The Mesa Historical Museum would close its Lehi facility by October, and its popular spring baseball exhibit would move to the downtown Mesa area and housed at what is now the Arizona Museum for Youth, under a plan presented Thursday to the City Council.
The plan is driven by financial problems that both museums face and that led to the history museum’s seeking city assistance.
Johann Zietsman, Mesa arts and cultural director, crafted and presented the plan to Council, explaining that his goal was to protect and work with the collections of both museums to create a new model for museums.
He said history museums throughout the country are on hard times and the city will “rethink” how it presents its history to the public.
For instance, Zietsman said that pieces of the history museum’s collections could show up in city buildings and possibly malls and other high traffic areas.
Zietsman said history museum director Lisa Anderson would be put on the city’s payroll, in part funded by revenues currently generated by the museum.
The plan was generally praised by Council members as important to the city’s quality of life and received a strong endorsement from Mayor Scott Smith.
Smith said if the plan was simply a bailout, he wouldn’t support it.
He added, “I wholeheartedly support this change in direction and vision.”
Smith said the city was the downtown’s largest landowner and had a vested interest in consolidating cultural offerings, such as the Cactus League exhibit, downtown.
He and Vice Mayor Kyle Jones spoke of the changes Zietsman outlined in broad terms as enhancing the quality of life in Mesa and the draw to the downtown.
“We want Cactus League visitors to experience downtown,” Smith said.
Smith did offer the Arizona Youth Museum a critical assessment of the museum’s branding and marketing.
Since running for mayor, he said he has become familiar with the institution, but suspects that the general population is neither aware of it or understands its purpose.
“The first question is what do they do?” Smith said. “There is not a broad understanding of what they do there.”
Presumably that question now falls to Zietsman as he reshapes the downtown museum landscape.
(Full disclosure: The writer was invited to join the Mesa Historical Museum board shortly before these developments. New board members are not seated until June.)
I visited the Mesa Historical Museum for the first time recently, particularly wanting to take in the Cactus League exhibit and the Wallace & Ladmo exhibit.
The addendum to your commentary says “New board members are not seated until June.” Well, let me ask you, will ANY visitor to that museum ever be able to be seated ANYwhere in that museum at ANY time? It is not a user-friendly museum, if you’re not one to rush through, look here, glance there, and hurry on out. No place for a visitor to sit down in any of the exhibit rooms or in the hallways Took me about a half hour of standing to read, view and absorb all the informative Cactus League history, that I was really interested in. The equally enticing, often memorable, and informative Wallace & Ladmo exhibit was another “exercise” of standing and reading the material and commentary hung on the walls, although it does have one arm chair in that exhibit room, but for the sole purpose of viewing four brief examples from different decades of Wallace and Ladmo shows.
More required standing and reading information on the walls in the Mesa history exhibit rooms. Probably would have been interesting, but by then I needed to get a load off my feet and left. If you are seated on their board in June, please make a recommendation that museum visitors also have a place to be seated…..SOMEWHERE in that museum. A simple bench in each exhibit room would be just fine.
One more point. I’m amazed that Mayor Smith, effectively a Mesa native, only became familiar with the nationally acclaimed Arizona Museum for Youth (founded here in 1978) since running for mayor. Both he and his children have missed out on a lot. The severe funding cut by the City of Mesa beginning about 4 years ago didn’t help matters any. AMY is a gem for expanding children’s minds and creativity.
At a recent arts meeting less than a month ago, Sunnee Spencer, the Museum’s Administrator, summarized AMY well. From the minutes of that meeting, she said, “The Arizona Museum for Youth is invaluable in teaching children multiple solutions and possibility thinking within complex problems, the ability to make critical judgments, to express the unsaid, stimulate achievement in other subjects and self confidence, have an experience unavailable from other sources, celebrating/understanding diversity in a global society, work ethics/values for future careers, and replaces the gap left from school program cuts.” Right on. Just watching children “in action” at the museum helps give credence to her words.