First year a tough one for African American museum

First-year attendance was projected at 600,000, a massive leap from the previous year, when just 75,000 people came. But attendance is under 400,000, the Detroit Free Press reported yesterday. And of that, only 225,000 paid for admission. The rest were there for free events.

The museum faces a similar problem with memberships. It now has more than 6,000 dues-paying members - a huge jump from the 900 it had one year ago - but budget projections called for more than 10,000 members.

To offset the lower-than-expected attendance, the museum has trimmed its operating budget to $4.7 million from $6.8 million.

The museum, renamed two weeks ago in honor of Dr. Charles Wright, the retired obstetrician who launched the institution 33 years ago in his medical offices, has also had successes in its new $38.4 million home.

Perhaps most visible was when former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young lay in state in the museum's glass-domed rotunda. Thousands of people waited on long lines outside the museum to pay their respects to Young.

Museum President Kimberly Camp says she is buoyed by the first year.

"I think we have raised the bar for what museums should be to communities," Camp told the paper.

"There was a lot of concern prior to this museum opening of it being able to serve as a community gathering place, as an exhibition space, as a place for scholarly discourse, as a place for school kids to come. There was the expectation of us being a lot of things to a lot of different people, and despite it not being a perfect year, I think we've been able to accomplish a lot of that with a fair amount of grace," she said.

However, some say the museum has created rifts in the local black community.

"This is no longer a self-determined project of African American people," says Millard Porter, founder and director of Pitch Black Poetry, which publishes Pitch Black Detroit, an anthology of Detroit poets.

"We don't feel it to be ours anymore," said Porter, who also blamed Camp for paying more attention to corporate sponsors.

But Camp has her supporters, too.

"Yes, she has some strong ideas," former museum board Chair Eugene Gilmer said. "But that's what we needed. We needed a person who had the professional expertise and could come in there and not operate this museum out of someone's hip pocket."

Even Wright, who admits to having reservations about the museum's direction, has become more vocal in his support.

"This is a different time and a different group of people running the museum, and there are bound to be changes," Wright said. "Not all of those changes are bad, but they're not all good, either. I would hope there is some understanding on the part of the current management that there remains a need for some remedial measures."

He is most critical about the museum's reliance on traveling exhibitions instead of self-made ones.

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