“What we learned is that we created a pretty fantastic infrastructure with this new expansion, and I think we captured a lot of people’s imagination about the Akron Art Museum and its architecture, and definitely pointed people toward our collection at the museum,” says Akron Art Museum Executive Director and CEO Mark Masuoka.
“But what we forgot to do was continue this conversation about who we are, what the value of this museum is to this community,” he says. “We took for granted that if we built this museum, people would just come and they would just keep coming. Well, they came because they were curious, but at some point they stopped coming, and it became a concern for the museum that we have to continue to make the case for people to (keep coming) as we go forward.”
Akron Art Museum discovers relevance takes more than a new building