IMLS Testimony

Testimony for IMLS
Mary Kennedy McCabe
Executive Director, Mid-America Arts Alliance
Kansas City, Missouri
March 12, 2008

Thank you very much for the opportunity to testify on behalf of the more than 3,000 museums located in the Mid-America Arts Alliance region of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. We are grateful that you are seeking comment regarding the vital role of the Institute of Museum and Library Services in the sustainability of museums across the country.

Mid-America has been working with museums since its inception in 1972 and we have organized more than 150 traveling exhibitions that have toured to thousands of communities through our ExhibitsUSA program. In addition we’re now working with the National Endowment for the Humanities through a cooperative agreement to manage NEH on the Road, a wonderful program designed to take large scale NEH-funded exhibitions and convert them into smaller scale artifact-based shows that can be hosted in mid-size museums nationwide. This effort is led by Dee Harris, our Director of Visual Arts and Humanities.

Our work with NEH began as a research project in 1999, including detailed surveying of over 1,100 museums nationwide to collect information about activities and behaviors across the entire spectrum of museums. This research was so compelling that it put us on the path to considering an expanded role beyond traveling exhibitions for Mid-America in relation to museums in our region. Our research and training efforts for small museums has been lead over the past ten years by two individuals—Edana McSweeney, our Director of Professional Development at Mid-America and Brian Crockett, HELP Project Director.

We began by completing our first in-depth research project on museums in Texas followed by projects in Nebraska and Arkansas. We are currently completing research in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, all thanks to support from IMLS. This research enables us to speak with some authority regarding the environment of the museum community within our region. What we already knew anecdotally but can now say empirically is this:

50% of all Missouri museums report having no full-time paid staff;
61% of all museums in Oklahoma operate with less than $100,000 annually and 37%--more than one third—operate with $25,000 or less;
75% of Texas’ small and midsize museums have not received any training in the last three years in board management, fundraising, or administration/finance;
76% of Kansas museums spend less than $1,000 in total annually to train all of their staff, trustees, and volunteers combined;
70% of Arkansas museums cite “lack of funding” as the primary obstacle in pursuing staff and volunteer training;
71% of Nebraska museums are located in communities with a population of 10,000 or less.

While I have cited these statistics state by state, we are finding the data to be very comparable region-wide and we look forward to reporting that information to the field later this year.
Some of the most compelling evidence of need was found while implementing Texas HELP (which stands for the Hands-on Experiential Learning Project), a four-year pilot training project for 18 small and rural museums in three regions of the state.
Texas HELP, which was also supported by IMLS, yielded remarkable results. Over four years, on average, the participating museums increased their annual operating budgets by 31%; their use of diverse marketing methods by 56%; their use of exhibit development and design tools by 31%; and their number of volunteers by 38%. These results were astounding and they demonstrated that small museums could indeed improve if given the opportunity.

We are now preparing to launch, with major support from IMLS, HELP Governance, in Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas, which will engage the staff and trustees of 80 small rural museums over the course of 24 months to measure and improve their nonprofit compliance and governance capacity.

So there’s a quick overview of what we’re up to and why we feel uniquely qualified to address IMLS’ concerns.

So the first question I want to address is: why is this museum constituency important?

Mid-America Arts Alliance, is obviously grounded in the arts – our primary federal affiliation is with NEA. But we know the workings of cultural organizations in our region very well. Federal definitions of the various disciplines in the arts and humanities are not relevant in communities with few cultural resources or opportunities. In fact, use of the term “place-based” museums is more appropriate for most museums in our region. The same county museum where our traveling exhibition on fine art quilts is hosted, is also home to the temporary showing of county history fair winners, a public meeting on cultural tourism, and the local piano recital. I would argue that these institutions (by far the most numerous in our nation) aren’t a poor example of a museum, they are, in my opinion the very best examples of a museum – where public engagement comes naturally, and love of place and community is easily realized through historical collections, storytelling, and artistic expression.

