Craft, Folk Art Museum Again Searching for Temporary Home

The Craft and Folk Art Museum, which has been housed at the May Co. on Wilshire Boulevard since 1989, is looking for a temporary home--again. The landmark emporium is scheduled to close at the end of January in the wake of a recently announced merger of May Co. and Robinson’s department stores.

May Co. will help relocate the museum while it continues a fund-raising campaign for a permanent building, according to Jim Waterson, May Co.’s vice president of public relations.

Meanwhile, the announcement of the department store’s closure has stepped up the museum’s efforts to finance and construct a new building. “The possibility of vacating the May Co. earlier than anticipated makes it necessary to accelerate our plans and underscores the urgency of our fund-raising campaign,” museum director Patrick Ela said in a statement Wednesday.

In 1989, the museum launched a $12-million capital campaign to create a new facility on its original site at Wilshire Boulevard and Curson Avenue. About $3.5 million in cash and pledges has been raised for a mixed-use complex known as Museum Tower, but the project did not attract sufficient investment to qualify for construction financing. Now the museum has dropped that ambitious scheme and substituted a more modest plan to develop a 33,000-square-foot museum on the same site.

The museum has obtained a five-year lease with a purchase option on the two-story building at 5800 Wilshire Blvd. Plans call for purchasing the structure and adjacent parking lot, and combining this property with the original CAFAM building at 5814 Wilshire Blvd. Architects Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fund will design renovations of the two existing buildings and create a connecting wing. The museum hopes to begin construction next year.