Chicago museum of veterans’ art battles for survival
CHICAGO |
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Joe Fornelli knows the art of survival.
In 1965, when he was 22, the Chicago native was drafted and sent to Vietnam, where he served in an army helicopter unit.
“So many crazy things happened, people getting killed or wounded or burned,” Fornelli said. “You never get over it.”
He found solace in art. One time he used instant coffee and water to paint the realities of war.
Fornelli and his fellow veteran artists find themselves in the midst of another battle — to save their beloved National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, which is struggling.
The museum houses more than 2,000 pieces of art by veterans from World War II to the current conflicts in the Middle East.
“We’ve got trained artists. We’ve got self-taught artists. We have people that probably would not even consider themselves artists,” said Mike Helbing, 64, a professional artist, Vietnam vet and the museum’s chairman.
What is now the National Veterans Art Museum started in 1981 as a traveling exhibit but found a home in 1996 when it bought an abandoned building from Chicago for one dollar.
“It was just a rat hole,” said Fornelli, an artist liaison and one of the co-founders.
The building was in Chicago’s South Loop, a largely industrial neighborhood then, that museum directors hoped would eventually draw tourists. Instead, it boomed as a residential neighborhood of expensive condos and townhomes.
In 2007 and in dire financial straits, the museum sold the building back to the city using the money to dig out of a financial hole. The building was then sold to the Chicago Park District, and the museum is now a rent-free tenant.
“They hoped things would turn around but did not have a turnaround plan,” said Levi Moore, the museum’s executive director, who was hired a year ago.
The museum has a use agreement with the park district that expires next April. After that, the museum will have to go. Moore said that leaves less than a year to raise more than $3 million dollars and find a new home. The money would pay to set up shop in a new location and ensure operating costs were covered for several years.
With the country slowly digging out of the economic downturn, the timing could not be worse.
More than 70 percent of museums in the United States reported economic stress, according to an April 2011 report from the American Association of Museums. Ford Bell, the association’s president, said small museums are
Article source: PRNewswire
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