Little by little, after nearly a year of closure forced by the state’s budget crisis, the Illinois State Museum system is reopening.
The ISM’s Lockport Gallery, an art hall in the southwest suburbs along the Illinois and Michigan Canal, opened its doors Saturday with an exhibit titled, cheekily, “Open.”
“Being with the public is fun,” said John Lustig, the gallery’s director. “It’s the primary issue. I had every indication that the stakeholders were going to figure this out.”
“It was a blast,” said Lockport Mayor Steven Streit, whose city’s willingness to kick in money to help run the formerly fully state-funded museum was crucial to the reopening. “Right next to the museum campus was where we had the big tent set up for the steampunk music festival. People would go in and out, experience both these things on the same day.”
The main archaeology and history museum in Springfield, known as the Illinois State Museum, began welcoming the public again in early July, along with the Research & Collections Center in Springfield and the Dickson Mounds Museum in Fulton County.
The least-trafficked of the museum system’s five sites, however, the Southern Illinois Art and Artisans Center at Rend Lake, is not expected to reopen, officials said. But the Chicago Gallery and affiliated artisan shop, which closed in the Thompson Center last June, should be reopen in some capacity in a more accessible city location before the end of the year, said Michael Wiant, interim director of the Illinois State Museum.
“It’s now the highest priority we have, to renew our Chicago presence,” said Wiant. “A venue in the city is imperative.”
So that’s mostly good news for the almost 400,000 people who visit the locations annually.
Just last week the museum in Springfield restarted its regular brown-bag lunchtime lecture series. Wiant was to talk about the Terracotta Warriors, the Chinese archaeological marvels currently on exhibit at the Field Museum.
“I walked into the room and was absolutely overwhelmed that there were more than 80 people in the room waiting for that presentation,” he said. In 33 years of the brown-bag series, “it’s one of the very best turnouts we’ve ever had,” Wiant said.
What’s the difference between now and a year ago, when the state’s ongoing budget impasse led Gov. Bruce Rauner to order the Department of Natural Resources, which runs the museum system, to begin closing their doors?
In the big picture, not much. Since late June of this year, Illinois has a “stopgap” budget meant to handle key funding through the November election, but there is still little hope of resolution to the political disagreement between the Republican governor and Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan that led to the closing of the museums, among myriad other state-funded services left in the lurch.
But on closer examination, the institutions are changing, to a degree that is at least symbolic and possibly significant to the bottom line and to the way they operate going forward. They are seeking outside partnerships — the Chicago gallery may end up with space within an existing institution, for instance — and working to make the museum board more active in fundraising, the way many of Chicago’s biggest museums operate. Membership will now be encouraged.
Neither the Lockport nor Chicago facility had weekend hours. Lockport now does, and the plan is that Chicago will also, Wiant said.
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The Springfield museum is expected to freshen some of its exhibitions. “Things had become static. The museum had become back-of-the-house, research driven,” said Jason Heffley, former chief of staff for DNR, now an official with Rauner’s office, and a key figure in the negotiations to reopen the museums. “There hadn’t been a focus on the front of the house” during a decade or more of budgetary challenges.
“We wanted to be in a community where the community wanted to be a partner,” said Heffley. “Through this the museum is in much, much better shape.”
The most immediately noticeable change is that the main museum in Springfield now charges an adult admission fee, $5 a head, for an institution that used to be free. That could bring in $1 million a year, officials estimated, a sizable chunk of an annual budget that was most recently at $6.2 million.
“It’s gone well,” Wiant said of the admission charge. “People see it as what I would hope they would do, as really an investment.”
Catherine Kelly, a spokeswoman for Rauner, said, “It was a difficult decision to close the museum, but through strategic changes the museum will be more self-sufficient and more fiscally sustainable.”
Some administrative functions that had been handled by the museum have now been taken over by DNR, officials said.
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In Lockport, entry will remain free. Reopening came about because the city and a local foundation agreed to split the cost of the $24,000 in annual rent for the gallery’s building, according to Streit, while the state will still pay salaries and utilities.
“I knew that we would find a way to open back up,” said Lustig, the facility’s director. “I couldn’t be happier for the audience.”
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
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