Clark enters lease deal with Mass MoCA
The Clark Art Institute has a $300 million endowment, more art than it can put on its gallery walls, and is eager to expand. The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, a 15-minute drive away, has plenty of extra space and needs cash.
So yesterday the two institutions, one which opened in 1955, the other just eight years old, announced a deal to provide the Clark with nearly 30,000 square feet of storage and exhibition space on Mass MoCA's campus in downtown North Adams.
The lease deal for three former factory buildings will increase the Clark's visibility, and provide the museum with a sensible place to branch out into more contemporary art exhibitions, Clark director Michael Conforti, said. For Mass MoCA, the arrangement will pump money into the museum's tiny endowment and perpetually strapped annual budget.
The formal announcement of the long-term lease comes a year after Mass MoCA made another agreement, with the Yale University Art Gallery, to renovate 30,000 square feet on its campus to house works by Sol LeWitt.
"We now operate 120,000 square feet of gallery space," Mass MoCA director Joseph C. Thompson said yesterday. "We have all that we can handle. I'm not keen to expand that. I am keen to use the Yale and Clark model to find ways to build more public gallery space through more collaborations."
Neither Thompson nor Conforti would say exactly how much the Clark will pay Mass MoCA. Thompson did say, that in return for a renewable, 20-year lease on the museum campus, the Clark would contribute "seven figures" to Mass MoCA's endowment campaign. Mass MoCA currently has just a $3 million endowment, though it has received promises of $10 million more, he said.
The Clark will also make additional annual payments to Mass MoCA, and pay for various services, including snow removal and security.
Thompson said that, from the moment it opened in 1999, Mass MoCA has had to deal with a structural deficit, forcing it to scramble for money from supporters in order to stay in business. The gap, once $2 million a year, has been reduced to about $400,000 for the current fiscal year, which wraps up this fall.
The Clark space at Mass MoCA won't open until 2011 because of the need to renovate, said Conforti. He said he couldn't say exactly what would be shown there, but that the buildings will provide important storage space.
"The Mass MoCA space is both a space that allows us to use an old kind of factory building for high-density storage for some of the works in our collection, but it's also an opportunity to link to the energy and the contemporary atmosphere and possibilities of Mass MoCA," Conforti said.
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. For more on the arts, visit boston.com/ae/ theater_arts/exhibitionist. 