What’s the Matter With Museums?

What’s not to like about museums? They offer information, cultural awareness, things to do and see, a pleasant place for people to meet, personal enlightenment—and on and on. However, for the people who live or work near arts institutions, the opening or expansion of a museum may mean noise, traffic congestion, gentrification, the appropriation of public parkland and a never-ending sinkhole for public money.

Filmmaker George Lucas of Star Wars fame is aware of both the praise and denunciations that museums attract, as he plans to open the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park this December after a 16-year effort that saw those same plans rejected in Chicago and San Francisco. Lucas packaged the $1 billion, seven-story, 400,000-square-foot museum as a gift each time, agreeing to pay for all construction costs and providing the museum with a $400 million endowment—but only Los Angeles saw it that way.

Between 2010 and 2014, Lucas sought to erect his museum in a park near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, meeting considerable resistance from groups unwilling to cede public spaces for a private museum. He next offered to build it on an undeveloped 17-acre parcel of parkland between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan in Chicago, but was met with similar pushback from a group called Friends of the Park. “The parkland belongs to the state as a public trust, and under the public trust doctrine,” said Thomas Geoghegan, the Chicago lawyer representing Friends of the Park. “You can’t just give public property to a private individual.”

Los Angeles’ Exposition Park was deemed a better fit, as it already is home to several museums, a science academy and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the University of Southern California Trojans play football. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will house the filmmaker’s extensive collection of illustration art, photography, animation and comic art.

Opposition to museums is hardly rare when their backers seek to build or expand them. Perhaps the most notable recent instance is Congress’s narrow rejection in mid-May of funding for a Smithsonian Institution American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall. It was another casualty of the culture wars; Republicans in the House of Representatives sought to exclude transgender people from any of the museum’s exhibits.

Many other opponents of museum building and expansion argue that when institutions open, public land is taken away from the public. For several years, lawsuits delayed the construction and opening of the Memphis Art Museum (formerly the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art) in Tennessee, which will open in September in its new home on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, several miles from the downtown Overton Park where it sat for over a century. The opposition, Friends for Our Waterfront, claimed that the building would take up too much space, limit greenway access and violate longstanding rules that riverfront land should be kept for public use. A judge ruled in March that a museum is public use, clearing the way for construction to continue.

Opposition to building a William Eggleston Museum in Overton Park, however, was successful. The museum would have displayed the photography of the city’s most renowned artist, but the plan never even came up for discussion as city council members and supporters of the local zoo only wanted to debate whether an unused section of the park should be used for additional parking. “The problem wasn’t with Eggleston,” said Tina Sullivan, former executive director of the Overton Park Conservancy, “but over parking. Nothing could move forward until the parking decision is resolved, and this has gone on for years with lawsuits back and forth.” Instead, the William Eggleston Foundation was created, lending photographs to museums elsewhere.

Museums are certainly in no short supply. The Washington, D.C.-based Institute of Museum and Library Services estimates there are around 35,000 museums of one type or another in the United States, more than double the number since 1990. Some of those most bothered by the proliferation of museums are the communities in which new ones are proposed, worried about how an institution may change the character of their neighborhood—a massive construction project that adds noise, takes away views, brings more cars and more foot traffic. And what if the museum fails to reach its fundraising goals or visitor numbers and memberships lag, especially if the municipality has issued a bond to help cover construction costs?

When multi-millionaire media mogul and philanthropist Fred Eychaner sought to expand his noncollecting architectural exhibition space, Wrightwood 659, in a condominium building in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, through the purchase of units, a current owner who did not sell her home brought a lawsuit claiming that Eychaner’s plans would create construction noise and block her views and light. That lawsuit is still pending.

This past spring, political leaders in Jersey City put a stop to a proposed branch of France’s Pompidou Centre in an abandoned building in the city’s downtown. The city faced a $255 million budgetary shortfall and had already spent $20 million on consultants and another $4.5 million for licensing and branding rights to the Pompidou Centre in Paris when the State of New Jersey rescinded a $24 million grant for the project. Quite unlike George Lucas’ Museum of Narrative Art, the Pompidou Centre would not shoulder all the costs.

