Museum of Performance & Design

Established in 1947 as the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, the recently renamed Museum of Performance & Design is the only West Coast library/museum dedicated to performing arts. Its collection includes 3.5 million photographs, scene and costume designs, videotapes, periodicals, sheet music, and books chronicling a century of San Francisco's performing arts history. It also serves as the official archive for the SF Ballet, SF Opera, Stern Grove Festival, and the Ethnic Dance Festival. The organization has amassed an important collection valued at $5.5 million, but currently faces significant challenges, as it is housed in a San Francisco government building that is due to be closed for two years for a seismic retrofit beginning in 2012. The Museum's leadership and board aspire to purchase and renovate a $30-$40 million permanent home in downtown San Francisco in the next three years, but the organization has some serious financial difficulties: it has been running operating deficits on its current $1 million annual budget, has very little cash on hand, is very dependent on contributed income, and has no major public commitments to suggest that a capital campaign of the scale that it is proposing is realistic and attainable. The organization has been unable to grow its small membership, and while it articulates a desire to modernize its public access to materials, especially by digitizing audio and video tapes of historic performances to be viewed online, its limited capacity has prevented it from making progress toward this goal. A tie-off grant would help the Museum prepare for its upcoming period of transition.