2 F THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020It has been a singular year for art museums.
In most parts of the country, they were
closed for several months beginning in
March; some are still shuttered. Rarely in
living memory has so much art been out of
view for so long.
But signs of resilience are everywhere.
Many museums have reopened or are in the
process of doing so, and it’s clear that things
will look a little different to visitors.
On the most visible level of pandemic pre-
cautions, some combination of mask man-
dates, temperature checks, reduced capaci-
ty and timed entry is now standard, and will
be at least until there’s a coronavirus vac-
cine.
Some of the changes have even been fun:
For a few weeks, the Metropolitan Museum
of Art had a bike valet for visitors who
wanted to cycle over instead of taking the
subway.
But it’s also the art on display that will
take new forms.
“We’re being forced to experiment,” said
Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, which has yet to an-
nounce a reopening date.
Closures have put enormous strain on
budgets, and to mitigate the effects, organi-
zations have been stepping in. The Andrew
W. Mellon Foundation announced in Sep-
tember that it was starting a special emer-
gency grant program that is distributing
$24 million to 12 midsize museums, includ-
ing the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Neva-
da Museum of Art in Reno and the
Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla.
For those museums able to reopen,
“There are countless silver linings,” said
Franklin Sirmans, the director of the Pérez.
He and his staff members used their
downtime to increase the size of an exhibi-
tion that was scheduled to begin in April:
“Allied With Power: African and African Di-
aspora Art From the Jorge M. Pérez Col-
lection.” It will be on view on Nov. 7, when
the museum is to reopen.
Here are some of the biggest changes vis-
itors will see this fall, including many that
may last well into 2021 and beyond.
The Online Revolution
In early September, Adam Weinberg, the di-
rector of the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York, said that as his institution
reopened at reduced capacity, “We’re half
online, half in person.”
And he seemed fine with that, given offer-
ings like the webinar series “Art History
From Home,” starring curators and educa-
tors talking about the collection; a recent
edition looked at art and social change.
Kaywin Feldman, the director of the Na-
tional Gallery of Art in Washington, recalled
how quickly the change happened.
“The gallery closed on a Friday still in the
20th century,” Ms. Feldman said, referring
to the museum’s closing in March. “And on
Monday, we went online and entered the
21st century.”
Ms. Feldman and her staff went to work
putting as much material online as they
could, from virtual tours of exhibitions to
Zoom seminars. “The staff was able to cre-
ate new tools, and quickly,” she said of virtu-
al exhibitions and daily Instagram stories.
At the Pérez, “Every week, we’ve done an
online studio visit with a local artist,” Mr.
Sirmans said, adding that thousands of peo-
ple took part in some online offerings, many
more than usual for an in-person event.
In Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner
Museum is demonstrating how many of
these online innovations may stick around
post-pandemic, too, with its supplements to
the recent show “Boston’s Apollo: Thomas
McKeller and John Singer Sargent,” which
looked at Sargent’s drawings of an African-
American model for a mural series.
The museum introduced an extensive se-
ries of digital tours and lectures this fall, in-
cluding a video conversation about mu-
seum and arts activism. And though the
physical show has just closed, the online
programs continue.
Joining Forces
Museums wanted to be up and running, as
long as they could do it safely.
The Whitney opened Sept. 3, and for
safety reasons, visitors were encouraged to
use the stairs — one set for going up, an-
other for going down — instead of the eleva-
tors, with their closer confines.
“We’re not breaking even being open at
25 percent,” Mr. Weinberg said, given that
most museums rely on ticket sales for a sig-
nificant portion of their revenue. “But mu-
seums exist as public services. Culture and
the arts provide hope, solace and comfort in
a time of isolation and anxiety.”
To make that happen, a working group of
New York City’s art museum directors met,
virtually, every week to discuss how to
move forward — and they are still meeting.
And they formed a task force of 25 city mu-
seums of all types, not just art institutions,
that made reopening recommendations to
the city and New York State.
“There was a sense that we were all in
this together,” Mr. Weinberg said.
Nationally, the first major art museum to
reopen was the Museum of Fine Arts, Hous-
ton, which welcomed visitors back in late
May.
“Uncertainty and anxiety were our two
biggest foes this summer, but seeing our
visitors’ expressions gave us the motiva-
tion,” said Gary Tinterow, the director.
Someone had to go first. Mr. Tinterow re-
ported that mask mandates and other
safety precautions worked well, and, per-
haps more important, that visitors didn’t
question them, which helped show the way
for other museums.
The Houston museum is also pushing for-
ward on its $450 million campus renovation
plan, including a new building by the archi-
tect Steven Holl, set to open Nov. 21.
“There were a thousand things that could
go wrong, and did,” Mr. Tinterow said of the
building project, including French oak floors
stranded on a dock in Le Havre by shipping
delays and local coronavirus travel restric-
tions; the museum found a new supplier.