Other museums have faced pushback from locals when seeking to expand their footprint, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the Frick Collection, with opposition proving largely successful in each case. Those who contested the expansion of Manhattan’s New Museum, which reopened in March, were not so fortunate. In Spain, a two-decade-long effort to create a Guggenheim outpost on a wildlife sanctuary near Bilbao was dropped in 2025 after opponents claimed the plan had been pushed through without sufficient community consultation on land declared a U.N.E.S.C.O. World Heritage Site in 1984.

The objections may stem from land-use or zoning issues (buildings deemed too tall, for instance), political tensions or plain not-in-my-backyard sentiment. Whatever the cause, the common thread is often institutional overreach. “Boards and directors often try to use the assumed positive public image of the museum to steamroll land-use-based or neighborly opposition,” Stephen Rustow, principal at Museoplan, a Brooklyn-based museum consulting firm, told Observer. “This happened at MoMA, where the museum literally paid off residents of the Museum Tower with renovations, new amenities and lifetime entry passes to quiet their opposition to the 2000-2006 expansion.” Whether or not there is actual elitism on the part of museum officials, he added that “there’s a class-based tension that sees the patrician, moneyed interests trying to take advantage of regular working folks.”

Museums are public charities, existing to benefit the public, but that is not always how they appear to the communities around them. “I’ve never known a community that was asking for a bigger museum. But many donors and collectors do,” said Stephen Reily, founding director of museum think tank Remuseum, told Observer.

Museums that make their surrounding communities a priority tend to experience less opposition and more acceptance. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, recently expanded its facility by 114,000 square feet—a move welcomed by area residents, Reily said, because the institution’s “purpose is to double down on a mission grounded in access and community engagement.” He also cited Los Angeles’ The Broad, which first opened in 2015, displaying the modern and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad, and “where general admission is free and has attracted the largest and most diverse audience of any art museum in Los Angeles.”

Increasingly, many museums are viewed as “billionaire pet projects” to be accepted gratefully by the communities in which they are located, according to Mark Walhimer, managing partner of the California-based Museum Planning LLC. “The museums that are succeeding in the current climate are the ones that are hyper-local, positioning themselves as direct service providers to schools, libraries, parents and neighborhood organizations. That identity is very difficult to argue with politically. The ones facing opposition, in most cases, made a different choice: They led with what they had and why it mattered, rather than asking the community what it needed.”

Consultants in museum development stress the need for genuine community outreach. Marcy Goodwin, president of M. Goodwin Museum Planning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, criticized the “cluelessness” of museum directors and founders who don’t know their communities, do not conduct town hall listening sessions or even send out questionnaires “to ask people what they want.” She described “an explosion of self-dramatization among billionaires,” with the creation of vanity museums as its most visible expression.

As a point of contrast, former President Obama sought to create a presidential library on parkland in Chicago, which triggered a lawsuit from a Friends of the Park group. However, those responsible for bringing the library to fruition held numerous meetings with community groups, emphasizing community service and engagement. The library, which opened in late May, includes a museum, public meeting spaces, a recording studio and an athletic center. “The resistance it faced initially was a land-use fight, not a community rejection,” Walhimer told Observer. “That’s a meaningful distinction.”

The growing number of instances of opposition to museum creation and expansion may reflect a rising public expectation that museums earn their place—justifying their footprint, demonstrating their relevance to surrounding communities and committing to resisting becoming instruments of private interest. Some of the opposition may also be part of a broader political skepticism about government and higher education, a sense that such institutions serve the “elites” and are anti-populist. “I take seriously the broader decline in public trust in institutions,” said Maria Elena Gutierrez, founder and president of the museum planning company The Chora Group, adding that she counsels institutions to make “serious strides in opening up and serving increasingly wider audiences beyond the elites.”

Still, as the failure of the effort to create a Smithsonian Institution American Women’s History Museum shows, the problems go beyond good intentions and good actions. “Museums that engage with American history—slavery, Reconstruction, representation, and the experiences of communities of color—find themselves on the front lines of a national argument about whose story gets told and who controls the telling,” Walhimer said. “That’s not a communications problem that better outreach can solve.”

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