The Bellevue Arts Museum (Bam) in Washington state closed its doorways to the general public In September 2024 and entered into receivership following years of monetary issues. Now the establishment has agreed to promote its Steven Holl-designed constructing to KidsQuest Kids’s Museum. The $5m it can obtain from the sale, in keeping with Margo Vansynghel of The Seattle Occasions, will permit Bam to repay its collectors and set up a brand new board for the surviving non-profit organisation, which is able to refocus its efforts on the native arts honest that was the preliminary impetus for the museum’s creation.
“Bam will proceed to nurture and assist the humanities by means of the annual Bellevue Arts Truthful, one of many longest-running and largest occasions in Washington state,” Shelly Crocker, the court-appointed receiver now answerable for the museum, mentioned in an announcement. “Moreover, we’re devoted to establishing an emerging-artist programme, a practice from Bam’s early days. Lastly, Bam is actively looking for a brand new bodily location to accommodate its in depth artwork library, show a choose assortment of visible artwork and host occasions that can proceed to assist artwork and tradition in Bellevue, with extra updates to comply with.”
The choice to promote the constructing got here after contemplating whether or not the local people in Bellevue, a rich suburb of Seattle, truly needed a standard artwork museum, Crocker instructed The Seattle Occasions. She added that annual attendance to Bam had stood at round 15,000 to twenty,000 guests for the reason that pandemic. KidsQuest, in the meantime, serves about 200,000 individuals yearly; a transfer into the Holl constructing would permit it to develop its viewers to greater than 350,000 individuals yearly, in keeping with a joint assertion.
The sale has the blessing of the town council and the Freeman household—led by Bam’s long-time patron Kemper Freeman, whose real-estate firm owns the close by Bellevue Sq. mall and lots of the buildings within the metropolis’s downtown hall. The developer additionally had a proper of first refusal on the museum constructing and land, which has a tax-assessed worth of $35m, in keeping with public data. (The Seattle Occasions notes that depreciation and a scarcity of air rights above the property may decrease its market worth.) Crocker instructed the newspaper that the sale worth to KidQuest is beneath the business worth, as a result of it’s a non-profit and “the sale advantages the general public”.
KidQuest has till the top of December to conduct due diligence on the property; the sale can be topic to approval in King County Superior Courtroom. If the sale is finalised, KidQuest’s president and chief government, Putter Bert, estimates that the organisation might want to elevate a further $60m to renovate the constructing. This contains updating the loos, elevators and heating, air flow and air con, in addition to soundproofing it (to accommodate its neurodivergent younger guests) and putting in new exhibitions. The youngsters’s museum doesn’t plan to make any vital modifications to the constructing’s construction, nonetheless, and hopes to open within the Holl constructing in 2029.
Bam, in the meantime, could solely preserve its acronym—as soon as it leaves the constructing and reorganises as a brand new non-profit, maybe someday subsequent yr.
