UC cuts threaten Riverside museum

Proposed cuts at UC Riverside threaten to close down its California Museum of Photography, a 3-decade-old museum noted for its collections of photographs, including the Keystone-Mast Collection and the University of California’s Fiat Lux Collection of Ansel Adams works.

In a letter to Chancellor France Cordova, museum Director Jonathan Green has asked for reconsideration of the 40% cuts that would result in the elimination of half the staff positions, effectively shutting down the museum.

The museum’s budget at the beginning of 2001 was $438,000. Today, it’s closer to $375,000, and the suggested cuts would bring it down by $150,000, eliminating three of the six staff positions.

“I know we’re not alone in receiving these kinds of exaggerated cuts,” he said. But, “we’ve taken our share of budget cuts.”

University officials, however, say the decrease is closer to 26%.

“We have a serious budget crisis,” said Joel Martin, interim dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UC Riverside. “It’s been a very painful process. We’re all being affected by it ... it’s a very dire time here.”

A decision is expected next month.

The museum, located in downtown Riverside, serves as a research and exhibition space. In addition to its photograph collections it also displays prints, glass-plate negatives and cameras that, Green wrote, the “university has a societal, legal and moral obligation to protect and conserve.”

With the proposed cuts, the collections would no longer be open to the public and would be accessible to scholars only on a very limited basis, according to Green.

“The museum has become an integral part of the university’s and community’s intellectual life,” Green wrote in his letter to Cordova.

“But if the cuts announced to us last week are implemented, the California Museum of Photography will have to essentially close its doors to both the academic program and to the community.”