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Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. A museum is a gathering place for ideas, culture, and knowledge, and we live in a region rich with museums. We’re not quite New York, but we have places like San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Asian Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art, California Academy of Sciences, the de Young Museum, the Exploratorium, and many smaller institutions like the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford.
These places are part of elite culture in some ways, but they’re also local spaces where people of all ages can engage with art, science, and history in real life. In an era of Netflix and staying home, how are museums surviving and adapting to changing social, entertainment, and philanthropic landscapes?
Joining us first is Sarah Hotchkiss, senior editor with KQED’s Arts and Culture team. Welcome, Sarah.
Sarah Hotchkiss: Thank you, Alexis. Good morning.
Alexis Madrigal: Let’s start broadly. People have heard news about layoffs at the California Academy of Sciences. The Contemporary Jewish Museum has closed, and the Mexican Museum never opened as planned. Is that the state of museums right now, or are there positive signs elsewhere?
Sarah Hotchkiss: I think it’s a mix. There really are positive signs. We have such an amazing range of museums here. We have major collecting institutions like SFMOMA, but also non-collecting spaces. Across from the Contemporary Jewish Museum—and hopefully near the future home of the Mexican Museum—Yerba Buena Center for the Arts has had an incredible comeback with vital programming.
We also have the Museum of the African Diaspora, which is doing well, and smaller cultural institutions like the Museum of Craft and Design. Down in San Jose, I love the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.
The programming coming out of these places is some of the best I’ve seen, especially over the last five years.
Alexis Madrigal: Also Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Sarah Hotchkiss: So good.
Alexis Madrigal: Do you think people are relating differently to museums now? Maybe there’s a breakdown of what we think of as elite culture?
Sarah Hotchkiss: I think so. The pandemic reset many of our habits. Our homes got more comfortable. We invested in them and got used to staying in them. It now takes more to get people out.
It’s also extremely expensive to live in the Bay Area. If someone has to decide between groceries and spending forty or fifty dollars on a museum visit for an entire family, that’s a difficult choice.
Alexis Madrigal: Are all museums facing similar issues? Some have massive buildings and collections, while others may simply be galleries with rotating exhibitions.
Sarah Hotchkiss: We’re talking about a huge range of institutions with very different financial realities. Some are paying off loans from major expansions. Some maintain collections of art or even living animals. Others may be leaner but still support staff and programming.
Federal funding has also become more uncertain and difficult to predict. More institutions are relying on private philanthropy, but they’re competing with medical research, social services, and many other causes for the same donors.
Alexis Madrigal: I’ve always associated San Francisco museums with old money and civic philanthropy. But now a lot of wealth comes from younger people in tech. Is that changing how museums think about fundraising and audiences?
Sarah Hotchkiss: That’s a great question for the museum leaders joining us. But if you look around, institutions are definitely trying to reach younger audiences.
The California Academy of Sciences has nightlife programming. The Exploratorium has After Dark. SFMOMA has younger donor circles and events designed to feel more social and contemporary.
Everyone—including KQED—is trying to reach younger audiences early so those connections become long-term relationships.
Alexis Madrigal: Let’s bring in our guests: Dr. Soyoung Lee, CEO of the Asian Art Museum; Lori Fogarty, executive director of the Oakland Museum of California; and Laura Zander, chief growth and operating officer at the Exploratorium.
Dr. Lee, let’s start with a basic question: how is the museum doing?
Dr. Soyoung Lee: The museum is vibrant today. San Francisco’s post-pandemic loss of tourism has definitely affected cultural institutions across the city, but this spring we’re doing very well in attendance and excitement around our programs.
For many museums, programs drive attendance. Right now we’re showing work by artist Chiharu Shiota and her Red Thread installations, which have generated tremendous excitement.
Over the past year we’ve also expanded our role as a gathering place. Museums are spaces where communities come together.
Alexis Madrigal: What do you mean by that?
Dr. Soyoung Lee: People arrive with their own communities—friends, family, people they know. But then they interact with others and create what I call “hybrid communities.”
People step outside of themselves. They connect with strangers through curiosity. That’s one of the reasons people come to museums.
Alexis Madrigal: Looking at the Red Thread exhibit, one thought I had was: this is very Instagrammable. Does that digital layer matter now?
Dr. Soyoung Lee: Absolutely. Museums have to think about that now. Even twenty years ago, audience research showed museums being grouped with entertainment options—restaurants, concerts, movies.
The challenge became: how do you compete with all those things?
What we’ve realized at the Asian Art Museum is that we can’t compete on entertainment alone. Museums remain places for learning and connection.
Not everyone is an artist or an art expert, but everyone has a cultural connection—food, music, tradition. The distinction between elite and popular culture isn’t as clear anymore, and museums are responding to that.
Come for the food, stay for the art.
Alexis Madrigal: Lori, that feels very aligned with where the Oakland Museum has been heading.
Lori Fogarty: Absolutely. We see ourselves as Oakland’s town square—a civic hub. Our mission is creating trust, understanding, and connection.
One of our best-known examples is Friday Nights at OMCA. Since 2013, we’ve hosted weekly community gatherings. We used to run them year-round, but weather shifted that. Now they run April through October, and we bring in thousands of people each week.
Alexis Madrigal: As a parent, being able to bring your kids and sit on the lawn is incredible.
Lori Fogarty: Exactly.
Alexis Madrigal: Laura, the Exploratorium seems like an early example of expanding what museums can be.
Laura Zander: We build around curiosity. We invite people to understand the world through joy and wonder.
Whether you’re five or one hundred and five, it’s a place to discover the world around you.
Our founder, Frank Oppenheimer, believed that democratizing science meant putting tools and experiences into people’s hands.
We also do more than operate our San Francisco museum. We design exhibits for museums around the world, and recently we signed a long-term project with Hyundai Motor Company.
Alexis Madrigal: We’ll get into that after the break. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.
