What’s not to like about museums? They provide information, cultural awareness, things to do and see, a nice place to meet people, personal enlightenment – and so on. However, for people who live or work near arts institutions, opening or expanding a museum could mean noise, traffic congestion, gentrification, the taking of public parks and an endless collapse of public funds.
Director George Lucas star wars Famously aware of the praise and condemnation that museums attract, he plans to open the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park next December after a 16-year effort that saw the same plans rejected in Chicago and San Francisco. Lucas packed the seven-story, 400,000-square-foot museum worth $1 billion as a gift at a time, agreeing to pay all construction costs and provide the museum with a $400 million endowment—but only Los Angeles saw it that way.
Between 2010 and 2014, Lucas sought to locate his museum in a park near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, encountering significant resistance from groups unwilling to cede public space to a private museum. He then offered to build it on an undeveloped 17-acre parcel between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan in Chicago, but was met with a similar response from a group called Friends of the Park. “The park belongs to the state as a public trust, under the principle of public trust,” said Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago attorney who represents Friends of the Park. “You cannot give public property to a private individual.”
Los Angeles Exposition Park was considered a better fit, as it is already home to several museums, the Academy of Sciences and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the USC Trojans play football. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will feature the director’s extensive collection of illustration, photography, animation and comic art.
Opposition to museums is not uncommon when their supporters seek to build or expand them. Perhaps the most notable recent example was Congress’s narrow refusal in mid-May to fund the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall. It was another victim of the culture wars. Republicans in the House of Representatives sought to exclude transgender people from any of the museum’s exhibits.
Many others opposed to museum construction and expansion say that when institutions open, public lands are taken away from the public. For several years, lawsuits have delayed the construction and opening of the Memphis Museum of Art (formerly the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art) in Tennessee, which will open in September in its new home on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, several miles from downtown Overton Park where it has remained for more than a century. The opposition, Friends of Our Waterfront, claimed the building would take up too much space, limit greenway access and violate long-standing rules that riverfront land must be reserved for public use. A judge ruled in March that the museum was for public use, paving the way for construction to continue.
However, opposition to the construction of the William Eggleston Museum in Overton Park was successful. The museum was supposed to display the photograph of the city’s most famous artist, but the plan was never brought up for discussion, as city council members and supporters of the local zoo only wanted to discuss whether an unused section of the park should be used for additional parking. “The problem wasn’t with Eggleston, it was the parking,” said Tina Sullivan, former executive director of the Overton Park Conservancy. “Nothing could move forward until the parking resolution was resolved, and this went on for years with lawsuits back and forth.” Instead, the William Eggleston Foundation was set up, loaning the images to museums elsewhere.
Museums are certainly not in short supply. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, based in Washington, D.C., estimates that there are about 35,000 museums of one kind or another in the United States, more than doubling the number since 1990. One of the communities most troubled by the proliferation of museums are those where new museums are being proposed, concerned about how an institution might change the character of their neighborhood — a massive construction project that adds noise, blocks views, brings in more cars and more foot traffic. What if the museum fails to meet its fundraising goals or visitor numbers and membership lag, especially if the municipality issues a bond to help cover construction costs?
When millionaire media mogul and philanthropist Fred Echaner sought to expand the space of his non-assembly architecture gallery, Wrightwood 659, in an apartment building in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, by purchasing units, the current owner, who had not sold her house, filed a lawsuit claiming that Echaner’s plans would create building noise and block her views and light. This lawsuit is still pending.
Last spring, Jersey City political leaders put the brakes on a proposed branch of France’s Center Pompidou in an abandoned building downtown. The city faced a budget shortfall of $255 million, and had already spent $20 million on consultants and another $4.5 million for licensing and branding rights for the Pompidou Center in Paris when the state of New Jersey canceled a $24 million grant for the project. Unlike the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts, the Center Pompidou will not bear all the costs.
Other museums have faced opposition from local residents when they sought to expand their presence, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Frick Collection, with the opposition proving largely successful in each case. Those who opposed the expansion of the new Manhattan Museum, which reopened in March, were not so lucky. In Spain, a two-decade-long effort to establish a Guggenheim site on a wildlife reserve near Bilbao was dropped in 2025 after opponents claimed the plan had been implemented without adequate community consultation on land that was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984.
Objections may stem from land use or zoning issues (buildings deemed too tall, for example), political tensions, or obvious ‘I don’t like’ sentiments. Whatever the reason, the common denominator is often institutional overreach. “Boards and directors often try to use a museum’s supposedly positive public image to overcome opposition based on land use or neighbors,” Stephen Rostow, principal of Museoplan, a Brooklyn-based museum consulting firm, told the Observer. “This happened at MoMA, where the museum paid off residents of the museum tower with renovations, new facilities, and lifetime passes to appease their opposition to the 2000-2006 expansion.” Whether or not there was actual elitism on the part of museum officials, he added, “there is a class tension that sees aristocratic and financial interests trying to take advantage of ordinary workers.”
Museums are public charities, existing to benefit the public, but that’s not always how they appear to the communities around them. “I’ve never known a community that was clamoring for a larger museum. But many donors and collectors do,” Stephen Reilly, founding director of the museum research center Remuseum, told the Observer.
Museums that make their surrounding communities a priority tend to encounter less opposition and greater acceptance. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, recently expanded its facility by 114,000 square feet — a move welcomed by area residents, Reilly said, because “the institution’s purpose is to double down on a mission grounded in community access and engagement.” He also cited The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, which first opened in 2015, displays the modern and contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad, and “where general admission is free and has attracted the largest and most diverse audience of any art museum in Los Angeles.”
Increasingly, many museums are viewed as “billionaires’ pet projects” to be gratefully accepted by the communities in which they are located, according to Mark Vallimer, managing partner of California-based Museum Planning LLC. “The museums that succeed in the current climate are those that are very local, positioning themselves as direct service providers to schools, libraries, parents, and neighborhood organizations. This identity is very difficult to argue with politically. Museums facing opposition, in most cases, have made a different choice: they have led with what they have and why it matters, rather than asking the community what it needs.”
Museum development consultants stress the need for real community outreach. Marcy Goodwin, head of planning for the M. Goodwin Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico, criticized the “ignorance” of museum directors and founders who don’t know their communities, don’t conduct city hall hearings or even send out surveys “to ask people what they want.” She described “an explosion of self-drama among billionaires”, the creation of vanity museums being the most visible expression of this.
In contrast, former President Obama sought to establish a presidential library in the parks in Chicago, which prompted a lawsuit from the group Friends of the Park. However, those responsible for completing the library held numerous meetings with community groups, emphasizing community service and participation. The library, which opened in late May, includes a museum, public meeting spaces, a recording studio and a sports centre. “The resistance I faced initially was a land use battle, not community rejection,” Walheimer told the Observer. “This is a meaningful distinction.”
The increasing number of instances of opposition to the establishment and expansion of museums may reflect growing public expectations that museums will gain status, justify their footprint, demonstrate their importance to surrounding communities, and commit to resisting becoming objects of special interest. Some of the opposition may also be part of a broader political skepticism about government and higher education, a feeling that such institutions serve “elites” and are anti-populist. “I take seriously the broader decline in public trust in institutions,” said Maria Elena Gutierrez, founder and president of museum planning firm The Chora Group, adding that she advises institutions to take “serious steps in opening up and serving increasingly broader audiences beyond elites.”
However, as the failure of efforts to create a Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum shows, the problems go beyond good intentions and good deeds. “Museums that engage with American history — slavery, Reconstruction, representation, the experiences of communities of color — find themselves on the front lines of a national debate over whose story is told and who controls its narrative,” Walheimer said. “This is not a communications problem that can be solved through better communication.”
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