The Bellevue Arts Museum (Bam) in Washington state closed its doorways to the general public In September 2024 and entered into receivership following years of monetary issues. Now the establishment has agreed to promote its Steven Holl-designed constructing to KidsQuest Kids’s Museum. The $5m it can obtain from the sale, in response to Margo Vansynghel of The Seattle Instances, will permit Bam to repay its collectors and set up a brand new board for the surviving non-profit organisation, which can refocus its efforts on the native arts honest that was the preliminary impetus for the museum’s creation.
“Bam will proceed to nurture and help the humanities via the annual Bellevue Arts Truthful, one of many longest-running and largest occasions in Washington state,” Shelly Crocker, the court-appointed receiver now accountable for the museum, mentioned in a press release. “Moreover, we’re devoted to establishing an emerging-artist programme, a practice from Bam’s early days. Lastly, Bam is actively searching for a brand new bodily location to accommodate its in depth artwork library, show a choose assortment of visible artwork and host occasions that can proceed to help artwork and tradition in Bellevue, with extra updates to comply with.”
The choice to promote the constructing got here after contemplating whether or not the area people in Bellevue, a rich suburb of Seattle, truly wished a standard artwork museum, Crocker advised The Seattle Instances. She added that annual attendance to Bam had stood at round 15,000 to twenty,000 guests because the pandemic. KidsQuest, in the meantime, serves about 200,000 folks yearly; a transfer into the Holl constructing would permit it to increase its viewers to greater than 350,000 folks yearly, in response to a joint assertion.
The sale has the blessing of town council and the Freeman household—led by Bam’s long-time patron Kemper Freeman, whose real-estate firm owns the close by Bellevue Sq. mall and most of the buildings within the metropolis’s downtown hall. The developer additionally had a proper of first refusal on the museum constructing and land, which has a tax-assessed worth of $35m, in response to public data. (The Seattle Instances notes that depreciation and an absence of air rights above the property may decrease its market worth.) Crocker advised the newspaper that the sale value to KidQuest is under the industrial worth, as a result of it’s a non-profit and “the sale advantages the general public”.
KidQuest has till the tip of December to conduct due diligence on the property; the sale can be topic to approval in King County Superior Court docket. If the sale is finalised, KidQuest’s president and chief government, Putter Bert, estimates that the organisation might want to increase a further $60m to renovate the constructing. This consists of updating the bogs, elevators and heating, air flow and air-con, in addition to soundproofing it (to accommodate its neurodivergent younger guests) and putting in new exhibitions. The youngsters’s museum doesn’t plan to make any important modifications to the constructing’s construction, nevertheless, and hopes to open within the Holl constructing in 2029.
Bam, in the meantime, could solely maintain its acronym—as soon as it leaves the constructing and reorganises as a brand new non-profit, maybe someday subsequent 12 months.