“We worked the problems to exhaustion,”
Mr. Tinterow added. “Slow and steady wins
the race.”
The slow and steady approach is also
working for museums that, because of budg-
et, safety or other constraints, are only
partly open. Some art on view, they figure, is
better than none.
The American Museum of Natural His-
tory ended the longest closure in its 150-year
history on Sept. 9. Most of its permanent ex-
hibition halls are open, minus heavily inter-active ones; its theaters are also closed.
The National Gallery of Art started in July
with the ground floor of its West Building,
home to treasures like Leon Battista Alber-
ti’s “Self-Portrait” (circa 1435); the main
floor begins reopening Monday.
The Cleveland Museum of Art reopened
June 30, and at first it kept its smaller gal-
leries closed.
“We were concerned that social distanc-
ing would be a challenge,” said William Gris-
wold, Cleveland’s director. “But we rapidly
gained the confidence to reopen more.” With
the exception of one gallery, the museum is
back.
Timed ticketing and purposeful distanc-
ing measures, along with a cautious public,have meant fewer visitors. But that has also
created an appealing atmosphere for those
who do make it inside. “It feels very safe,
partly because there are so few people,” Mr.
Griswold said.Closer to Home
The pandemic scrambled the exhibition
schedule at pretty much every museum. In
some cases, exhibitions scheduled for
spring moved to fall, as in the case of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s show “About
Time: Fashion and Duration,” now set to
open Thursday. Shows that had just opened
when museums were shuttered — like the
Donald Judd survey at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art — have a new life, and a slightly
longer run, in their current slot. That exhibi-
tion has been extended until Jan. 9.
Artworks on loan that had to travel were
a particular issue, pushing some exhibi-
tions into the future a year or more.
Most museums take years to plan and
mount a major exhibition, so directors and
curators had to think fast. The first thing
they did was to look to their permanent col-
lections, which many already thought were
an underused resource.
Mr. Tinterow said the general attitude
was: “What can we cook with what’s al-
ready in the kitchen?”
At the Dallas Museum of Art, a Juan Gris
exhibition had to be pushed to 2021, so the
12-person curatorial team got together to
build “To Be Determined,” a pandemic-ap-
propriate show about uncertainty itself. On
view through Dec. 27, it has 35 works,
mostly from the permanent collection.
The Cleveland museum, already re-
nowned for its trove of artworks, received in
early March a gift of over 100 works from
the collectors Joseph and Nancy Keithley.
The collection, which includes Henri Ma-
tisse’s 1914 “Tulips,” has an estimated value
of $100 million.
So when the museum reopened, it dis-
played them interspersed with other pieces
from the permanent collection. And it did
not have to look beyond its own attic to de-
velop another show, “Stories From Stor-
age,” due in early 2021.
That show will include among its 300
works a Greek drinking cup featuring the
god Dionysius and satyrs that was made
around 480 B.C.
“Many of the works I’ve not seen in per-
son,” Mr. Griswold said. “Some have never
been shown. It’s been a fun project that we
never would have done otherwise.”
A separate but related issue is how long
exhibitions stay on view. To drive attend-
ance, museums have put pressure on them-
selves to present new shows frequently. But
such efforts can strain budgets and staff
members.
Mr. Govan of the Los Angeles County Mu-
seum of Art said many museums might now
consider “slowing down — we don’t need to
change things every 10 minutes.”
He added, “We’re going to find out that
things you were afraid to do are fine.”
At the same time, Mr. Govan is moving
ahead on his own redevelopment project,
with a major new building by the Swiss ar-
chitect Peter Zumthor, due in 2024.
The idea is that building places to come
together still matters, and no amount of on-
line art is quite the same.
That may be why, as people come back
into art-filled halls this fall, “there is a quiet
excitement and hopefulness,” Mr. Weinberg
said.
Masks may make the atmosphere sub-
dued at times, but as Mr. Tinterow put it,
“Physical encounters with works of art, sur-
rounded by friends and strangers, will re-
main compelling.”Museums Are Back, and Changing
Visitors may be masked, but the art
is gradually returning to full view.
By TED LOOSClockwise from top: The
Museum of Modern Art;
“Dog Howling” by Rufino
Tamayo, part of “To Be
Determined” at the Dallas
Museum of Art; Jan
Anthonisz van Ravesteyn’s
“Portrait of a Woman,” from
the Cleveland Art Museum’s
“Stories From Storage”; and
“Tightrope 5.7” by Elias
Sime, which will be on view
at Pérez Art Museum Miami.
Below: A new building at the
Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston, is scheduled to
open Nov. 21.ELIAS SIME AND JAMES COHEN, NEW YORKAMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMESTAMAYO HEIRS/MEXICO/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORKPETER MOLICK/THOMAS KIRK IIIJAN ANTHONISZ VAN RAVESTEYN, VIA THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART.