During the COVID-19-induced lockdown, those privileged enough to do so spent a lot of time at home. So, for most of us, extracurricular activities — museum visits included — were not a priority.
Yet museums as a concept didn’t cease to exist. Despite suspended (or scaled back) operations, many had to find a way to survive the long year. “Zoom” went from tech company name to verb, and museums could broadcast lectures or virtual tours across the globe. Thanks to high-resolution cameras, some of these institutions could house images of the works in their collection in stunning detail, too.
But not every museum is your public collection with a massive endowment, and — naturally — you might want to ask the obvious question: How did smaller, niche museums make it through the pandemic wilderness?
Take the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton. As the name implies, it’s a museum that specializes in housing sacred Russian art (and other pieces relevant to Russian history). When asked how it fared during the worst parts of 2020, marketing director Mary Delaney said they weathered it well.
“We don't depend on visitation for our income,” she said. “It's nice … and of course we want to have visitors, naturally. That's why we're there. But we don't have an enormous amount of visitors like the MFA would or some big institution that really counts on that income to pull them through.”
The museum staff is small: There are six full-time employees, six part-time employees and a number of volunteers who serve as docents. (“We don’t have a huge payroll,” Delaney observed.) The Board of Trustees was determined to avoid layoffs, and with a grant from the Paycheck Protection Program, everyone kept their job throughout the lockdown year.
That’s not to say the Museum of Russian Icons sat empty and inactive. They pushed digital offerings that, Delaney explained, “expand[ed] our audience tremendously because now we could have people attend our programs from maybe Germany and Russia and all around the world.” Those programs were free, but they did accept donations, and the enthusiasm of the interested meant that, in Delaney’s estimation, they gave more than what the museum would have charged for a virtual ticket.
But as far as main sources of income go, the museum does well in “our annual appeals, our shop sales, and our programs,” Delaney said. They also receive a monthly stipend from the family of founder and icon collector Gordon B. Lankton. With his death this past March, his beloved museum will also be receiving an endowment.
The pandemic also meant some people at home began exploring new hobbies and curiosities, which niche museums — like the Spellman Museum of Stamps & Postal History in Weston — could capitalize on. Executive Director Joseph Mullin explained that, in the past year, the museum saw “a dramatic increase in the number of consultations and visitations and stamps we were receiving on donation.” And it makes sense when you think about it. During lockdown, quite a few people went spelunking in their basements and attics, and came across family artifacts. Recovered stamps sent their curious archaeologists to Spellman for an appraisal — for which the museum charges a small fee and, Mullin explained, “really provided an opportunity for us to actually cover our expenses during these difficult times.”
An uptick in these consultations is clearly welcome, but now that visitors are welcomed back to Spellman during limited summer hours, the museum is thinking about how to maintain some of that pandemic-era momentum moving forward. Like many institutions, Spellman will embrace an increased role in the virtual space — namely, with its annual symposiums on postal history. In 2019, Mullin said, a symposium on Mexican postal history drew about 20 participants. But a year later, during the pandemic, the museum hosted another symposium via Zoom — this time on Swiss postal history — and saw participant numbers swell to 90. “So, all of a sudden, we realized that we had a gold mine,” said Mullin.
There are some museums, however, that truly require you to be present, and for those, pivoting to digital isn’t as simple as uploading a catalogue for high definition browsing or hosting a symposium. A good example is the Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum, a railway museum that specializes in the preservation of cars and equipment from the Shelburne Falls & Colrain Street Railway Co.’s heyday of the early 20th century.
The pull of the museum is the experience of seeing the equipment itself, and looking at pictures of trolley cars is much different from actually being in them.
“We thought a little bit about trying to do virtual things, and we did put up a couple of new YouTube’s [videos] about some of the work we were doing,” explained Sam Bartlett, the museum’s president. “But it’s not the same as coming... and riding the trolley.”
He’s right, and with no visitors during the pandemic and a collection that isn’t conducive to the digital landscape, figuring out how to stay afloat could have been difficult. But thanks to a variety of factors, the museum was able to stay financially solvent: The trolley museum is volunteer run, so there is little overhead; maintenance that would have been hired out to contractors was done in house; and the museum regularly rents out excess yard space to tenants.
“Our income did go down, but not really as much as our costs did because of that baseline of the tenant rental revenue,” said Bartlett. “And we’re comfortable because we had been sure to keep a good cushion in the bank anyway.” In 2019, the museum budgeted $38,000 each in income and expenses. Income did go down, to about $25,000, but expenses were cut by more than half, to $17,000. Obviously, 2020 was no one’s favorite year, but all things considered, the museum could have done worse.
As for the future, Shelburne Falls Trolley Museum doesn’t necessarily feel it needs to fundamentally change. Yes, there are some more videos coming, “but we don't have any big plans to try to be, you know, more virtual than we are,” says Bartlett. “We really feel like hands on is the thing that we are.”
Smaller museums operate differently, and while no one wants to deal with a pandemic, the mechanisms by which these institutions sustain themselves means that in emergencies, they aren’t totally adrift. They’re anchored by not just visitors, but also volunteers. And when those doors open, the curious minds that enter are climbing aboard a well-run ship.
