Museums around the world are working hard to find ways to overcome challenges related to audience growth and engagement, and the strategies they’re landing on are diverse: creating new people-focused missions, launching institutional partnerships that enhance programming, undertaking renovations and expansions, exploring collection diversification and even ‘flipping’ museums for social impact. High Museum of Art Director Rand Suffolk is something of a star in this space for not only reducing the institution’s admission fees and implementing hyper-local marketing campaigns but also increasing the High’s acquisition and exhibition of artworks by women, LGBTQ and BIPOC artists.
To some degree, arts institutions are racing the clock, as many haven’t fully recovered after Covid tanked admissions and membership revenues and, as Observer correspondent Daniel Grant so aptly put it, “people lost the habit of going to museums.” Financial woes aside, there’s an argument to be made that museums need people as much as people need museums. A well-endowed institution without visitors is more mausoleum than museum, which means the effects of depressed attendance numbers can be seen outside of an institution’s balance sheet. Some museums are doing great—the Met just announced that the number of out-of-state visitors reached pre-pandemic levels while local visitors exceeded pre-pandemic figures in the previous fiscal year—but many others, not so much.
Audience growth and engagement initiatives are often focused on attracting first-time visitors, repeat visitors or both—what Suffolk has succeeded in doing in Atlanta. But what if there was a way to boost attendance and financial support without focusing as much on getting people through the door? That’s what Dan Law, associate director of The Andy Warhol Museum and manager of the museum’s Pop District initiative, which kicked off in 2022, is doing in Pittsburgh’s eastern North Shore neighborhood. The museum—one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh—is the largest single-artist museum in North America and one of the most comprehensive anywhere, but it’s tucked away in a largely commercial corner of the city.
“We have this world-class asset that opened in 1994 in this really kind of inauspicious spot surrounded by parking garages and offices, right next to an overpass,” Law told Observer. “There’s infrastructure everywhere, and that was what life was like for the museum for three decades.”
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The Andy Warhol Museum, it’s important to note, has an endowment of roughly $20 million when, according to Law, it should have an endowment of somewhere between $50 and $70 million. That’s not a gap that boosting audience numbers or selling memberships is going to make a dent in, and as he puts it, “the donor class is dwindling everywhere, not just in Pittsburgh,” which has pushed the institution to take an extremely broad approach to engagement.
Diversification of revenue streams is one element of the Pop District initiative; diversification of programming is another. Law says that for museums everywhere, it has to happen. “It’s incumbent upon us to come up with a model that works,” he said. “The question institutions have to answer is how to do it without losing focus on your mission.”
His museum’s mission is to ‘engage and inspire through Warhol’s life, art and legacy’—arguably general enough to support a wide range of initiatives (David Carrier made a case for it being too general in Hyperallergic earlier this year). Law and his team have taken advantage of that when planning the multi-year Pop District plan, which encompasses not only a reimagined and expanded campus with public art by artists including KAWS, Laura Jean McLaughlin and Typoe in a six-block section of the institution’s neighborhood—“someone visiting the museum doesn’t even have to step inside to get an art experience”—and a new cultural and performing arts center called, what else, The Factory, but also two ambitious creative economy workforce programs.
“What we say is that we want to make sure the next Andy Warhol doesn’t have to leave Pittsburgh to become the next Andy Warhol,” Law said. The artist attended free drawing classes at the Carnegie Institute and earned a degree in fine arts from what is now Carnegie-Mellon University before decamping to New York City in 1949 to work in commercial illustration. He only returned to Pittsburgh a handful of times.
The Andy Warhol Museum’s approach to keeping Pittsburgh’s talent in Pittsburgh is built on two pillars: education and boutique content creation. The first, The Warhol Academy, is supported by a $4 million endowment. Law refers to it as a “learning and skill building platform—a portfolio of programs” that includes workshops and fellowships and even a digital marketing diploma program licensed through the Department of Education in the state of Pennsylvania. The second is The Warhol Creative, an award-winning content studio that produces documentaries, commercials, social media content and digital video for twenty steady clients and has contributed six figures in operating support for the museum this year while offering new professional opportunities for regional talent.
The whole thing is, Law points out, very Warholian. “The Pop District is a vehicle for revenue generation, for growth and for attention, too,” he said. “New ideas, new amenities and new experiences bring new attention to your museum.” Which, in turn, supports endowment growth and audience growth. “It’s what we call a 360-degree art experience,” he added, though he’s careful to clarify several times that the institution with its sizable Warhol archives is still the number-one focus.
While many older, more traditional museums around the world are facing criticism from some corners for diversifying collections, modernizing programming and generally making their offerings more Instagrammable, The Andy Warhol Museum isn’t necessarily bound by the same constraints. “We are blessed with a namesake who was constantly innovating, constantly changing and constantly challenging conventions,” said Law. “It’s in our DNA—if Andy saw an opportunity, he was going to take it.
Still, everything Law and his team are doing links back in some way to the institution and the art inside its walls. The public art on display exists in conversation with the museum’s collection. The Factory will generate revenue that supports its operations while also familiarizing new faces with the neighborhood and the institution. Pop Park and Silver Street are making the area around the museum more inviting. The educational programming is introducing younger and more diverse people to the institution, while the creative studio, which works with clients as diverse as the Miami City Ballet and NBCUniversal, generates buzz. And all the while, the museum is collaborating with other Pittsburgh organizations and philanthropists to elevate the city and its cultural cachet.
Now in Phase 2, the Pop District project is having a quantifiably positive financial impact on The Andy Warhol Museum. As of 2024, the institution surpassed its initial goals of generating more than $1 million in annual revenues. “Part of the legacy of Warhol is entrepreneurship, innovation and enterprise with art at the core,” Law said. “A world-class museum, with a world-class collection, and a world-class community engagement program don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Institutions can do both; we know because we’re doing it, and I think what we’re doing here can absolutely be a blueprint for a national model.”
