The Contemporary Jewish Museum is selling its landmark building in downtown San Francisco.
The decision, announced Wednesday, comes 15 months after the museum closed its doors and laid off most of its staff due to financial constraints, amid a promise to restructure.
“I will tell you that the decision on the building was not made lightly,” CJM board chair Tom Kasten told J. “We weighed it very carefully, but we also felt that the building itself does not define the museum.”
At the time of the closure in December 2024, Kasten and others told the community that they would begin a “period of intense reimagining.”
Despite the planned sale, executive director Kerry King said she has come out of this period optimistic about the museum’s future. In a year, “what I would most like to be saying to you is that we have a curatorial team in place, and we’re working toward our exhibitions,” she said.
“But to get from here to there, we have the step of fully stabilizing our finances,” she added. “We have come a long way in a year.”
King said the museum’s recent financial struggles should be seen in the broader context of a post-pandemic, post-Oct. 7 world.
Kasten called it a “perfect storm” of Covid, an economic downturn in San Francisco and a struggling U.S. economy. He told J. when the initial closure was announced that annual operating expenses had been outpacing operating revenue. (The shortfall was around $6 million in the fiscal year ending in June 2024, according to tax filings.)
CJM leaders told J. there was a roughly 50 percent drop in attendance between 2019 — before the pandemic — and a 12-month period in 2023-2024.
With years-long budget shortfalls and declining attendance, King said, preserving the museum’s $20 million endowment was, and continues to be, a paramount priority.
“We wanted to make sure that we keep that fully intact,” she said. “We have done that. We had significant debt on the building. We still have debt, but we paid half of it over this past year.”
Founded in 1984 as the Jewish Community Museum, the institution first produced modest exhibitions in a small gallery space in the Jewish Federation building on Steuart Street. That museum kicked off with two shows: one with Judaica treasures and the other with a sukkah art competition.
(Gary Sexton Photography/ Courtesy CJM)
Over time, the museum grew and so did plans for its future.
In the early 1990s, board members, including Roselyne “Cissie” Swig, the San Francisco philanthropist and advocate for the arts, were determined to create a new home worthy of the museum’s potential. After a series of setbacks and delays, Rabbi Brian Lurie was drafted to lead the organization as its CEO in 1996. Two years later, world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind was commissioned to design the new CJM.
Libeskind combined a 19th-century former brick power substation on Minna Street with a gleaming, tilted cube of a structure that succeeded both in setting the museum apart from its surroundings and weaving it into the modern cityscape of downtown San Francisco. The 63,000-square-foot museum opened in June 2008.
In 2007, Libeskind spoke rhapsodically about his design. “The blue is a carefully considered choice, signifying the right relationship with the red of the brickwork,” he said. “It’s the color of Israel, the color of the Mediterranean, even the color of the tallit.”
CJM would be a “noncollecting” art institution that would instead host short-term exhibits of contemporary Jewish art, the board decided. Much of the original museum’s historic trove of art and artifacts had been transferred to what is now the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life in Berkeley.
Paula Birnbaum, head of the master’s program in museum studies at the University of San Francisco, told J. on the occasion of the building’s 10th anniversary in 2018, that there are challenges with a noncollecting model, including “how to raise money, and court patrons and trustee-collectors, without being able to offer a home for their works.”
The museum’s future home is unknown. King said that “some of our options will be clearer once it’s known that we are going to be listing the building for sale. It’s certainly an option that we stay in part of the building.”
Meanwhile, King said museum leaders will be in “conversation with artists and curators and members of the community” to hear “how we can stay active,” such as offering traveling exhibits across the Bay Area.
Was the museum overly ambitious in investing in a downtown building? It opened to great fanfare after an $80 million fundraising campaign — $47 million for the building and the land, and the rest for operating expenses, setting up the space and funding an endowment.
King said ambition wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“We’re very proud of what we’ve done,” she said. “We’re very proud of the incredibly bold and thoughtful group that raised the money, came together and built the building.”
“I suspect some people will be sad or angry” about the sale, Kasten added. “But I’m hoping that by focusing on our exhibitions, programming, on Jewish life and themes and ideas through the lens of contemporary art, that they will agree that we are making the right decisions for the future.”
Like Kasten, King is looking forward to the museum’s transformation.
“From the beginning, from the 1980s, from the development of the idea of the CJM, through all of the changes and where we are today,” she said, “we believe in the same need for this to be an institution that is unique in bringing Jewish stories through contemporary art to our Jewish community and beyond.”