What don’t you like about museums? They offer information, cultural awareness, things to do and see, a nice place to meet people, personal enlightenment – and on and on. However, for people who live or work near art institutions, opening or expanding a museum it can mean noise, traffic congestion, gentrification, appropriation of public parkland and a bottomless pit for public money.
film maker George Lucas e Star Wars Fama 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 similar plans rejected in Chicago and San Francisco. Lucas gift-wrapped the $1 billion, seven-story, 400,000-square-foot museum each time, agreeing to pay for all construction costs and provide the museum with a $400 million endowment — but only Los Angeles saw it that way.
Between 2010 and 2014, Lucas tried to set up his own museum in a park near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Franciscoencountering considerable resistance from groups unwilling to give up public spaces for a private museum. He then offered to build it on an undeveloped 17-acre park plot between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan in Chicago, but it was was met with similar reactions from a group called Friends of the Park. “The park belongs to the state as a public trust and according to the doctrine of public trust”, he said Thomas Geogheganthe Chicago attorney representing Friends of the Park. “You cannot give public property to a private individual.”
The Los Angeles Exposition Park was deemed more appropriateas it is already 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 director’s extensive collection of illustration, photography, animation and comic art.
Opposition to museums is rare when their supporters seek to build or expand them. Perhaps the most notable recent example is Congress’s narrow rejection in mid-May of funding for the Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Museum at the National Center. It was another victim of the culture wars; House Republicans tried to exclude transgender people from any of the museum’s exhibits.
Many other opponents of museum construction and expansion argue that when institutions open, public land is taken away from the public. For several years, the lawsuits delayed the construction and opening of the Memphis Museum of Art (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, a few miles from downtown Overton Park, where it has stood for more than a century. The opposition, Friends for Our Waterfront, claimed the building would take up too much space, restrict access to the greenway and violate long-standing rules that riverfront land must be kept for public use. A judge ruled in March that a museum is a public use, clearing the way for construction to proceed.
Opposition to the construction of a William Eggleston The museum at Overton Park, however, was a success. The museum would have displayed the photography of the city’s most famous artist, but the plan never came up for discussion as city council members and supporters of the local zoo only wanted to debate whether an unused portion of the park should be used for additional parking. “The problem wasn’t with Eggleston,” he said Tina Sullivanformer executive director of the Overton Park Conservancy, “but on parking. Nothing can move forward until the parking decision is resolved, and that’s been going on for years with lawsuits back and forth.” Instead, the William Eggleston Foundation was created, loaning photographs to museums elsewhere.
Museums are certainly not in short supply. The Washington, D.C.-based Institute of Museum and Library Services estimates that there are about 35,000 museums of one kind or another in the United States, more than doubling the number since 1990. Some of those most concerned by the proliferation of museums are the communities in which new ones are proposed, worried about how an institution can change the massive face of construction without adding a single project to their neighborhood. cars and more foot traffic. And what if the museum fails to meet its fundraising goals or visitor numbers and memberships lag, especially if the municipality has issued a bond to help cover construction costs?
When the multimillionaire media mogul and philanthropist Fred Eichaner sought to expand his non-collectible architectural exhibition space, Wrightwood 659, into a condominium building in Chicago’s Lincoln Park through the purchase of units, a current owner who did not sell her home filed a lawsuit claiming that Eychaner’s plans would create construction noise and block her views and light. That lawsuit is still pending.
Last spring, political leaders in Jersey City blocked a proposed branch of France’s Pompidou Center in an abandoned downtown building. The city faced a $255 million budget shortfall and had already spent $20 million on consultants and another $4.5 million on licensing and branding rights to the Center Pompidou in Paris when the State of New Jersey canceled a $24 million grant for the project. Quite unlike George Lucas’ Museum of Narrative Art, the Pompidou Center would not cover all expenses.
Other museums have faced opposition 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 the opposition proving successful in each case. Those who contested expansion of the New Manhattan Museumwhich reopened in March, were not so lucky. In Spain, a two-decade-long effort to establish a Guggenheim outpost in a wildlife sanctuary near Bilbao was scrapped in 2025 after opponents claimed the plan had been implemented without sufficient community consultation on land declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984.
Objections may stem from land use or zoning issues (buildings considered too tall, for example), political tensions, or the simple feeling of not being in one’s backyard. Whatever the cause, the common thread is often institutional overreach. “Boards and directors often attempt to use the museum’s supposedly positive public image to incite opposition based on land use or neighbors.” Stephen Rustowdirector at Museoplan, a Brooklyn-based museum consulting firm, told the Observer. “This happened at MoMA, where the museum literally paid Museum Tower residents with renovations, new fixtures, and lifetime passes to appease their opposition to the 2000-2006 expansion.” Whether or not there is actual elitism on the part of museum officials, he added that “there is a class-based tension that sees patrician, moneyed interests trying to take advantage of regular working people.”
Museums are public charities, existing to benefit the public, but they don’t always seem that way to the communities around them. “I’ve never known a community that asked for a bigger museum. But many donors and collectors do,” said Stephen Reillythe founding director of the museum’s research institute Remuseum told the Observer.
Museums that make their surrounding communities a priority tend to experience less opposition and more acceptance. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, recently expanded its facility by 114,000 square meters—a move welcomed by area residents, Reily said, because “the purpose of the institution is to double down on a mission based on community access and engagement.” He also mentioned Los Angeles’ The Broad, which first opened in 2015, featuring Eli’s collection of modern and contemporary art and Edythe Broadand “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 regarded as “billionaire pet projects” to be gratefully received by the communities in which they are located, according to Mark Walhimermanaging partner of California-based Museum Planning LLC. “Museums that are succeeding in the current climate are those 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. Those who faced 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 true community outreach. Marcy Goodwinpresident of M. Goodwin Museum Planning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, criticized the “ignorance” of museum directors and founders who don’t know their communities, hold town hall hearings or even send out questionnaires “to ask people what they want.” She described “an explosion of self-dramatization among billionaires,” with creating museums of vanity as its most visible expression.
As a point of contrast, former President Obama sought to establish a presidential library in the Chicago park, which prompted a lawsuit from a group called Friends of the Park. However, those responsible for the realization of the library 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 he faced initially was a fight over land use, not a community rejection,” Walhimer told the Observer. “That’s a significant difference.”
The growing number of cases of opposition to museum creation and expansion may reflect a growing public expectation that museums earn their place—justifying their footprint, demonstrating their importance to surrounding communities, and committing to resist 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 “elites” and are anti-populist. “I take seriously the broader decline in public confidence in institutions,” he said Maria Elena Gutierrezfounder and president of museum planning company The Chora Group, adding that she advises institutions to take “serious steps in opening up and serving ever-wider audiences beyond elites.”
However, as the failure of the effort to create a Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Museum shows, the problems go beyond good intentions and good actions. “Museums that engage with American history — slavery, Reconstruction, the representation and experiences of communities of color — find themselves on the front lines of a national argument about who gets told the story and who controls the story,” Walhimer said. “This is not a communication problem that better contact can solve.”
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