After nearly two years of collaborative planning between Spokane Public Schools and Spokane Parks & Recreation, voters will find two initiatives on the November ballot pertaining to a package of citywide projects called Together Spokane.
If both pieces — including a 20-year $240 million levy from Spokane Parks & Recreation and a 20-year $200 million bond from Spokane Public Schools — are passed in November, the city will begin to roll out 200 projects over the next two decades including several school renovations, investments in neighborhood facilities and citywide park maintenance.
According to the Together Spokane website, the project emphasizes community partnerships and aims to make strategic, fiscally responsible investments that benefit every part of our city. That work began in January with the purchase of the Riverpoint One building at 501 N. Riverpoint Blvd. If the bond and levy are passed, this building will hold the district's central administrative office and the project-based learning high school called The Community School.
The relocation of The Community School, which now operates out of an old elementary school on North Monroe Street, and the district office in another part of downtown is part of a multiphase plan to sell or lease up to six district properties and combine district spaces with public agencies to reduce operational costs and improve services for the public.
As part of this consolidation plan, the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture is partnering with Together Spokane to free up space in the museum's Browne's Addition hub by moving its permanent collection storage to an off-site facility.
"As part of the study we conducted between Spokane Public Schools and the Parks and Recreation department, we met with various community partners to talk about their mission and current areas of focus as well as potential opportunities for partnership both programmatically and from an infrastructure perspective," says Spokane Public Schools Superintendent Adam Swinyard. "When we met with Wes [Jessup, executive director of the MAC], he shared that they're focused on transitioning more of their current location to exhibit space."
"We only have 13,000 square feet of gallery space," says Jessup. "So, really, that only accommodates changing, temporary exhibitions."
NEARLY TRIPLED EXHIBIT SPACE
At any point in time, the MAC's five galleries boast anything from exhibitions about our region's history to large-scale traveling shows about pop culture or featuring art from big-name artists. Pieces from the museum's permanent collection occasionally get pulled for display, but it's not often — if at all — that more than a few pieces are on display at any given time. Thousands of items, including paintings, sculptures, historical artifacts and more, are currently stored on the museum's campus.
Most recently, a printing press from the 1800s was pulled out of permanent collection storage and displayed in the exhibition titled "Fire: Rebirth and Resilience." It's a large item that had never previously been displayed despite residing in the collection for years.
"For any museum, it's critical that you're going to collect and you're going to have a substantial collection around your mission," Jessup says. "It's important to have some of that collection on display in a way that's permanent. It's the backbone of any museum and, sadly, we're missing it."
By partnering with Together Spokane, the MAC will be able to free up approximately 25,000 square feet of space in one of its buildings and convert it to gallery space that staff plan to dedicate to educational programming, regular exhibitions and display space for some of the items in the permanent collection.
"In order for the partnership to work, the bond and the levy would need to pass," Swinyard says. "A portion of the construction cost will come from the sales of the six properties that we're going to sell."
The location of the off-site storage facility — dubbed a "joint operations and storage center" — is yet to be determined and relies heavily on whether the bond and levy are passed. But the plan is the facility would store various items from the school district, the parks department and the MAC's permanent collection. The MAC would also raise funds for the plan.
Swinyard says that pending design and capacity needs, the current projected cost for the storage facility is $4 million to $5 million.
"We're a little different from the two other organizations," Jessup says. "And even though the storage would be under the same roof, it would be a discrete space. It would have separate entries and all of the requirements of museum storage."
To keep the permanent collection secure and to preserve sensitive items, the off-site storage facility would be climate-controlled and have a heightened level of security.
"We are a very small piece of this very vast initiative," Jessup says. "But the impact on the museum would be significant."
Along with storage, the facility would also house administrative offices for museum staff and, though it wouldn't be open to the public, it would include a viewing room for scholars, tribal members and other visitors to view items from the permanent collection for research or other purposes.
"It's a really cool partnership," Swinyard says. "It's also a model that has been leveraged in other parts of the country, and it's something that we want to explore here in Spokane. It's a shared need and also a need that we are about to really support each other around in a way that we wouldn't if we were doing it by ourselves." ♦
