Columbia Museum of Art galleries are closed for renovations. What's upgrading?

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22-04-2025

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Last month, the Columbia Museum of Art marked its 75th anniversary. It met the milestone with its galleries closed.
They've been closed since January, and they'll remain closed until May.
'The nonprofit has existed for 75 years, but we've been in this building for 25,' Executive Director Della Watkins said of the museum's home, which was built on the steel-frame bones of a Belk's department store.
'In the 25 years that we've been there, you know, just like in your home, there's always things you want to change and improve.'
That's why the museum has pulled down the art from its walls, and torn up those walls and the ceilings above. The museum's ongoing, extensive renovations of all its main display galleries, six on the ground floor and 20 more upstairs, key on the need to upgrade the lighting for its art, which has reached the end of its operating life after 25 years in use.
But the museum is doing more than simply hanging new lights. It's reworking and refreshing its galleries so they're a better space to see art, and it's expanding its capabilities to hang pieces that are heavy or otherwise challenging to display. And when the permanent collection galleries upstairs are ready for work to be reinstalled, there will be a thorough reshuffling of which pieces are displayed and how they're organized — some pieces will be put back in storage, while others will be put on display for the first time.
Visitors will begin to see the results of the museum's $2.9 million upgrades May 24, when the rotating galleries downstairs reopen with an exhibition of works by innovative American printmaker Sam Gilliam. The return of the permanent collection is still a ways off, with the opening of the upstairs galleries not anticipated until January of next year.
'I'm not going to move it down the road,' Watkins said of that tentative date. 'I hope I'm moving up the road.'
The State was invited along for a hard-hat tour of the in-progress renovations in late February to learn about how they will change the experience for museum visitors.
It hasn't been too long since the museum last underwent a renovation, but it has been a while since most of its galleries were overhauled.
The $5 million improvements the museum completed in 2018 did impact the way it displays art, as the push to expand into 11,000 square feet of unused space added both more areas for events and new galleries to increase the number of works displayed from the museum's permanent collection.
This latest round of improvements is aimed squarely at the museum's ability to effectively display its art. Installing new lights is the primary emphasis. Controlling lighting — the amount and physical temperature each piece can take, the color temperature that best suits it — is vital.
'Every work of art has an ideal foot count, the amount of light that can stay on that piece of art,' Watkins said, explaining that the museum had previously been managing this by attaching lenses and baffles to diffuse and reduce the amount of light. But the heat put off by those bulbs limited the museum's capacity to display more sensitive works.
After interviewing five lighting companies and testing their products in the gallery, the museum settled on new LED lights that can be easily adjusted via Bluetooth based on the requirements of each installation.
'You stand on the ground with your phone, and you can adjust it ... while somebody is on the lower level with the light meter,' Watkins said.
And being able to so precisely control the light can help with the preservation of the art, Michael Neumeister, the museum's senior curator, said.
'These newer LEDs, of course, are much better, and you could really dial in the color temperature, purposefully, in a way that you couldn't before,' he said. 'The sentiment among conservators is that LED generates much less heat. You get much less UV band in there. So it'll definitely help.'
The museum is upgrading the galleries in other ways, both planned and unexpected.
Among the unanticipated improvement was properly pinning the HVAC ducts above the downstairs galleries instead of having them on the ceiling tiles, which is what crews discovered when they began work.
'We still don't know to this day how that passed all the right requirements, but it did 25 years ago,' Watkins laughed during the tour.
One upgrade in the ceilings was more intentional. In seven spots, three in the downstairs galleries and four in the upstairs galleries, the museum has reinforced its ability to hang art from the ceiling. In these seven locations — three downstairs and four upstairs — it will soon be able to hang objects that weigh up to 1,000 pounds.
'Before this, we couldn't accept art that we had to hang at that level,' Watkins said. 'There were some cases where we did corner installations, and we kind of braced in the corner, but this is structurally sound for whatever needs to happen. It could be a big sculpture. It could be something out of wax, anything that has weight.'
Another upgrade that will impact the viewing experience for museum guests is more subtle. Watkins pointed out how the walls in the downstairs may have looked like there was a wave to them, like they weren't quite level.
That's because they weren't. Over the years, the gallery walls accrued 75 layers of paint as they were prepared again and again for new gallery displays.
'25 years, three exhibitions a year, and we paint every time,' Watkins said.
The layers upon layers of paint gradually made the walls uneven. Now, with new walls going in, the museum will have fresh hanging surfaces on which to install exhibitions.
'They had to break it off into, like, sheets,' Watkins said of the old paint. 'They were snapping it off. It was the weirdest sound, just snapping off all 75 layers of paint.'