin, president of Zandafi Philanthropic Advisors, which works with Jewish nonprofits and was brought in as a consultant in 2019, floated the idea of making the museum a part of the Smithsonian Institution. “They have museums of African-Americans, of Native Americans, of Latinos. I think we belong in that category,” he told Observer. However, a number of current and former museum trustees ponied up to pay off the debt, and luxury shoe designer Stuart Weitzman made a gift last December of $30 million that will establish an endowment in his name for what is now the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History.