Carolyn Ramo, Artadia’s new director, spent the last 12 years of her career in the New York gallery world, first at Nicole Klagsbrun, then as a production director at David Zwirner, and most recently as a partner at Taxter & Spengemann. When they brought her on board at T&S, Kelly Taxter explained, “Carolyn brings a [...]

A few weeks ago, Artnews’ feature on Gary Tinterow discussed the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s plans to build a new wing for modern and contemporary art, at a cost of $250 to $300 million. The museum has announced the project’s architect, Steven Holl, but has not yet made a case for the expansion publicly. [...]

“Please, someone, do the research and write a really in depth article on the nature of getting people in the door [of galleries] versus the likelihood that they buy something…” –surlycurly (reader comment on Lucia Simek’s discussion of Design District Gallery Day in Dallas)   Short Answer At high-end contemporary galleries, there isn’t a causal [...]

There’s been a lot of management turnover within top tier Texas museums over the past year. [Quick recap: Just 13 months ago, Simone Wicha replaced Ned Rifkin as Director of the Blanton Museum of Art after Rifkin had spent only two years in the post. Five months later, Maxwell Anderson became the new Director of [...]

About a year ago now, I published a series of articles introducing readers to some of the financial metrics consultants, academics, and others have used to evaluate the financial stability of nonprofits and applying these metrics to the nonprofit contemporary art world. I used a variety of case studies from mid-sized U.S. cities (Crunching the [...]

Julieta Aranda, Hills Snyder and Regine Basha at Sala Diaz Regine Basha was recently appointed Executive Director of Artpace, San Antonio, a position she’ll assume less than a month from now on March 1, 2012. In anticipation of her return to Texas, Claire Ruud caught up with her to ask about her plans. Claire Ruud [...]

When I ask Mark Goodman, Graduate Academic Advisor in the Department of Art at the University of Austin, what he wishes he could tell his 25-year-old self about a career as a visual artist, he pauses. In his early twenties, he wasn’t an artist, he was a photographer. It was the early 70s. Photography wasn’t [...]

Long gone are the days when a CEO could simply cut a company check to his favorite charity. Now that it has become clear that companies can get the social kudos they used to get from philanthropy through initiatives that are also “good business,” managers have difficulty justifying any Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives that [...]

Why should we care about the rise of the arts management professional? Because the institutions that produce art—institutions made up of people who have a set of experiences and frameworks for thinking—are implicated in the kinds of art we produce. In New York, if large institutions with massive collections characterized the early 20th century, and [...]

Why do “ladies” always get in free? Because dance clubs serve a two-sided market. On one side of the market, men, on the other, women. The more women in the club, the more a visit is worth to the guys. The reverse is also true, although to a lesser extent, the more men in the [...]

In the wake of Miami, it seems an appropriate moment to address the economic impact of the art fair. Just before Art Basel and its myriad satellites opened last week, Miami Dade County Newspaper took up the question in “The Art Basel Effect” and concluded yes, for Miami, it worked. Between 2002 and 2010, revenue [...]

Think of a newlywed couple moving in together for the first time. Writing the prenup was hard and planning the wedding was an emotional rollercoaster, but the work of synchronizing the day-to-day, learning to make decisions together, sacrificing on one another’s behalf is practically Herculean. In the merger between Arthouse and AMoA, the prenup’s been [...]

When the AMoA and Arthouse announced that they were beginning discussions about some sort of merger, it kicked up a dust storm in Austin worthy of West Texas. And friends in the dance community tell me it was the same in NYC when Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company began [...]

Cases such as the high profile merger between Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones Dance Company, which together became New York Live Arts, have inspired talk of an uptick in mergers among nonprofit arts organizations. In the nonprofit sector more broadly, strong anecdotal evidence suggests mergers are on the rise. 20% of 117 [...]

As a follow-up to my article, “Mind Games, Museums, and Suggested Donations,” I’ve been looking into the ways that museums set their general admission prices. Discussions regarding museum admission often carry moral undertones. Recently, editorials have expressed the usual mild outrage at first the Met’s and now MoMA’s price hikes from $20 to $25. (See, [...]

I was excited to see that The Dallas Morning News started a series on “Money in the Arts” on the financial state of metroplex arts organizations in August. The first article in the series looked at the Dallas Museum of Art. The article reported a variety of numbers, and I went in search of context [...]

Pricing strategy. In the for-profit world, business school classes spend semesters on the topic, entire books are written on its nuances and staff positions—even departments—are devoted to analyzing, tweaking and re-tweaking it for every sector and product line. Far less attention has been devoted to pricing strategy in the nonprofit world. And museums, being a [...]

(For Part I and Part II, click here and here.) This series has considered the finances of a number of mid-sized, contemporary U.S. arts institutions outside of the major contemporary arts hubs of New York and Los Angeles. In Texas, these have included the Dallas Contemporary and Arthouse, and, because of the proposed merger, the [...]

(To read Arthouse and the Dallas Contemporary: Crunching the Numbers, Part I, click here.) In 2009, the Austin Museum of Art (AMOA) cancelled its plans for a new building downtown for the third time. Last December, AMOA sold the land on which it had been planning to build and in February it announced it would [...]

In an attempt to figure out what the hell has been going on at Texas institutions lately, I’ve been playing around with some numbers. Since the contemporary arts organizations I wanted to look at—Arthouse, The Dallas Contemporary and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston—don’t publish their annual reports online, I turned to their Form 990s. Form [...]