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Posted Mar 7, 2008, 11:01 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2006
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Jewish Museum arrives
Quote:
Friday, March 7, 2008
Jewish Museum arrives
Artful addition expected to draw 150,000 visitors
San Francisco Business Times - by Sarah Duxbury
Major construction on the $47.5 million Contemporary Jewish Museum is complete, and now come the finishing touches and installation to prepare for opening day on June 8.
With the museum's completion, the Redevelopment Agency is close to closing the books on the Yerba Buena Redevelopment Area.
The Contemporary Jewish Museum has been around for more than 20 years, but the organization will undergo a virtual recreation as it grows its staff, budget, programming and ambitions to fill a 63,000-square-foot new home designed by internationally-renowned architect Daniel Liebeskind.
Its first year, the museum hopes to welcome between 150,000 and 175,000 visitors, but Executive Director Connie Wolf said she expects attendance in future years to stabilize between 115,000 and 125,000 visitors.
Wolf has yet to finalize an operating budget, but she said it will be several million dollars more than the $2 million it took to run a much smaller museum on Steuart Street. The staff will grow from about a dozen full-time employees to 35, most of whom are already hired, Wolf said, and she expects to triple membership in the first year to 4,500 members.
To support that growth, the museum, led by board member Roselyne Swig, is in the final stages of an $80 million capital campaign that, in addition to funding construction, will also cover ramp-up costs, contingency and reserve funds, and includes $25 million for the endowment.
"The financial effort has been satisfying," Swig said, "The people who have supported the campaign are broad-based, young and old alike, so that makes us feel very good."
Wolf won't disclose how much the museum has raised to date for fear of discouraging new donations, but the museum had raised $60.5 million by July 2006. It has also logged 27 donations over $1 million, putting it on track to exceed its $80 million goal. Any extra funds will further secure the museum's future by growing its endowment.
Cartoonist exhibition on tap
The new museum has three different program spaces, all of which have been designed to be flexible because the museum doesn't have a permanent collection.
The first floor gallery has a cement floor and a wall of windows that open onto Yerba Buena Lane. Its inaugural exhibition, "From the New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of William Steig," will be the sole West Coast showing of an exhibition created by the Jewish Museum in New York. It will be followed an Andy Warhol exhibit.
A long, 7,000-square-foot, sky-lit gallery on the second floor will be the museum's main presentation space, and the museum has commissioned seven artists to create works for an exhibition entitled for "In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis."
The 'Yud' is a dynamic space inside Liebeskind's iconic blue cube, whose stark, diagonal walls are punctuated by 36 windows that represent a double "L'Chaim," Hebrew for "To Life," and a lucky number in Jewish culture. A sound installation entitled "John Zorn Presents the Aleph-Bet Project" has been commissioned to inaugurate this space.
Some 20,000 square feet of the museum were donated by Millennium Partners and are built into the Four Seasons Hotel.
There are also display cases in the educational wing, and the education program will start in earnest in the fall. A ground-floor multipurpose room has retractable seating for 250.
In the late spring CJM will start a paid teen docent program, and it will stand out from other museums thanks to a one-year pilot program to offer free admission for anyone under 18. General admission is $8.
Target will sponsor a free community day on June 8. It is just one on an enviable roster of corporate sponsors, many of whom, including PG&E, BNY Mellon Wealth Management, Hermès and Boucheron are first-time supporters of the organization.
A café will occupy the front of the structure and on nice days will spill out onto the Plaza.
Growth of Yerba Buena area
These are heady times for the museum's management and closest supporters, but the museum opening is equally significant for San Francisco.
"With our opening, we'll also open Jessie Plaza -- a location in Yerba Buena that was not developed and was something of an eyesore for many years. We really finish that northern part of the Yerba Buena district," Wolf said.
The Redevelopment Agency will spend $6 million to complete Jessie Plaza, which will be like an extension of Yerba Buena Gardens.
"This whole area will come alive with Yerba Buena Lane and all the stores and restaurants," Wolf said. "There's going to be a vibrancy on this block that wasn't there."
Her neighbors agree.
"We can hardly wait," said Jennifer McCabe, director of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art which sits halfway down Yerba Buena Lane. "We've been here two years and patiently awaiting all the new spaces to open and people to become more familiar with what the lane is and where it is and the construction to be over."
While all but one space on the lane is leased, none of the restaurants is yet open, so the lane hasn't lived up to its promise to become a destination.
"The Contemporary Jewish Museum will bring the most traffic by far," McCabe said.
It also, presumably, will bring art lovers, which will be a boon to her museum.
Ongoing museum boom
San Francisco has seen something of a museum renaissance in recent years, particularly of new construction, and the Jewish Museum isn't the end of it.
"It's obviously a beautiful and meaningful project in itself, but it's also another piece in the major development of Yerba Buena as the cultural center of San Francisco," said Amy Neches, senior project manager at the Redevelopment Agency. "Physically, it also helps create that connection we want from Market through to Mission and into Yerba Buena Gardens and South of Market."
The Redevelopment Agency donated the Jessie Street Powerstation to the Jewish Museum, much as it has given millions of dollars in donated land, building costs and direct investments to the other cultural institutions it slated for the area.
Not all have succeeded. The Mexican Museum is practically disbanded. It has a collection, but must rebuild its leadership and regain the trust of donors if it is to move forward with its museum plans.
Museum of the African Diaspora opened to much fanfare in the St. Regis Hotel in late 2005, but has since faltered. It raised $6 million to open, but found it hard to cover operating costs. Last fall, the Redevelopment Agency committed $1 million more to help it find its footing, much as it reinvested in Zeum when that new arts organization stumbled in its infancy.
The Jewish Museum hopes it has dodged the fate of those museums by raising operating and endowment money at the same time it has its hand out for construction costs.
The Redevelopment Agency is scheduled to finish the Yerba Buena area by 2010.
The failure to start construction of the long-planned Mexican Museum is "the big unfinished piece at this point," Neches said, but she hopes that project, too, will be well under way by 2010.
sduxbury@bizjournals.com / (415) 288-4963
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Source: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfranci...10/story1.html
Mexican Museum underway by 2010. Hmmm. Since the latest version of that project involves rebuilding and enlarging--probably with additional height-- the building on the corner of 3rd & Mission and putting the museum in a ground floor space, I wonder if this means that project will be underway by 2010.
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