What don’t you like about museums? They offer information, cultural awareness, things to do and see, a fun place to meet, personal enlightenment—and more. However, for people who live or work near art centers, the opening or expansion of a museum can mean noise, traffic congestion, expansion of traffic, allocation of public park space and an endless pit of public money.
Filmmaker George Lucas of star Wars fame knows both the praise and criticism that museums attract, as he plans to open the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles’ Exposition Park this December after a 16-year effort that saw similar plans rejected in Chicago and San Francisco. Lucas packaged the $1 billion, seven-story, 400,000-square-foot museum as a gift each time, agreeing to cover all construction costs and give the museum a $400 million gift—but only Los Angeles saw it that way.
Between 2010 and 2014, Lucas wanted to set up his museum in a park near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, meeting strong opposition from groups that did not want to give up public spaces for a private museum. He next offered to build it on 17 acres of undeveloped land between Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan in Chicago, but was met with similar encouragement from a group called Friends of the Park. “The parkland is owned by the state as a public trust, and is subject to public doctrine,” said Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago attorney representing Friends of the Park. “You can’t just give public property to a private person.”
Los Angeles’ Exposition Park was considered a better fit, as it is already home to several museums, a science school and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where the University of Southern California Trojans play football. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will feature the filmmaker’s extensive collection of graphic art, photography, animation and comic art.
Opposition to museums is not uncommon when their supporters want to build or expand them. Perhaps the most notable recent incident was the rejection by Congress in mid-May of funding for the Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall. It was another tragedy of the culture wars; House Republicans have sought to exclude transgender people from any museum exhibits.
Many others who are against the construction and expansion of museums say that when museums are opened, public land is taken from the community. For several years, lawsuits have delayed the construction and opening of the Memphis Art Museum (formerly the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art) in Tennessee, which will open in September in its new home on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, a few miles from the city of Overton Park where it has lived for more than a century. Opponents, Friends for Our Waterfront, say the building would take up too much land, reduce access to greenways and violate long-standing rules that waterfront land must be preserved for public use. The judge ruled in March that the museum is for public use, paving the way for construction to continue.
However, opposition to the construction of the William Eggleston Museum in Overton Park prevailed. The museum would have displayed the paintings of the city’s most famous artist, but the plan was never discussed as city council members and supporters of the local zoo wanted to argue that the unused part of the park should be used for another parking lot. “The problem wasn’t Eggleston,” said Tina Sullivan, former executive director of the Overton Park Conservancy, “it was parking. Instead, the William Eggleston Foundation was established, lending pictures to museums elsewhere.
There is no shortage of museums. The Washington, DC-based Institute of Museum and Library Services estimates that there are about 35,000 museums of one kind or another in the United States, which has more than doubled since 1990. Some of those worried about the expansion of museums are the communities where the new ones are proposed, worried about how the center could change the nature of its project, which adds more traffic—not more traffic. traffic. And what if the museum fails to meet its fundraising goals or visitor numbers and membership decline, especially if the municipality has issued a bond to help cover construction costs?
When media billionaire Fred Eychaner wanted to expand his non-collectible real estate showroom, Wrightwood 659, in a condominium building in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, through the purchase of units, the current owner who did not sell his home brought a lawsuit claiming that Eychaner’s simple plans and blocking his views would cause construction noise. That case is still pending.
This past spring, political leaders in Jersey City launched a proposed branch of France’s Pompidou Center in an abandoned downtown building. The city faced a $255 million budget shortfall and had spent $20 million on experts and another $4.5 billion for licensing and merchandising rights to the Pompidou Center in Paris when the State of New Jersey withdrew a $24 million grant for the project. Unlike George Lucas’ Museum of Narrative Art, the Pompidou Center will not cover all costs.
Other museums have faced consternation from locals when seeking to expand their footprint, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the Frick Collection, with opposition proving largely successful in each case. Those who opposed the expansion of Manhattan’s New Museum, which reopened in March, were not so lucky. In Spain, a ten-year effort to build a Guggenheim center in a wildlife park near Bilbao was shelved in 2025 after opponents said the plan was carried out without sufficient public consultation on the land, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984.
Objections may stem from land use or zoning issues (buildings deemed too tall, for example), political differences or the obvious feeling that it’s not in my backyard. Regardless of the cause, a common thread often haunts the institution. “Boards and directors often try to use the museum’s perceived good public image to promote land use or neighborhood opposition,” Stephen Rustow, principal of Museoplan, a Brooklyn-based museum consulting firm, told the Observer. “This happened at MoMA, where the museum actually paid Museum Tower residents with renovations, new amenities and lifetime admission to silence their opposition to the 2000-2006 expansion.” Whether museum officials are present or not, he added that “there is a class-based tension that sees health professionals trying to take advantage of regular working people.”
Museums are charitable organizations that exist to benefit the public, but that is not always how they are seen in the communities around them. “I’ve never known a community that asked for a bigger museum. But many donors and collectors do,” Stephen Reily, founding director of the museum tank tank Remuseum, told the Observer.
Museums that prioritize surrounding communities tend to receive less opposition and more acceptance. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, recently expanded its space by 114,000 square feet—a move welcomed by local residents, Reily said, because the center’s mission is to “double down on a mission based on access and community involvement.” He also cited Los Angeles’ The Broad, which first opened in 2015, showcases Eli and Edythe Broad’s modern and contemporary art collection, and “is free to enter and attracts the largest and most diverse audience of any art museum in Los Angeles.”
Increasingly, many museums are viewed as “billion dollar pet projects” that should be gratefully received by the communities where they are located, according to Mark Walhimer, managing partner of California-based Museum Planning LLC. “Museums that succeed in the current climate are those that stay local, positioning themselves as service providers directly to schools, libraries, parents and neighborhood organizations. That ownership is very difficult to argue with politically. Those who face opposition, in many cases, made a different choice: They lead with what they had and why it was important, rather than asking the public what it needed.”
Consultants in museum development emphasize the need for genuine public access. Marcy Goodwin, president of the M. Goodwin Museum Planning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, criticized the “ignorance” of museum directors and founders who don’t know their communities, don’t hold town hall hearings or even send out questionnaires “to ask people what they want.” He described the “explosion of self-dramatization by billionaires,” with the creation of vanity museums as the most visible.
As a separate point, former President Obama wanted to build a presidential library in a park in Chicago, prompting a lawsuit from the group Friends of the Park. However, those responsible for implementing the library had many meetings with community groups, emphasizing community service and dialogue. The library, which opened in late May, includes a museum, community meeting spaces, a recording studio and an athletics center. “The opposition it faced initially was against land use, not community rejection,” Walhimer told the Observer. “That’s a meaningful difference.”
The growing number of cases of opposition to the construction and expansion of museums may indicate an increase in public expectations that museums deserve their place—justifying their footprint, demonstrating their relevance to the surrounding communities and a commitment to resisting being instruments of private interests. Some of the opposition may also be part of a broader political skepticism about government and higher education, a feeling that such institutions serve the “elite” and are against the will of the people. “I take seriously the widespread decline of public trust in institutions,” said Maria Elena Gutierrez, founder and president of museum planning company Chora Group, adding that she advises institutions to take “an important step in opening up and serving a growing audience outside the elite.”
However, as the failure of the effort to create the Smithsonian Institution’s American Women’s History Museum shows, problems outweigh good intentions and good deeds. “Museums dealing with American history—slavery, Reconstruction, representation, and the experience of communities of color—find themselves at the forefront of a national debate about whose story is being told and who controls the telling,” Walhimer said. “That’s not a communication problem that can be better solved by human communication.”
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