I had a pleasant chat with a young lady, a talented instrumentalist who plays for several orchestras in the Midwest, wherein we both decried the lack of funding for the arts, particularly outside major urban areas. The NEA and the NEH, with woefully limited budgets, provide grants where they do the most good for the most people. Consequently, funding tends to puddle in only the biggest cities who also are possessed of a larger donor base, both corporate and individual. Where the arts in San Francisco, say, are relatively well off, her near neighbor, poor, benighted Fresno, has recently had one of its major museums closed.
Native Fresnan that I am, it is therefore with profoundly mixed emotions- none of them happy- that I consider the closure of the Fresno Metropolitan Museum. On the one hand, considerable sadness that Fresno is bereft of an institution providing a vista on world culture to the hundreds of thousands locally who cannot visit museums 200 miles distant in Los Angeles or San Francisco. And, the other predominant emotion, anger that museum management and its trustees so egregiously betrayed their responsibility to the community that they allowed a 100% cost overrun on the restoration of the museum, and then, when the money ran out, with monumental hubris key trustees inveigled city authorities into guaranteeing a massive loan upon which the museum defaulted.
The Fresno Bee has over the course of the last couple of months published a number of articles detailing what led up to the loan default and the museum’s ultimate closure this past January. The size of the museum fiasco doubtless prompted a grand jury investigation, the results published today. It makes for interesting reading, particularly if the phenomenon of wrist slapping sets your juices flowing. It is disappointing to find that the report itself masters only the obvious- that the City of Fresno did not employ sufficient due diligence prior to recommending the city approve the museum’s loan guarantee- and falls short of identifying culpability on the part of both the city officials and the trustees whose apparently back-room deal led to the local community holding the bag. It’s interesting, the grand jury report tells us the museum’s ultimate plan for repayment was from voter-approved bond financing. Sure, and I’ll repay my balloon mortgage payment from winning the lottery. What’s sadly ironic in all this is that doubtless at some time before the excreta hit the fan the city must have had the opportunity to step in and administer the museum. Now, of course too late, the city has a derelict building and the community has lost a critical cultural outpost.
With the bulk of foundation, non-local and NGO arts funding concentrated in the major cities, Fresno of necessity requires the diligent engagement and oversight of the local community and its elected officials to ensure the support of the arts and culture. Note that I said ‘local community’ by which I mean to exclude the unnamed ‘community leaders’ cited in the grand jury report. I hope the Fresno Bee continues to investigate those leaders. A small cadre of names will emerge, whose strange and mystical relationship over the years with arts organizations has guided a number of them into peril and near collapse. I hope the larger local community will insist, at long last, they be held to account.