Vancouver Museum's 'Austerity Tours' Expose Funding Cuts

(MENAFN- USA Art News) The Museum of Vancouver (MOV) has launched new“Austerity Tours” highlighting the severe impact of decades of funding stagnation and reduced government support. The initiative, which started this week, aims to draw attention to the challenges faced by the museum and others globally as funding decreases.

These behind-the-scenes tours coincide with Vancouver's civic elections on October 17 and a provincial election set to occur before the end of October. According to MOV representatives, the museum receives the majority of its funding from the city of Vancouver, followed by the province of British Columbia and the federal government. The tours illustrate“what is lost when all levels of government choose not to invest in public assets.”

Ryan Hunt, the museum's chief executive, told The Art Newspaper that despite winning national awards and seeing admissions grow faster than industry averages and Vancouver's population,“sustainable funding feels unreachable.” He added that government support has decreased against the rate of inflation over the past 30 years, describing the situation as“bailing out a boat with more and more holes in it.”

One example revealed by the tour is the museum's 1968 Gerald Hamilton-designed building, which requires significant repairs. The lobby's light fixture, for instance, cannot be fully illuminated due to a hydraulic fluid leak, and staff cuts have led to the removal of once-ample greenery. In the long-term exhibition c̓əsnaʔəm: The City before the City, focusing on local Indigenous history, an aging heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system has caused some stone, shell, and bone fragments to deteriorate, necessitating their replacement with cutout photographs. Elsewhere, a drip tray catches moisture from another failing HVAC unit in a rental space closet.

The tour also visits the museum's collections storage area, connected to the adjoining City of Vancouver Archives building. Visitors observe the municipal archives' relatively new freezer, used for pest elimination, in contrast to the MOV's own aging freezer. This MOV freezer, part of the original building, has operated continuously since 1968, but the city of Vancouver decided last year to cease funding its annual maintenance. Hunt warned,“If this freezer breaks down, it will be catastrophic for the MOV. Acquiring new objects would be challenging and the collection would be at great risk.”

Further along, the tour explores the taxidermy storage area, a part of the 140-year-old museum's Victorian legacy. Here, visitors learn about the“dangers” of historical preservation, including the arsenic, mercury, and other toxic chemicals once used to preserve objects, underscoring the importance of maintenance and trained staff. Overhead, ceiling patches show where orange-colored lead paint has been replaced with safer white paint. The tour also highlights the museum's woodworking studios, which create in-house displays and save thousands of dollars, and its recycling program for display objects.

At the tour's conclusion, Hunt advocated for government support, stating that arts and culture yield a C$29 return on every dollar of funding. He asserted that the money spent by municipal, provincial, and federal governments on the Fifa World Cup could have doubled every arts grant available in British Columbia for the next seven years.“The economic and social impacts of a funding increase of this magnitude would be transformative. Even the money spent on one game would fund us for nearly a decade,” Hunt said.

The exhibition, titled Austerity Tours: How Decades of Funding Stagnation Affects the MOV, runs from September 24 to October 17 at the Museum of Vancouver.

Source: The Art Newspaper

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