(VOICEOVER): The following program is a production of Ozarks Public Television.

Good evening and welcome to Sense of Community.

I'm Jennifer Moore.

The Springfield Art Museum has launched a 30 year plan for the future of their campus.

Tonight's guest, executive director Nick Nelson, will walk us through the changes happening at Springfield's Art Museum.

Join us as we learn more about this plan and what it means to our community.

(VOICEOVER): Welcome to Sense of Community.

Sense of Community is a Public Affairs Presentation of Ozarks Public Television.

Nick Nelson, thank you so much for joining us.

It's a pleasure to be here.

The Springfield Art Museum recently broke ground on the first phase of its 30 year master plan.

And I know it's hard to summarize a 30 year plan.

But I want to try and break that down for our viewers if I can a little bit.

If you had to summarize the themes or the priorities in the long range master plan, how would you do that for Springfield Art Museum?

I think that the overarching themes, there are really kind of two really big ideas that we're working with here.

One is this idea of sort of completing the museum.

The museum moved to its location in Phelps Grove Park in 1958.

We built a small gallery and some classrooms over there.

Actually, the original museum building is our-- serves as our education wing right now.

And so over the decades, we've added to the museum.

In the '70s, we built our auditorium.

In the '90s, we built our Musgrave wing-- our Jeanette Musgrave wing, which houses are permanent collection.

And then from there, in 2008, we built the latest wing that is sort of the entry point of the museum today and made some improvements throughout.

And so through these additions over these decades, we've retained that small original wing.

It was built in the '50s or into the '50s, really, for a Springfield that was you know a much smaller community.

A museum that served a smaller audience and a smaller geographic range.

And I think it was just because our community has grown so much since then that it really calls for us to rebuild that part of the museum as a 21st century museum.

You know, a museum that sees the needs or meets the needs of our current audiences.

Many of these audiences are tour groups coming from rural areas.

You know, art enthusiasts from our community.

I mean, it's just a broad and diverse group of audience members that we serve.

So one theme is sort of completing-- bringing all of those additions that have been done over the decades together and providing more community space that meets the needs of the 21st century Springfield.

Yeah, so that's one theme.

The other theme is about connectivity.

And that's a really big part of what we're doing.

So connectivity on a number of levels.

Physical connectivity to other places-- other places within the city.

You know, from the time I arrived at the museum almost nine years ago, you know I was really struck by the proximity to Phelps Grove Park and all of the wonderful green spaces surrounding the museum.

But there were-- these faces weren't really connected.

You know, you could go to the park and not even be aware that the museum was there.

You know, people coming to the museum.

There were a lot of barriers to just sort of making your way over to the park.

And of course, to the south of the museum we have this wonderful zeroscape garden-- it's a waterwise garden that's just a wonderful space.

So we were thinking about how do we leverage all of those surrounding amenities and create a single sort of experience, almost like a campus-- a museum campus using the park that already exists and a museum that already exists.

So how do we connect those things?

Oh, terrific.

And that's such a beautiful art area.

And to go beyond that, you know we are sitting in Phelps Grove Park.

Just up the street from us is Fassnight Creek Greenway Trail that runs to Fassnight Park from, I think, about Jefferson Avenue.

And so it was-- the dream was sort of, what if we could connect the Fassnight Creek Greenway Trail to the museum to Fassnight Park?

Then, you have a museum and a park connected to another park via a trail.

And then, suddenly, it starts to grow from there.

This idea of connecting parts of the city and parts of our community was really a key part of this and-- Sorry to interrupt you.

And I was just-- that leads right into you broke ground on phase one.

Give us some of the details on what exactly phase one entails.

Phase one, so when we got into this plan, we had-- and I was just talking about sort of the big picture, connectivity, completing the museum.

And it's wonderful to think about these sort of lofty ideas.

But then, you kind of hit reality.

And early on in the process, we discovered through our architectural firm that we were going to be put in a FEMA floodplain.

So that was-- you know, you kind of move from these big ideas of connecting a museum to the community, connecting through parks and trails, and all of that.

And then, it's like, well, guys, you might have to move.

And that's because FEMA is drawing its floodplain maps, right?

FEMA is redrawing its floodplain maps.

And you know, as I said, the museum was built in the '50s.

The channel in front of the museum was built in the-- for a much smaller Springfield.

You know, I don't want to say the number of acres in the watershed, but it's a pretty large watershed that comes through there and it's a very narrow shallow channel.

And so it just sort of tops over and spills out and.

And of course, threatens the museum.

So in that process of redrawing those floodplain maps, we were going to be put right in the hundred year and 500 year floodplain, which you know when you're an art museum, that's not a good thing.

So we had to really rethink or sharpen our pencils and figure out how to solve that problem.

Because the first response was, have you considered relocating?

Well, you couldn't build or-- I don't care what your budget is, you could not recreate what we have there in Phelps Grove Park.

And it's right in the center of the city, geographically speaking.

You have this incredible historic park.

You have all of these amenities and accessibility.

We're right off National Avenue, which is a major thoroughfare.

So it was like, there's no way we would want to move from here and leave it.

So what's the solution?

Well, the solution was to naturalize Fassnight Creek and bring it back to the state of sort of an Ozark Creek that may have-- what Fassnight Creek may have looked like before all of the development around it.

And so what it ultimately does is it widens the creek and gives a place for that water to sort of flatten out and spread out so it doesn't go into the neighborhood, it doesn't go into the museum.

But it also creates a wonderful opportunity for us to celebrate our natural world and our natural Ozarks heritage here.

And in our run up to the master plan, we did a lot of study of the community.

We did a lot of focus groups.

Talked to a lot of people.

And something that kept rising to the top was this connection to nature.

So when I go back to the big theme of the master plan, one being connectivity.

It's not just about connecting on trails, but also connecting art to nature.

Connecting the interior of the museum to the exterior.

And sort of breaking down boundaries so that you can experience all of these things at once, which I think is a wonderful part of what the master plan does.

So this phase one, it serves two purposes.

To save the museum, get us out of the floodplain.

And to create an amenity that celebrates our natural world and our natural place here in the Ozarks.

We are here now in the middle of July.

How far is the art museum into phase one?

We're really far into it.

If you come by the museum, you'll see how far into it we are.

In March, we started the work on the stormwater project.

And they've been working away at it ever since.

And we're hoping to be done by the end of fall, early winter.

And so the majority of the ground work is this naturalization project.

It takes up about probably 75% of the grounds.

And then, another aspect of this will be improvements to our parking.

A goal of the master plan is to create a continuous green space from the historic amphitheater on the west side of our grounds to the front door of the museum.

So what this is-- what we're trying to do is move the parking lot to the north side of the property.

So we were very fortunate to get funding to do that.

And so this coming July, we're going to be opening bids on that project.

And it's a much shorter timeline of a project.

It's about three or four months.

So I'm hoping that by middle or the beginning of next year 2022, we'll have this work done and the majority of phase one will be complete.

Great.

You touched on funding for that particular project.

I'm curious, more broadly, how much of the Springfield Art Museum is privately funded and how much is publicly funded?

The art museum itself, its budget about 80% to 85% is publicly funded.

The rest comes through donations, earned revenue, and other sources.

For this project, phase one, the majority of it is publicly funded because it's a stormwater project.

So that's-- and those funds are coming from a lot of places.

From city funding, from grants, from EPA, and other sources, DNR.

So but the majority of that is publicly funded.

Gotcha.

So tell me about the decision making process within the Springfield Art Museum.

And that can be whether it's on which you know acquisitions curating or even on a larger scale like the master plan.

But who-- tell us about the decision making process.

Is there a board?

Is there input from community members?

Well, they're both.

There's a board that is made up of community members.

A nine member board, a city appointed board.

The requirements for board service are you have live within city limits for two years.

So that's pretty much it.

And you apply through the city and are appointed by the city manager and city council.

So that board is the administrative board that oversees the art museum.

And of course, we seek other community input as well.

When I got to the museum, we jumped into a strategic planning process.

We did a lot of focus groups.

And input from the community was really important to figure out where we want to go.

And it continues to be so.

With the master plan, we convened focus groups from the community.

We reached out to the neighborhood associations-- Phelps Grove Neighborhood Association.

We worked with the city.

We also studied the community as well.

We looked at the strategic plans of the school systems in Springfield public schools.

We looked at strategic plans of other arts organizations.

We looked at past comprehensive plans for the city.

So we just kind of gathered as much information as possible, whether through interviews or through study and kind of compiled everything and started to synthesize that.

And through that process, themes started to kind of bubble to the top.

For instance, I talked about the love of nature and the interest in nature-- the interest in connectivity throughout the city.

And so those were the things that really drove what you see in that master plan.

The museum had to shut down for some time during the pandemic.

But you shifted gears and you still tried to bring joy and art to the community in other ways.

Tell us, if you can, a little bit about how the museum is doing through the pandemic and what you reverted to for some of those projects.

Yeah, so the pandemic, like with everybody, was really kind of a difficult time and still is.

I mean, it's still ongoing.

And so you know we came together and sort of started to prioritize or create some priorities for what the museum would do.

And I think our top priority was to focus on the health and wellness of our community.

So you know adhering very strictly to those-- any restrictions.

You know, that was really important.

And then, just being very careful in how we moved forward to put the health and safety of our community, our staff, our board, and volunteers first.

And that was really kind of the driving sort of ethos in terms of how we made decisions.

We also wanted to be very mindful of the resources we could provide the community.

And we wanted to be mindful of the continuity of service.

So we were kind of pulled in two directions.

One was to be very cautious, one was to serve the community.

And so we came up with a couple of projects that I think were really successful.

The one that I'm most proud of and think was most successful were project bags that we did.

We looked at our collection and our exhibitions and we came up with some very simple art projects that could all fit in sort of a paper sack.

And it had-- these bags had of a bio of each artist and some information about the artwork that was in the collection are on display.

And then, some art supplies.

And then, people could sign up, pick them up, and take them home and work on them together as a family or as a group.

We also provided that to schools in lieu of tours because we couldn't really do tours of the museum.

And we ended up distributing over 10,000 of these bags.

And the thing that was really wonderful about it, all these were done for free.

Nobody had to pay for a bag.

So it is a free service that we provided.

We decided to do-- to sort of lean on that rather than sort of Zoom classes or Zoom lectures.

Because I think we were also understanding that people were kind of Zoomed out.

Having a small child myself who was in virtual school and a lot of the staff members had that.

It was like, we can't-- we don't want to do another-- we don't want to do another Zoom meeting with our kids.

So I think what people were-- I think the reason it was-- people responded to it was because it wasn't that virtual experience.

It was about you and the people you care about getting together, making something, and learning about something through this art activity and learning about an object.

Tell me what makes Springfield's Art Museum unique.

I think the thing that makes us unique is that we're your museum.

And to kind of dig into that, you know there are a lot of museums and some really wonderful museums close by or you know in St. Louis or Kansas City or Bentonville or other places like that.

What makes us unique is we are your community's museum.

We've been in the community since 1928.

We have some really wonderful programs that have spanned generations.

Our fifth grade field trips, we've been doing those since I think the 1940s.

We've been exhibiting the all school exhibition, which is a show of student work in a-- K-12 student work that we do every March and April.

We've been doing that, I think, since the '30s or something like that.

So I think the things that I'm most proud of about our museum is that longevity and that connection to the community across generations.

We are-- and when you asked about what the decision-- where the decision making or how decision making kind of happens, I think we always start with the community in mind, our audience in mind, and our impact-- the impact that we have on the community.

I'm curious how the museum world, in general, has been recovering from the pandemic.

And what, if anything, makes Springfield unique in that way?

Well, the museum world is-- like everything, has been hit hard.

I mean, a lot of museums have been closed or had to close for an extended period of time.

Museums rely on admission charges.

They rely on program fees.

So if you sign up for a class or-- they rely on fundraisers-- fundraising events and other things like that.

So you know there's a saying, no margin, no mission, right?

So you know when you take away that-- those revenue sources, they struggled mightily.

In fact, there's a-- I read in an article recently, and I think it was said that about a third of museums won't come back from the pandemic.

So you have massive lay off of staff.

You have-- it's just not been good, as you can imagine.

Springfield is growing.

I mean, you're adding some staff members, right?

Yes, absolutely.

Well, we're very fortunate that we have some public support.

Earlier when you asked about our funding, about 85% comes from public support through property tax.

So what that's been able to do-- what that has enabled us to do is have some incredible stability.

We certainly didn't leave the pandemic unscathed.

We went-- our attendance has just sort of bottomed out.

To give you an idea, the December before 2020, we had-- I think this was in 2019, we had somewhere around 3,000, 3,500 people come through the museum that month-- that December.

Well, the December in 2020, I think we had 600, 650, or something-- or 690 people.

So that kind of gives you an idea of just how few people were coming through.

And then, also, you know we also rely on earned revenue for classes and we do our own fundraisers.

So I mean, we lost, I would say, a significant amount of revenue.

We were able to weather it by cutting expenses.

But I think we-- because of that stable support from the city through the property tax, we were able to do better than other places.

But we have a lot to build back.

And that's what you see us sort of moving towards.

And also with some of the growth, these are things that were planned before the pandemic.

And then, suddenly had to-- we had to put the brakes on right as the pandemic happened.

So we're almost out of time.

But briefly, what do you want area residents, both within Springfield and our wider viewer audience, to know about the Springfield Art Museum?

Well, I think, it's yours.

I think that it goes back to what makes us unique.

We are your community museum.

We welcome you.

We hope that you'll come by and take part in the programs that we offer, the exhibitions that we offer.

We work very hard to offer as many programs at no cost or low cost to make sure that there are no barriers-- economic barriers.

We're working hard to partner with parts of our community to bring more people in.

But I think, ultimately, it's your museum.

It's your art collection.

And you know we hold it for you and hope that you can come by and enjoy it.

And then, lastly, what is up and coming this-- later this summer or this fall, perhaps, at the museum?

We have three really wonderful exhibitions.

One is a collection of prints by Jacques Callot, who was an 18th century printmaker etcher.

An exhibition of Rose O'Neill's Kewpie Comics, which are always a lot of fun.

And then later on in the fall we have an exhibition by a printmaker named Michael Mazur who did the whole series on Dante's Inferno.

So there's going to be a lot of really wonderful etchings and printmaking and illustration works up at the museum this fall.

And we are really excited to welcome people back.

Excellent.

And Rose O'Neil with a tie to Springfield with the Kewpie dolls.

Yes, absolutely.

Well, Nick Nelson, this has been a pleasure and best of luck with everything in the plans at the Springfield Art Museum.

Thank you.

And we want to thank you for watching.

We are going to leave you with some websites and phone numbers where you can go to learn more information.

Thanks again and have a good night.

(VOICEOVER): Here is where you can find more information about the topics covered in this program.

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