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Dr. M-----------
FINC 4950
15 February 2011

Report Morris Art Museum

The Morris Art Museum has the purpose to broaden the knowledge and understanding of the visual arts in Central Savannah River Area, preserve and display works of art, develop and maintain a library and research center focusing on Southern American painting. As the museum pioneer John Cotton Dana once wrote, “a good museum attracts, entertains, arouses curiosity, leads questioning, and promotes learning.” In my visit at Morris museum I could learn and understand some contexts and in a certain way, how to manage a museum. To begin with, the museum is a nonprofit organization, so it raises money to pay its operating costs. The ways that the museum raises money is through annual fund raisers, in selling and renting some donated paintings that the museum is not interested at the time, the museum just exhibit 4% of the total paintings that it has in storage below the museum, and from 65 sponsors, their biggest source of money. Also, the museum has costs; organizing exhibitions is hard and the museum has design costs, advertising costs, and operating costs. For instance, there are some paintings that need an extra care to preserve it; depending the painting, even the light that illuminates the painting has to be put in a certain angle and distance to better preserve the painting. Since is very hard to know how much is worth a painting, is difficult to know how much the museum can make profit when selling or renting their paintings; however, when selling or renting, the advantage is that the museum does not need to pay its preservation cost, it just pays the shipping of the painting. The museum has a budget of approximately 3.3 million yearly; this money is used to pay the museum’s expenses and by the end of the year the museum hopes