Museum Overflowing $1.5 Million Sought For Designing And Engineering An Underground Addition

(From For the Record, Friday, January 12, 1996): Cheney Cowles Museum is asking the Legislature for $1.2 million to design and engineer a 43,000-square-foot addition to its facility at 2316 W. First. The museum is seeking another $245,000 in supplemental operating money to cover additional work in handling the former MONAC Native American collection. The amount for the expansion was incorrect in Tuesday’s newspaper.

Cheney Cowles Museum has spent the past decade accumulating and caring for what other curators have called one of the country’s finest collections of Native American artifacts, along with historical manuscripts, photographs and contemporary regional art.

Now, says New York consultant Carol Derfner, it’s time to build a facility that can adequately house and display those cultural treasures.

Derfner and museum director Glenn Mason are in Olympia this week, where they and other museum staffers hope to persuade legislators to approve a $1.5 million appropriation.

The money would go toward designing and engineering a three-story, 43,000-square-foot underground addition south and east of the existing museum. Construction, landscaping and fixtures would cost the state another $18 million over the next four years.

The skylit subterranean structure would double the museum’s exhibition and storage capacity. Currently, the museum can display only about 3 percent of its collection at one time, Mason says, and must rent space around town to warehouse its burgeoning holdings.

Derfner, whose employer, C.W. Shaver and Co., helps museums develop programming, marketing and fund-raising strategies, says acquiring objects usually is the biggest expense museums face.

“You have the reverse situation here,” she says. “Your museum has a wonderful collection (valued at $21 million) already developed. What it needs is a building to house it.”

Cheney Cowles Museum’s dilemma isn’t the result of bad planning. In fact, a privately funded $1 million expansion in 1984 should have provided adequate space through the year 2000.

But the closure of the Fort Wright Historical Museum in 1983, followed by the demise of the Museum of Native American Cultures in 1991, caused Cheney Cowles Museum to absorb more historic relics than it had anticipated. The MONAC collection alone included 28,000 artifacts and 30,000 photographs and papers.

Three years ago, a national team of architects, program specialists and marketers recommended the museum undertake a $50 million, 122,000-square-foot expansion. State legislators gave the plan a chilly reception during the 1994 session.

Derfner, who came aboard about that time, says it’s a good thing that proposal flopped. “Our analysis concluded there wasn’t enough (private) financial support to operate and maintain a $50 million facility.”

After talking with legislators, patrons and local business people, Shaver and Co. came up with what Derfner and Mason call “a more realistic solution” to the museum’s problems of inadequate space and a low public profile.

First, the museum hopes to add 14,000 square feet of storage space so it can consolidate and care for all its collections at a single site. Another 12,000 square feet of exhibition space would allow the museum “to do justice to our regional art, regional history and American Indian collections,” Mason says, “and have space to accommodate a major traveling show.”

Phase one would include replacing the museum’s sandstone facade with a glass wall to present a friendlier, less mausoleum-like image to passers-by.

The Shaver report also proposes expanding to downtown. “Not a satellite museum,” Derfner explains, “but a family-oriented space that’s very interactive … what you might call an adventure museum.”

Derfner says expanding to downtown would help revitalize the urban core while relieving some of the pressure on Cheney Cowles’ headquarters at 2316 W. First.

The cost of the downtown project - roughly $2 million, she estimates - would be paid with private donations. Additional money is needed to enhance marketing, develop new programs, and shore up the museum’s modest endowment fund.

“We’re talking $20 million over six years from the Legislature and another $10 million from private sources. That’s a lot of money for a town this size,” Derfner admits, “but if we break it into components, it feels and looks a lot more manageable.” , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ART UNDERGROUND The proposed skylit subterranean structure would double the museum’s exhibition and storage capacity. Currently, the museum can display only about 3 percent of its collection at one time. Plans also call for creating “an adventure museum” in downtown Spokane.