In face of financial headwinds, MAH looks to expand revenue with new museum store

It’s become part of the contemporary museum experience: After spending an hour or two (or more) deep-diving into the exhibitions and collections, you finally get the dopamine hit of visiting the gift shop just to see if there’s something you can take home to forever remind you of your day at the museum.

Until now, the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz couldn’t offer much in the way of a gift shop experience. For years, the MAH offered a few items for sale on a couple of shelves near the front entrance, mostly books on local history, with a few keepsakes like coffee mugs.

But that’s about the change. In that same space near the front entrance, the MAH will now have a separate gift shop, with more offerings reflecting the museum’s mission to embrace art and history. 

“We’ll have a lot of fun, affordable, unique artsy stuff from other artists from all over,” said executive director Ginger Shulick Porcella. “But we really want to highlight artists who are local, and get people to buy local and support Santa Cruz artists.”

On Thursday, the MAH will be unveiling its new museum store with a free party, from noon to 8 p.m in the atrium. During the latter part of that window, from 5 to 8 p.m., there will be a happy hour with a live DJ set and “MAHctails” — and, yes, the pun is completely the museum’s. 

In a way, the new store marks a new era at the MAH. Though Porcella has been on the job for six months, July 1 marks the beginning of the organization’s fiscal year. In that respect, she’s now fully invested in the job.

“So, it’s a great time to get some new earned income streams with the gift shop,” she said in the MAH’s atrium, while she and her staff were building out the new store’s infrastructure. “I’ve talked to my friends who run museums and museum shops are the thing making them money right now.”

Financially, the MAH needs the help. The museum’s climb out of post-COVID debt has been slow, and the debt, Porcella said, sits at around a half-million dollars. “It’s a significant amount,” she said. “We’ve been running a debt for the past several years, but we can’t keep doing that.”

Porcella said that the museum has trimmed its budget for the coming year in an effort to retire the debt — as if to illustrate the case, she said this with a big splash of paint on her elbow from her labors helping to build the infrastructure of the gift shop. 

The continuing chaos at the federal funding level is bringing a lot of uncertainty as well to the museum’s future planning. The MAH’s largest single funding source is the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, an agency that the Trump administration wants to eliminate. 

Porcella said that the MAH’s attendance has returned to pre-pandemic levels. And despite the choppy waters ahead, she’s not ready to declare the MAH’s situation a crisis.

“There’s a fine line between urgency and emergency,” she said. “You can only say it’s an emergency or a crisis once, and I’m not ready to play that card yet. And I honestly don’t think it’s an emergency or a crisis. I think, with our staff, with our donor base, with our community, we’ll be able to see it through.”

Porcella said that she has opened museum stores three times before in her career as an arts administrator: “I feel very comfortable doing this. I know what works: It’s trying new things, being flexible. It’s not having too much inventory, and it’s always mixing it up, and letting people know who the local artists are.”

In this case, that could mean merchandise branded to a particular ongoing exhibition at the museum. It could mean jewelry, T-shirts, hats or stuff for kids all branded to a local artist’s work. Whatever it means, Porcella is counting on the new store to raise revenues.

“We have very modest income goals for the first fiscal year, around $60,000,” she said.

Of course, there are plenty of retail shops within steps of the MAH that offer up creative and artistic gifts, from Artisans, just adjacent to Abbott Square, to Bookshop Santa Cruz on the next block. Porcella said that the MAH isn’t interested in competing with such retailers. “That was the hardest part when I started thinking about doing this,” she said. “We don’t want to compete, we want to support.”

The museum store, she said, will open in two phases, a front part which will open immediately, and another area, deeper into the front lobby area, set to open before the end of the year. Porcella decided to do the two-phase approach because she wants to learn what customers are buying. Learning what sells in the first phase of the store will determine what will be available in the second phase.

“I’ve seen that mistake so many times with museum stores,” she said. “[Museums] go all-in on something in the beginning, and it doesn’t really pay off.”

Beyond a new gift shop, in mid-July, the MAH is bringing back an exhibition that was one of its biggest successes of the 2010s. “The Princes of Surf” is a historical exhibit focused on the three Hawaiian princes who introduced surfing to the mainland U.S., near the San Lorenzo River’s mouth in Santa Cruz in 1885. The exhibit was hugely popular when the MAH first brought it to town in 2015. 

The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History opens its new museum store Thursday, with a free event from noon to 8 p.m. MAH executive director Ginger Shulick Porcella herself will serve as DJ with psychedelic, soul, hip-hop and R&B. 

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.