Most American museums have a problem that visitors rarely see until it’s too late: their buildings are falling apart.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office analyzed by The Art Newspaper finds that roughly 85 percent of museums across the country are dealing with deferred maintenance or major repair needs. Even more concerning, about 77 percent say they have at least one structural issue that could put their collections at risk.
The scope of the problem cuts against the usual image of the museum as a well-funded institution in a grand building. In reality, most of the country’s roughly 16,700 museums are small, under-resourced operations, often housed in aging or historic structures that are expensive to maintain and hard to upgrade.
For those institutions, basic fixes can be existential. A new roof or HVAC system can eat up a huge portion of an annual budget. About half of museums report more than $100,000 in deferred maintenance alone. In some cases, that means delaying repairs or patching things together, with artworks ending up in makeshift storage like garages or even bathrooms.
Accessibility adds another layer. Many buildings predate modern standards, leaving visitors to navigate stairs, uneven terrain, or sites that simply can’t be reached without significant retrofitting. And for museums in rural or remote areas, the cost of materials and labor only makes everything harder.
The root issue is money, or the lack of it. Federal funding for museums rarely covers construction or major capital improvements, leaving institutions to rely on private fundraising to tackle structural problems. Meanwhile, maintenance costs keep piling up, sometimes to the point where starting over with a new building would be cheaper than fixing the old one.
The Government Accountability Office report lands at a moment when Congress is weighing the future of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the main federal agency supporting museums. Its budget currently stands at just under $300 million, and how that money is used could determine whether institutions get real help addressing the backlog.
For now, the takeaway is simple and not especially reassuring. Across the U.S., museums are doing their best to care for their collections while the buildings around them slowly catch up with decades of neglect.
