SLO art museum kills $12 million expansion: ‘If you look around this city, you can see why’
If you’ve been wondering when the San Luis Obispo Museum of Art is getting its swanky new building, we’ve got bad news.
It probably won’t be getting that upgrade any time soon.
The art museum, a fixture in downtown San Luis Obispo since 1968, was expected to expand to a new $12 million, three-story building that would triple exhibition space and add other amenities at its 1010 Broad St. location.
The plans were announced in 2017 and construction was expected to start in 2019, with a grand opening in 2020.
That won’t be happening now.
At a meeting of the nonprofit organization’s board of directors on Jan. 14, the board confirmed that it canceled a capital campaign that aimed to raise $15 million for the new building — effectively putting plans for the new center on hold.
“It ran for longer than was anticipated,” board member Barb Renshaw said during the meeting. “And the conclusion was that the time just wasn’t right. The community wasn’t going to come up with the money required to replace this building in the time frame.”
Renshaw cited a lack of interest from large-scale donors as the primary reason for the campaign’s termination.
“If you look around this city, you can see why,” she said. “People who are the owners of properties downtown, people who one would expect to make major contributions, have been building a lot of buildings which are not yet finished. Some are just barely finished. “
Renshaw said she believed the capital campaign could be revived sometime in the future when it seems like more donors would be able to commit resources to the project. But, she added, “that is not going to be shortly.”
The decision to stop the campaign, and by default the expansion project, came at a time of change for the art museum.
The board hired curator Ruta Saliklis in early 2019 as its interim executive director to replace longtime director Karen Kile, who retired after 20 years.
The museum’s finances were also in a difficult spot for most of 2019, the board revealed at its Jan. 14 meeting, but saw improvements after instituting a new budget plan in October 2019.
This story was originally published January 29, 2020 at 12:23 PM.
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