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 | What is the story behind the show coming to Reno? |
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The exhibition came to Reno over a period of about a year and a half that we were working on both finding the exhibition and working with the Cantor Foundation to attract them here. I was familiar with it -- I went to a colleague's museum in Illinois and they raved about it and so we decided we would pursue it and see if we could get it here. We were looking for some really major types of exhibitions that we can start bringing, attracting to the community here, and Rodin seemed like a very good sort of first step in that direction. So, we contacted the museum and they referred us to the Cantor Foundation. We contacted them, and I essentially sort of sicced my curator on them, Diane Deming, and she really worked with the foundation and convinced them that we were capable of handling this kind of work. You know, there's a high value associated with the work. It's also extremely heavy work, and so it requires certain skills in art handling that a smaller institution couldn't handle. So we had to convince them that we could care for the work appropriately. We also wanted to convince them that having it here was good for them in that we would present it well, that we would articulate it to our community well, and that it would be well received. Obviously the result of that far exceeded our expectations and the community really adopted it. |
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"This is the best kept secret. We used to refer to it as the Stealth Museum."
| | How was the show received? |
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We scheduled the exhibition for three months, which was, in a way, kind of a risk for us. Normally our exhibitions are six weeks to eight weeks, but we felt that it was an important enough exhibition that we wanted to give it enough time, so we scheduled it for three months. We anticipated attendance to start dropping off in the second month and probably really drop off in the third month, and so for us it was kind of a test. Well, the exact opposite occurred. As the exhibition continued attendance rose, and in fact our last month's exceeded our first month's attendance by almost two thousand people. It spread by word of mouth. We had a good marketing campaign for the early part of the exhibition, but toward the end that had all sort of played out. It was just people telling other people and great press in the paper and all these sorts of things that worked out to the exhibition's benefit. Essentially over the exhibition we had nineteen thousand people, walk-ins, come in to the museum to see the exhibition, and that's not counting any of our school tours and any of our special events. Our total attendance for the three months was about twenty five to twenty six thousand people. |
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| | How does that compare to other shows? |
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Well, for example, last year we had a twenty percent growth in attendance at the museum, and we were up to a little over eleven thousand people in walk-in for the course of the whole year. Now, our total attendance for the year was about thirty five thousand, but in our walk-in traffic, and these are people who just come in to see the show, it was only about eleven thousand, which is not something we're really happy with. So this exhibition almost doubled that walk-in traffic in almost three months. |
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| | Did this show increase awareness, not just in the museum, but in the arts in general in Reno? |
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Well, it's a combination. How the arts are perceived in Reno is a changing phenomena right now, and it's a combination of things that are going on. I think certainly the Rodin exhibition really helped generate awareness for the arts and what the arts can do to the community, but in much the same way the performances of the Philharmonic, the opera's programs that they've been doing, the ballet, the dance theatre that's going on in the community, all these kinds of organizations work together to sort of raise the awareness of the arts in the community. So I wouldn't want to say that the exhibition did it alone, but the exhibition was certainly a key factor in generating awareness of what the museum can do. I think in the past people liked to say, "I didn't know there was a museum in Reno," and "This is the best kept secret." We used to refer to it as the Stealth Museum. But you can't do that now. What the exhibition really did for the museum was it created a sense that Reno does have a high quality art museum, and that it offers programs for people in the community, and no longer can you say it's a mystery or it's hidden. So for us that's phenomenal.
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Part I of Art Beat's interview with Steven High, Executive Director at the Nevada Museum of Art.
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