While it might be argued that public museum funding should be directed to support these institutions, the most public of our museums, or that federal funding should be directed to these museums because they are in the greatest need and in the greatest number, I believe, and too few of us argue, that these museums are already worthy of public support.

The second question to address is: how is the current system of federal funding working for our museum constituency?

To be honest, not well. A quick glance at the Urban Institute’s tally of federal funding to museums per state can be deceiving. I compiled the statistics for our six-state region and we hold 13% of the nation’s population but receive just 8% of federal grants made for museums. We have 12% of the country’s museums, but just 7% of funding from NEA, NEH, and NSF for museums. (and I can tell you those figures are far less flattering with Texas taken out of the mix—8% of the museums but just 3% of those funds.)

Our focus at Mid-America has been to determine how best to supply these organizations with high quality cultural resources and buoy their professional capacity in order to serve their towns as genuine community assets. We’ve learned much about the ingredients required for improvement, and for institutional change itself. Of course new money is their highest priority. We know that a strong and simple majority of American museums operate with less than $100,000 annually (in much of our region this figure is as high as 80% of their museums). They’re simply cash-poor. Stabilization funds to these organizations would change their capacity in radical ways.

But even that is somewhat deceiving. It might be argued that by making just a few more grants to the heartland, federal funding could be more equitable. We could close the gap between population and grant dollars, or numbers of museums and grant dollars. But it’s not just a matter of ratcheting up the grant dollars, it’s important to ask if the current funding mechanisms are reaching the right museums.

The real issue is based on a closer look at what institutions from our region both apply for, and receive in federal grant funding. Not surprisingly, federal grants are typically made to our region’s highest profile, and largest institutions. Premier art and science museums in Houston, Dallas, St. Louis and Kansas City usually account for the lion’s share. Omaha, Austin, Wichita, and Little Rock are typically in the next tier. Federal funding rarely hits communities the size of Amarillo, Topeka, or Springfield. And federal funding is entirely absent among the towns and communities we serve regularly—Batesville, Arkansas; Montezuma, Kansas; Lexington, Nebraska; and Shawnee, Oklahoma. There simply is no federal reach for these small museums. Our six-state research documents that small and mid-size museums uniformly rank federal granting opportunities dead last in both opportunity and success for funding.

I feel compelled to make another point. I will not argue that federal grants made to our major museums are misspent. I fully recognize their importance and their need. And as an art historian and arts administrator, these museums hold special emotional authority for me. I would urge IMLS to refrain from splitting our museum community into a small vs. large museum debate. I want a chance to advocate for all museums, believing that size is not a virtue, it is a characteristic, and it is possible to achieve museum excellence in both Kansas City and Kirksville, Missouri, in Houston and Beaumont, Texas.

The current distribution of federal funding for museums is not equitable and not even viable for the vast majority of institutions in the Mid-America region. A major boost in the museum funding that is on par with public libraries is long overdue, and we look forward to doing our part to help make it a reality. Creation of an infrastructure that partners federal museum funding with state and regional museum service organizations would undoubtedly increase access by small and mid-sized museums to financial support and training opportunities.

Again, thank you for the opportunity to testify. We are most grateful for IMLS’ support of our research and training efforts. We are encouraged by your presence here and we look forward to our continued work with you in support of the museums served by Mid-America Arts Alliance.
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The complete list of speakers from Kansas City:

Marc Wilson, Menefee D. & Mary Louise Blackwell Director & CEO, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Michael Bouman, Executive Director, Missouri Humanities Council
Sharon Sanders Brooks, Councilwoman, District 3
Greg Carroll, Executive Director, The American Jazz Museum
Gregory M. Glore, Community Volunteer
Christopher Leitch, Director, Kansas City Museum at Corinthian Hall
Fred Logan, Chairman, Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City
Mindi Love, Director, Johnson County Museum
Mary Kennedy McCabe, Executive Director, Mid-America Arts Alliance
Robert D. Regnier, President, Bank of Blue Valley
Kate Viens, Executive Director, New England Museum Association