Stop Saving Museums. Start Transforming Them.
Sixteen strategies to transform institutions before it's too late
The New York Times recently reported on a survey revealing what many in the cultural sector already knew but hadn’t fully quantified: American museums are in crisis. One-third have lost federal funding since Trump took office. Attendance remains below pre-pandemic levels. Revenue has fallen by more than a third since 2019. Some institutions have closed entirely. Others have gutted their education departments or abandoned conservation projects mid-stream.
Reading through the details (the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis losing $105,000 in grants, Berkeley’s quilt exhibition scrambling for emergency private donations, the Speed Museum eliminating nine positions), a pattern emerges. Museums keep responding to structural problems with crisis management. They’re plugging holes, launching emergency fundraising campaigns, and hoping conditions return to some imagined normal.
But what if there is no normal to return to? What if the model itself (monumental buildings requiring year-round operation, dependence on tourism and federal grants, success measured by foot traffic) is fundamentally mismatched to current economic and political realities?
For over two decades, I’ve worked with cultural organizations navigating resource constraints, audience shifts, and funding instability. The museums struggling right now aren’t failing because they lack excellence or commitment. They’re struggling because they’re operating with assumptions built for different conditions: stable arts funding, consistent tourism, cultural authority concentrated in institutions, and ample public leisure time.
None of those conditions exists anymore. And they’re not coming back.
So rather than offer sympathy or critique the political decisions that got us here, I’ve been thinking about what museums could do differently, not just to survive this moment but to build models that work for the conditions of 2025 and beyond. Some of these ideas are practical adaptations of current practice. Others are genuinely radical, challenging fundamental assumptions about what museums are and how they operate.
Here are sixteen strategies that could transform the sector, if museums are willing to embrace change as fundamental as the challenges they face.
1. Reframe Museums as Community Infrastructure, Not Arts Institutions
Stop leading with “cultural enrichment” in advocacy; it doesn’t resonate politically right now. Lead with economic impact: jobs created, tourism dollars generated, educational services provided, civic gathering spaces maintained. Document these functions with concrete data and communicate them relentlessly to local and state governments.
2. Abandon Attendance as Primary Success Metric
Physical visits no longer reflect public value or reach. Develop parallel measurement systems for digital engagement, community partnerships, educational impact, and research influence. This isn’t about giving up on physical spaces; it’s about articulating value that makes institutions resilient when tourism inevitably fluctuates.
3. Diversify Revenue Streams Beyond the Big Three
Museums rely too heavily on federal funding, attendance, and major donors. Build multiple income sources: robust membership programs with tangible benefits, corporate sponsorships tied to measurable social impact, mission-aligned earned revenue (consulting services, professional development for educators, licensing), and endowments focused on operations rather than just capital projects.
4. Subscription Services for Museum Networks
Netflix-style model: $15/month gets you unlimited access to 50 regional museums, virtual content, and priority registration for programs. Pooled revenue is distributed based on engagement metrics. This shifts focus from individual institutions competing for visitors to creating a collective value proposition.
5. Create Regional Shared Services Networks
Small and mid-sized museums should consolidate back-office functions: shared collections management systems, conservation facilities, marketing infrastructure, and even curatorial expertise for specialized exhibitions. Maintain distinct institutional identities and community relationships while eliminating duplicated overhead that’s killing budgets.
6. Open-Source Entire Collections
Photograph every object in high resolution, fully catalog it, and make all research notes publicly accessible and downloadable for unrestricted educational use. Let anyone create exhibitions, conduct research, or use images. Transform from gatekeepers into platforms. License commercial uses for revenue while allowing free personal/educational access.
7. Merge Education and Curatorial Functions Entirely
The separation between “collection experts” and “public teachers” creates inefficiency and often condescension. Every curator should regularly teach public programs; every educator should conduct research and contribute to exhibitions. This eliminates duplicate labor, reduces silos, and produces better outcomes for both scholarship and public engagement.
8. Limit K-12 Field Trips, Invest in Teacher Residencies Instead
The exhausting march of school groups through museums produces minimal educational impact. Instead, bring teachers into multi-week intensive residencies where they deeply engage with collections and develop curriculum they take back to schools—quality over quantity.
9. Museums as Distributed Networks, Not Destination Buildings
Reduce the costly physical footprint and circulate collections through libraries, schools, community centers, and commercial spaces. Keep climate-controlled storage and conservation labs, but make the museum a distributed presence throughout communities rather than a single monumental building requiring a special trip. This dramatically reduces operational costs while increasing access.
10. Rotate Entire Institutions Seasonally
Close for 3-6 months annually, dramatically reducing operational costs while creating scarcity that drives attendance when open. Staff can focus on research, conservation, and community programs during closure. This breaks the expensive illusion that museums must be open 350 days a year.
11. Aggressive, Regular Deaccessioning
If 95% of collections sit in storage untouched for decades, sell or transfer works to institutions that will actually use them. Use proceeds for conservation of core collections and public programming. The taboo against deaccessioning protects institutional hoarding, not scholarship or public access. Make this a regular practice, not a crisis response.
12. Collections as Loans, Not Ownership
Museums could shift toward long-term borrowing rather than permanent acquisition. Artists, families, or other museums retain ownership while works circulate for 10-20 year periods. This increases collection diversity, reduces insurance/storage costs, and acknowledges that “permanent collections” are constantly changing anyway.
13. Universal Basic Income for Artists-in-Residence
Instead of temporary exhibitions, museums become permanent workspaces for rotating cohorts of artists who receive guaranteed income for 1-3 years. The “exhibition” is the ongoing, publicly visible creative process. This positions museums as infrastructure for cultural production, not just consumption.
14. Radically Transparent Budgeting
Publish every salary, every expense, every funding source in real-time public dashboards. If museums claim to serve the public, let the public see exactly where the money goes. This would force difficult conversations about executive compensation, expensive exhibitions, and questionable expenditures—but it might rebuild trust and demonstrate accountability.
15. Museums as DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations)
Community members buy membership tokens that give them governance rights over programming, acquisitions, and budget allocation. This creates stakeholder investment beyond passive philanthropy. Imagine a museum where 10,000 token holders vote on which exhibitions to mount or which works to acquire—governance becomes engagement.
16. Time-Limited Institutions as Default Model
New museums should plan from inception to last 20-50 years, then sunset intentionally, transferring collections, selling assets, and closing with dignity. This prevents zombie institutions that persist for institutional survival rather than mission relevance. It also creates urgency and focus: what must we accomplish in our limited time?
These strategies won’t all work for every institution, and some will make people deeply uncomfortable, which is precisely the point. The museum sector has spent the last several years trying to restore what existed before the pandemic, before funding cuts, before attendance declined. But restoration isn’t an option when the conditions that enabled the old model no longer exist. The museums that will thrive aren’t the ones with the largest endowments or the most prestigious collections. They’ll be the ones willing to fundamentally rethink what a museum is, who it serves, and how it operates. The crisis isn’t coming—it’s here. The question is whether museums will use it as permission to transform, or whether they’ll keep plugging holes until there’s nothing left to save. For over two decades, I’ve watched cultural organizations wait too long to make hard decisions, hoping conditions would improve. They rarely do. The institutions that survive are the ones that choose change before change chooses them.
Amani Olu is the founder and lead strategist at Olu & Company, where he’s been solving problems in the creative economy and cultural sector for over 20 years. You can learn more about his work at olucompany.com.
YES! TRANSFORMATION is what the museum world neeeeeds
Appreciate this out-of-the-box thinking! “Responding to structural problems with crisis management”…this could apply to so many arts institutions!