The sturdy stream of visitors to view Dale Chihuly's works at St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Arts could become a rarity - the exhibit that makes a profit.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published February 21, 2004
[Times photo: Dirk Shadd]
Business is booming at St. Petersburg’s Museum of Fine Arts as crowds flock to see the current exhibit of works by glass artist Dale Chihuly.
ST. PETERSBURG - Two years ago, leaders at the Museum of Fine Arts had to take a chance that some very fragile glass could bear a very big financial weight. If it's glass by Dale Chihuly, it apparently can.
"Chihuly Across Florida: Masterworks in Glass," an exhibition by the most famous studio glass artist in the world, is setting attendance records. The show is costing the museum about $500,000 to bring in, an ambitious and expensive venture for an institution with an annual budget of less than $2-million. It needs, according to museum officials, 35,000 paying visitors during its 18-week stay to break even, four to five times the usual number the museum sees during this time of year.
The gamble seems to be paying off. Since opening on Jan. 18, "Masterworks" has drawn 20,000 people.
"We're not worried about that goal anymore," said museum director John Schloder.
The last time the museum saw such crowds was almost 10 years ago, in 1995, for an exhibition of Russian art that featured a Faberge egg from Malcolm Forbes' collection. But at that time, the museum was probably getting a boost from the success of "Treasures of the Czars," a blockbuster at the Florida International Museum. This time around, it has to count on Chihuly as a standalone draw.
Even better news for the museum now is that visitors, who pay $12 for an adult admission, are doing more than looking; they're spending a lot of money in the museum's gift shop, which sells everything from small note pads for several dollars to Chihuly's studio glass, priced from $3,100 to $7,100. Museum officials report that 22 of those glass sculptures have been purchased, along with four limited-edition lithographic prints of the artist's drawings that range from $1,500 to $1,900. The store sells out of the books of Chihuly postcards as soon as they arrive and have run out of T-shirts, officials say.
The museum has only recently begun exit surveys to gather demographic information about the crowds. Anecdotal observations, Schloder says, indicate "it's not our usual museum visitors. On Saturday and Sunday, the place is filled with kids. We've had tour groups from as far away as Ohio, and groups of Russian and Korean tourists here."
To secure the show, the museum needed a down payment, which was provided by a $70,000 loan from United Bank. A $125,000 contribution from Progress Energy supplied transitional funds until the show opened.
Even with that financial guarantee, getting an exhibition by Chihuly was a coup for the Museum of Fine Arts and was due in large part to Schloder. He met Chihuly about 12 years ago when he was director of the Birmingham Museum of Art. The museum hosted an exhibition that featured studio glass from the Pilchuck School in Seattle, which Chihuly co-founded. Schloder subsequently mounted one-man Chihuly shows when he became director of the Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, and later at the Naples Museum of Art in Florida; they were financially successful. Organizing such a show when he joined the St. Petersburg museum seemed a logical plan.
But during the past decade, Chihuly has gained international prominence, creating large sculptural works for prestigious museums around the world. He has become well-known to a nonmuseum-going public, too, with his flamboyant installations in settings such as the Bellagio Resort in Las Vegas and Atlantis in the Bahamas. He's a wealthy man, employing a small army of artisans and assistants to help blow, shape and color the thousands of glass components used in his sculptures, and he can pick and choose his commissions, which have grown increasingly ambitious, in sites as far-flung as Venice and Jerusalem.
This exhibition, Schloder believes, appealed to him because it would be so different from most Chihuly installations, which are usually built outdoors or in spare, contemporary spaces. For the Museum of Fine Arts, Chihuly had to choose works that would complement the relatively intimate galleries, some of which would also show art from the permanent collection along with the glass.
Another compelling factor was Schloder's idea to have a concurrent Chihuly exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art, to create an "arts highway" between the two museums. Taken together, they would be the largest museum exhibition of Chihuly's work ever presented.
"We were nervous," Schloder says. "But we all believed there would be enough interest. It's so beautiful, and he's so well known."
Marena Grant Morrisey, executive director of the Orlando Museum of Art, declined to give attendance figures, saying only that the Chihuly exhibition there "has been a phenomenal success."
At the St. Petersburg museum, with the balance of $300,000 all but assured by strong attendance, the hope now is that the exhibition will turn a comfortable profit. Extra money, Schloder says, will be put into the building fund and used to refurbish the galleries that are suffering, he says, "from a lot of wear and tear," due to "almost 5,000 people a week walking through them."
The Palladian-style museum opened in 1965, and although it has undergone three expansions, the main galleries have never had a major redo. The carpeting and fabric on the walls are stained and shredding.
"We're getting estimates for recarpeting," Schloder says, "but we don't know the costs yet. Ultimately, the gallery walls will be flat (without fabric) for paint, which works better when you want to change the color for special exhibitions."
Like all special exhibitions, the Chihuly show will be packed up and returned to its owner, in this case Chihuly Studios in Seattle. Schloder would like at least one work to stay.
"We're hoping someone or a group will come forward and help us purchase one of the works for the permanent collection," he said, though he says he isn't sure which one it should be.
The museum will pause only briefly after the Chihuly exhibition ends May 30. In January, to kick off its 40th anniversary, it will open another potential blockbuster, "Monet and Modernist London," with 70 impressionist works on loan from several European and American museums, including at least 10 by the great French artist Claude Monet.
