MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) – After years of setbacks, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is starting to see progress.
The executive board named Alice Novak as temporary director in July, and now, the museum’s association and city boards met together for the first time in months.
“Going back and forth with the city council, we got off our regularly scheduled meetings,” explained joint board President Bill Ford.
“We’re calling it the renaissance, this idea of hey, we’ve gotten over a hump,” said Montgomery’s Cultural Affairs Director Jennifer Dobbs. “We feel renewed, refreshed, everyone’s ready to move forward.”
Recent disputes with city hall put the museum’s accreditation into question, but those concerns have been put to rest.
“The American Alliance of Museums is our accrediting body, and we sent them right away the ordinance that was passed at city council, and also the new agreement between the joint boards that very closely follow the way we have been structured historically, and our accreditation was approved -or continued- without question,” Novak explained.
The museum is also continuing to make progress on proposed facility upgrades that would better preserve the art inside.
“We’ve got some very fantastic pieces of art, and we want to protect them,” Ford said. “If that air handling goes down, the storage facility where we actually keep the art would be unsuitable for keeping those pieces together, so we’re talking about sealing off one of the galleries.”
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