The Washington Business Journal breaks the bad news at the Bead Museum: the museum will shutter at the end of this year. The report describes the museum’s woes:
Despite minimal money spent on marketing and collaborating with other cultural and community groups, the 1,600-square-foot museum could not stay afloat. Competition with D.C. tourists vying to see the visible Smithsonian Institution sites along the National Mall did not help. The Bead Museum is tucked inside the Jenifer Building at 400 7th St. NW.
The museum’s main income stream has come from gift shop sales and twice-yearly bead bazaar sales. The rest comes from membership fees and donations.
The report keys in on museum officials’ hopes that foot traffic would increase with the opening of the Textile Museum in the neighborhood in 2008. But the sales associated with foot traffic weren’t the Bead Museum’s problem. Or rather, problems.
According to publicly available tax records, net receipts (from gift-store and other sales activies) reached their highest mark in fiscal year 2007, at $71,259 — up from FY 2006’s $63,970 and consistent with performance in prior years. In addition, the Bead Museum reported $26,189 in additional revenue — receipts that dwarfed figures from FY 2006 ($842) and FY 2005 ($1,027). By all accounts, the Bead Museum enjoyed a strong year in sales last year. (Figures for FY 2008 are not available.)
The Bead Museum did not enjoy much in the way of public support, however. Membership fees declined over the last few years, though not precipitously. Program service revenue — including government contracts and the like — dropped from $105,777 in FY 2005 to $70,377 in FY 2007. However, the sharpest decline came in direct support: contributions, gifts, and grants. These figures dropped from $34,215 in FY 2005 to $24,124 in FY 2006 — before falling a whole order of magnitude in FY 2007, when direct contributions totaled $2,016.
At the same time, the rent went up. Occupancy costs nearly doubled from FY 2005 to FY 2007, rising from $37,000 to $67,000. From the tax records, a loose sketch emerges of an organization that began to lose its footing while its station in Penn Quarter continued to prove untenable.
One wonders whether the Bead Museum ever approached the Textile Museum about combining forces to create a Craft Museum. (Probably an unimaginable horror to the hardcore advocates of the respective bead and text arts.) Will you miss the Bead Museum, Washington?
Bead Museum photograph used with permission under a Creative Commons license with Flickr user stgermh
