Seattle Art Museum has mastered the art of raising money.

With a new sculpture park opening this month and a huge museum expansion ready to open later this year, it has demonstrated financial prowess unprecedented in the Seattle arts community, due in good part to the giving of Microsoft alumni.

		Dan DeLong / P-I
	Mimi Gates, who became director of the Seattle Art Museum in 1994, says she "was drawn to Seattle as a city coming into being."

Just three weeks before the opening of Olympic Sculpture Park, SAM is within $7.5 million of the $180 million goal of its capital campaign, which is financing the park, the near doubling of its downtown museum and the further renovation of its Asian museum in Volunteer Park.

The museum shot past the $100 million mark in its endowment fund last fall.

What is more remarkable is how the museum transformed itself from an essentially private museum with a narrow focus, run by a former geologist, into what it is today.

The evolution was not preordained. "It was damn hard work," said Virginia Wright, former president of the museum and a trustee for nearly 50 years.

When Wright joined the board in 1959, Dr. Richard Fuller paid for nearly everything, including acquisitions. By 1970, just before Fuller's retirement, the annual operating budget stood at $1.5 million, with an endowment of nearly $725,000. Twenty-two years later, the budget had jumped five times and the endowment more than 20 times. By 2000, the budget was $17 million and the endowment $72.3 million.

During the past two decades, other major Seattle arts organizations experienced multimillion-dollar leaps in budgets and endowments and conducted major capital campaigns, but none has raised the kind of money SAM has. The Seattle Symphony's endowment, second only to the art museum's, stands at $34.3 million.

Money follows power and the museum's board is the most socially prestigious in town, an important attribute in raising cash. Such was not always the case, according to Wright.

"The symphony board in those earlier days, I believe, was snappier, hotter, more desirable," said Wright. "The museum board was small and never considered exclusive. It was more a set of cronies -- not movers and shakers -- too small to be interesting with little to do. There was no esprit among us."

That is not true today. The museum's board of some 60 trustees represents a cross-section of some of the city's most prominent people: those with deep pockets, those with old, weighty names; those with powerful civic and corporate connections. In some cases all three. They are energized by the institution and committed to its multifaceted projects. Last year, SAM's membership reached a high of 41,000.

"The perception of the Seattle Art Museum has changed," said Peter Donnelly, president of ArtsFund until his retirement a year ago, and now a trustee of the museum and newly installed president of the Frye Art Museum. "Once insular, the museum has worked hard to become accessible and engaged in the whole community through extensive outreach programs and educational initiatives. Today, anyone can carve out an experience at SAM."

Making the leap

The transition, according to Wright, began in the mid-1970s with board leadership from John Hauberg, a noted art collector and philanthropist with his wife, Anne. It was designed to make the museum more professional and to represent the community at large. As the museum approached building a new facility downtown, she said, her husband, Bagley Wright, then president, "made sure the board was strong enough to raise money. It was no longer enough to be an art lover." Afraid of what was going to be asked of them financially, several trustees left the board.

SAM's desire to build downtown was fraught with difficulties. Its attempt at Westlake Center was killed by the threat of lawsuits. The second try was successful, but success did not come easily. There were all sorts of public-private partnerships to aid in construction costs, with nearly 50 percent of the $62 million capital budget provided by a bond levy.

By contrast, only $21 million, or 12 percent of the current campaign, comes from government sources. The biggest private donations for the first capital campaign were in the $1 million range, often collective gifts like that of the Wrights, which included a family foundation and Virginia Wright's parents, Prentice and Virginia Bloedel. For the second campaign, single contributions reached beyond $25 million, with the Wrights donating $10 million through their personal foundation.

In 1994, three years after the museum opened its downtown building, Mimi Gardner Gates was hired as director.

"I was drawn to Seattle as a city coming into being," she said. "I loved the idea of making a difference in a city and the fact there was a separate facility for Asian art (in Volunteer Park) since my speciality is Chinese art. I was impressed in my interview by how open everyone was and how enthusiastic they were. A lot of people in the early '90s didn't know how to view Seattle. Some were surprised I would go from Yale (she was director of the Yale University Art Gallery) to Seattle, Washington. I knew how beautiful the city was because I had a son at Evergreen. I remember being at Volunteer Park, looking west and seeing the water shimmering in the sun. I also like to fly fish. However, the primary factor in my coming was I felt this was a city coming into being, and a lot I had learned in the museum world could be of use here. Now, there is enormous interest in how we evolved."

		Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
	Still in its crate, a piece of Korean artist Do-Ho Suh's sculpture "Some/One" rests in one of the new galleries in the expanded section of the Seattle Art Museum. The sculpture was created from military dog tags.

Among the first things she considered, in terms of money, was the museum's $19 million endowment.

"It was essential for the financial stability of the institution that 20 to 25 percent of the operating budget come from endowment income. Faye (Sarkowsky) and Jinny (Wright) took leadership roles in that campaign. If we had not done that, we would not have been able to take on our current projects. That laid the groundwork."

To date, about 20 people and foundations have given $1 million or more to the endowment and more than 50 in excess of $100,000.

"Years ago, we were at a board meeting," said Sarkowsky, former president of the board and longtime trustee, "and were told the museum needed at least $40 million for the endowment and everyone gasped. Then we got to work, first with trustees and, second, the community at large. For a campaign of any scale to succeed, new donors are critical. How do we find them? We gather names -- hundreds and hundreds," she said. "You go through them discussing who is doing what in the city. Then, we take people out in beautiful boats, give glamorous parties and invent all kinds of entertainments."

"Create a lot of buzz," said Wright, or "a bit of leg," to quote The New York Times in a January story on how museums are trying to attract the young and affluent.

"Cultivate, then conquer," quipped Janet Ketcham, who has experience in such matters, not only as trustee at the Seattle Art Museum but also as co-chairman of the Vancouver Art Gallery's capital campaign when she lived in Vancouver, B.C.

One idea, taken from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Sarkowsky said, secured $2 million from 200 people each giving $10,000. Much later, people were taken on tours of what would become Olympic Sculpture Park. A lot of them, not necessarily engaged with the museum, she said, were interested for environmental reasons.

"We got people interested in collecting art, some of whom now collect in a major way," Sarkowsky said. "Raising money is a kind of drip-drip process through the years, a lot of cultivation before any contributions. These things do not happen overnight."

The money tree

The climate was right. The number of major art collections in Seattle -- collections that register on a national level -- has increased dramatically. And there is money that was not in the area previously.

"When someone writes the history of Seattle," Wright said, "I think a key factor in its development will be the transformative effect of money made by people in companies like Microsoft, Starbucks, Amazon.com, not only those who worked there but those who invested in them."

More than $70 million in the $180 million capital campaign, for instance, was derived from people who had worked at Microsoft, including $25 million gifts each from the Jon and Mary Shirley and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations; $10 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences; and $2.5 million each from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and William and Sally Neukom.

Museum director Gates is married to the Microsoft billionaire's father, attorney William H. Gates Sr., one of the four co-chairmen of the Gates Foundation, whom she met after arriving in Seattle.

Freshly minted money also is driving the national art scene where new museums, expansions or renovations -- running from $100 million to nearly $1 billion -- have become the norm.

The goal of the museum's original campaign was $150 million. With that drive going well, the museum expanded it two years ago to $180 million. That allowed the expanded downtown museum to have four floors instead of three when it reopens in May, all connected to the original Robert Venturi building. A $5 million art program at Olympic Sculpture Park, scheduled to open Jan. 20, also was created and a program to update the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park ensured.

The museum's campaign has been so successful, it is now aiming to raise $20 million more, said Maryann Jordan, senior deputy director, "to provide money for miscellaneous projects such as transition funds, additional art programs and further structural work at the park."

		Paul Joseph Brown / P-I
	Parts for Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang's installation "Inopportune: Stage One," including cars to be hung from the ceiling, await assembly in an expanded section of the Seattle Art Museum, which reopens May 5.

To date, more than 6,000 gifts have been received. While nearly $150 million came from donors contributing $100,000 or more, some 5,600 gifts were under $10,000, of which 3,000 came from people who had never before given to SAM, Jordan said. Two-thirds of the gifts were made through personal contact by the museum staff or trustees via meetings, tours and social gatherings -- receptions, cocktail parties, dinner parties. The museum hopes to have 10,000 contributors by the end of the campaign and 50,000 members by the end of next year.

"If the museum is going to be successful in going forward, it must extend itself to the broad community and build new audiences," said Susan Brotman, SAM president for the past six years and, with her husband, Jeffrey, among the largest contributors -- at $10 million -- to the campaign.

"A new donor base is necessary to sustain the future. We want to find ways people can participate and enjoy what the museum has to offer. The sculpture park is a particularly wonderful vehicle for that."

"When I came to Seattle (in 1996, from the Guggenheim Museum in New York)," Jordan said, "there was a sense of potential, a city that was evolving. That said, I never anticipated that the museum in particular would have developed as it has. The city itself has changed. It feels completely different now -- more vibrant. Benaroya Hall (across from SAM) and McCaw Hall (at Seattle Center) were milestones. SAM has had leadership. You can be entrepreneurial, but you have to have a great foundation to take advantage of the opportunities that come along."

Quick action

Although the museum had been investigating property on which to create a sculpture park for some time, it had one week, in 1999, to acquire the current site -- 8.5 acres on Elliott Bay, the last sizable piece of waterfront property -- before it was to be sold to developers. Only two years later, Washington Mutual offered SAM a partnership to expand its downtown building. That kind of major expansion was thought to be at least a decade away, said Gates.

"The trustees of the museum did not take any of this lightly," said Jon Shirley, board chairman since 2000. "When I joined the board I didn't think I would be leading a capital campaign of this magnitude. Personally, Mary and I have done all sorts of events to get people interested in the museum in hope of securing their support."

The Shirleys are among the museum's most generous patrons in terms of art -- Alexander Calder's 39-foot "Eagle," sitting astride Elliott Avenue between the two halves of the Olympic Sculpture Park, for instance -- and cash. They endowed the park so it would be free to the public and its upkeep never a burden to the museum.

One might think with Shirley's connection to the high-tech world (he is former president and chief operating officer of Microsoft), fundraising in that arena would be easy for him. He spoke the language.

"Not at all," he said. "People in that area tend to do their own philanthropy in highly focused areas. Education, children, environment and social concerns are high on their list. They don't think much about art museums, although they realize cities are judged on the quality of their cultural institutions. You have to find a door to their interests. The environmental aspects of the park have been one way to approach them, as well as the many educational programs of the museum."

The environmental aspects of the Olympic Sculpture Park also appealed to government agencies such as the King County Conservation Futures Fund, U.S. Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Interior and Transportation, and Washington State Interagency Committee for Outdoor Recreation.

"The amount of money the museum is raising has caused a few eyebrows to go up," said Donnelly, "but you don't always get to dictate the timing of opportunities that come along. You have to grab them and then figure out how to do it. SAM is now doing what Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia did at the turn of the last century, when those cities were so strong: creating a public space for the art its citizens are collecting and an audience to look at it."

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