A snowball that became an avalanche. Lessons from the financial struggles of the Bellevue Arts Museum

What started as an art fair made it big in 2001, when the Bellevue Arts Museum opened its brand-new building on the corner of Sixth Street and Bellevue Way.

But in the decades since opening its doors, BAM has struggled financially -- and in recent reporting, The Seattle Times’ Margo Vansynghel found that a recent fundraiser was just one symptom of larger financial struggles.

BAM launched an emergency fundraiser in February to survive what it said were "dire financial crises." In a nutshell, without an emergency injection of funds the museum was running out of cash and at risk of closing its doors. In press releases, museum officials noted the burden the pandemic placed on museums, alongside shifts in audience habits and philanthropy.

The February fundraising drive managed to exceed the museum's fundraising goal, but according to Vansynghel, the sources of the problem ran deeper.

"It's basically a snowball that started 20 years before and became an avalanche," said Vansynghel, who spoke with dozens of current and former employees for her story on the longstanding roots of the museum's struggles. "Taking on debts, leadership turnover, over-relying on a small group of funders — and all these things work together to create this big, intractable issue."

When it was originally formed, BAM sought to operate as an "education-focused museum," which meant it wouldn't house a permanent art collection and would instead rely on rotating local and traveling exhibits.

"The upside of BAMs model is that storage is expensive, taking care of art is very expensive. The downside of that is you have to bring in every exhibit and that is time consuming and expensive as well," Vansynghel said.

That flexibility in gallery options has been integral to the mission of BAM, which wanted to show the more crafty to the avant-garde. Over the years, it's become an integral piece of the region's rich arts ecosystem, especially for artists who reach their ceiling in the gallery and commercial circuits and are looking for the next step up in their artistic careers.

The East Side community also appeared to have bought into the mission and value of having a bonafide arts institute like BAM in the area. Early backers of the museum included tech moguls Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Microsoft executive John Shirley and his wife, Mary.

But BAM has struggled to source a critical, though not always necessary, mechanism for funding: an endowment, which acts as a kind of investment savings account and can make up close to 20% of a museum's income. The museum had managed to secure funding for an endowment in its early years, before turning those funds toward immediate operating expenses as projections for foot traffic fell short and the dot-com bust affected philanthropy.

"This pattern of patching holes by making new ones goes back to that time," Vansynghel said.

BAM's new executive director, Kate Casprowiak Scher, says a new era of change and transparency is on the horizon for the institution, and that means an inevitable move away from living fundraiser to fundraiser.

"You see some of these issues playing out in a variety of museums, and experts that I've talked to also bring this back to the precarious state of many small museums in America that are just, in general, more reliant on philanthropy given the lack of public support," Vansynghel said. "I think in that way, it could be kind of a cautionary tale or example of how close to the edge some museums can can live in in the United States."

Read Margo Vansynghel's full reporting for the Seattle Times here.

You can listen to the full Soundside interview by clicking "play" on the audio icon at the top of this story.