The Contemporary Jewish Museum’s decision to close for at least a year has rocked the Bay Area arts community.
“I just felt like it was a punch in the gut,” said ceramicist Liz Lauter, who currently has artwork on display in CJM’s California Jewish Open. “You lose your breath for a moment.”
The San Francisco museum pointed to years-long budget shortfalls, as well as declining attendance, as the primary reasons behind its Nov. 13 announcement. During the closure, CJM will cut its staff from 30 to 11. Museum leaders said they will use the downtime to “evaluate its financial framework and engage in intense planning and organizational assessment.”
Dec. 15 will be the last day CJM will welcome the public since its current site opened in 2008 across from Yerba Buena Gardens.
Artist Tiffany Shlain, who also has artwork in the California Jewish Open, said she was “not completely surprised” by CJM’s news because she’s known that museums — as well as the city’s downtown — have been struggling.
“I really hope that, in this year to restructure and rethink, it’ll come out on the other side — still there but in a new evolution,” she said.
CJM’s announcement noted that visitor numbers never fully bounced back after a yearlong pivot to virtual programming during the Covid-19 lockdowns that started in 2020.
Museums in general suffered during the pandemic, according to Paula Birnbaum, head of the museum studies master’s program at the University of San Francisco. Birnbaum noted that her program has had close and fruitful collaborations with CJM over the years.
“I think it’s really sad,” she said. “It has such a rich history of generosity to this community and creating stimulating dialogues around important social justice issues, using the arts as a lens to examine them.”
Birnbaum said she’s seen studies showing that only about half of U.S. museums have bounced back in terms of visitors since the start of Covid.
“I think it’s incredibly challenging to run a museum in the 21st century, never mind immediately following a pandemic and in the midst of a war in the Middle East,” she said, specifically for a Jewish museum.
Some Jewish nonprofits have seen donors shift money toward causes supporting Israel and fighting antisemitism since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre, subsequent war and global spike in antisemitism.
David Katznelson, CEO of Jewish arts and culture nonprofit Reboot, and Roberta Grossman, executive director of documentary nonprofit Jewish Story Partners, told eJewishPhilanthropy last month that it’s not unusual for donors to switch from funding the arts to what they see as more pressing needs during a time of crisis.
Kerry King, CJM’s executive director, told J. when the closure was announced that the political aftermath of Oct. 7 was just one of several factors that have affected the museum.
“Donors have so many things to think about, and Jewish donors today, especially. It’s been tough for all of us,” King said.
Birnbaum agreed.
“I think when there are political crises, cultural institutions can definitely suffer,” she said.
The ongoing war also caused some division among artists.
In April, several artists withdrew their work from CJM’s inaugural California Jewish Open in part because the museum would not divulge its funders or agree to divest from all funding sources associated with Israel.
“In our own community, there are artists and community members who are critical of the CJM, who would like to see it divest from pro-Israel funders,” Birnbaum said. “So there’s that issue as well.”
Rabbi Brian Lurie, the museum’s CEO from 1996 to 2000, was hired to help develop its current site and expand its mission after years in a small gallery space at the bottom of the Jewish Community Federation building. He oversaw the capital campaign for the museum’s landmark annex designed by architect Daniel Libeskind.
Lurie, too, attributed CJM’s closure to struggles that the museum and other venues have faced since the start of the pandemic. The lack of a return of significant foot traffic in the area also has been a problem, he said.
“The whole dynamic of San Francisco is in financial trouble,” he said. “I’m saddened by the reality.”
For Lauter, though, CJM’s announcement was a complete surprise. “I didn’t realize that the Jewish museum was having these problems,” she said.
CJM visitors will feel the loss, too. To many of them, the museum has never been just a place to view art. It has been a space for community.
Megan Micco of Berkeley has many fond memories of spending time there when her children were young.
Visiting CJM is about “remembering my mom, who’s no longer with us, and the memories of being with her,” she said. “Just having brunch and being with the kids, and then running around and running into friends.”
Micco said the museum’s announcement made her realize how much more you appreciate something when you realize you might lose it.
“I think there is this intersection of poignancy and memory that comes up when you think you might not have access to something,” she said. “It really provides a clarifying lens to how we look at things and how we value things.”
Brisbane artist Beth Grossman also sees the closure as a “big loss.”
“I stayed up really late writing a love letter to the CJM,” she said, after hearing the news.
While her work has been shown at CJM in the past, Grossman said she also values it as a Jewish cultural institution and an outward-facing manifestation of Jewish identity.
“I think that a lot of times antisemitism is caused by ignorance about what it means to be Jewish,” she said. “A cultural institution like the CJM could be a place to welcome people, to connect and converse and learn and understand the real diversity of who we are as American Jews.”
Grossman said she deeply appreciates CJM as a place where the Jewish story of today has been told.
“Not as an old story, not stuck in the Holocaust or in the shtetl or any of those kinds of things,” she said. “This is a culture that’s living and growing and changing and wrestling with contemporary issues.”
On Dec. 15 — the last day the galleries will be open — Shlain and artist Amy Trachtenberg will give a long-scheduled talk on connecting to Jewishness through art. The event will be sad, Shlain said, but it will feel fitting, too, to come together on that day.
“Maybe there can be some ritual we can do in hopes that in a year it’s going to come back in a new form that is still going to be vibrant and powerful for the community,” she said.
While community programming will be suspended during the hiatus, including CJM’s arts education outreach, people will continue to have access to evergreen educational content on CJM’s website. The museum will also be available as a rental space.
It is free to visit the galleries until the museum closes. The exhibits include the California Jewish Open, which includes Lauter’s sculpture of a woman’s head decorated with an ornate headdress of birds and flowers.
Lauter said she’d like to see a transformed CJM tap into the wider arts community, which is full of talented people looking for a place to show their work.
“Open up,” she said. “Become part of the community more. It’s a hungry, active arts community.”