New Orleans Museum of Art Fighting to Survive
— -- The baseball-sized French glass Mardi Gras beads still dangle on live oak trees outside the New Orleans Museumof Art. Somehow, they defied Hurricane Katrina's fury.
The Degas, Monet and Gauguin paintings, the jeweled Fabergeeggs, the Ansel Adams photographs, they're all safe inside. Eventhough storm winds uprooted 60-foot-tall trees nearby and8-foot-deep floodwaters surrounded the museum like a lake with anisland castle, the art treasures were spared.
But the museum wasn't and its scars are just beginning to show.
The New Orleans Museum of Art has been forced to lay off most ofits 86 workers, it must raise millions of dollars to survive thenext few years and it will not reopen its doors for months. Andthat's just for starters.
"It's going to take years to get back to where we were," saysJackie Sullivan, the museum's deputy director. "The toughest timeis definitely now."
The museum's plight typifies the dilemma a cultural institutionhere - especially one dependent on city dollars - faces in thispost-Katrina era. New Orleans has no money, no sizable number oftourists and no crystal ball to predict when all will change.
Then there's the matter of priorities.
In a city where hundreds of people died, thousands of homes weredestroyed, jobs are gone and schools and businesses closed, thepreservation of an art museum just doesn't rank at the top of themust-do list.
But E. John Bullard, the museum's director, argues that art mustbe a part of the city's revival.
"Obviously, the people have to have houses to live in," hesays. "They have to have hospitals. They have to have schools. Ithink museums ... are on the same level. You can't live in acultural desert. Especially in New Orleans. You just can't."
The 94-year-old museum, a neoclassical white stone building seton a circle, is important, too, because it attracts out-of-townvisitors - and that means money.
"I think the city has wakened up to the fact that tourism isits last great hope," says John Keefe, one of the laid-off museumworkers.
The museum needs $15 million in the next three years and is nowtrying to raise money to make up for losing visitors (about 150,000a year) and fees from its 10,000 members, many of whom have fledNew Orleans. "We're hanging out a little tin cup," says Bullard, who sayshis recent trip to New York to appeal to foundations for helpbrought in pledges of $900,000.
