Community support needed for new UI Museum of Art

By Iowa City Press-Citizen

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Although the 90-day deadline for an appeal has passed, University of Iowa officials are still holding out hope that the Federal Emergency Management Agency will reverse its earlier decision and pay a significant portion of the expenses for building a new UI Museum of Art out of the Iowa River's floodplain.

Since the flood of 2008, UI's impressive art collection has been scattered throughout various storage facilities and exhibition spaces. Although a portion of that collection is available in the Iowa Memorial Union's Black Box Theatre, the bulk of the collection is being stored and displayed at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport as museum officials figure out the next step.

Typically, FEMA will provide funding for up to 90 percent of the cost of repairing (or relocating) a building that has been damaged greater than 50 percent of its value. But the UIMA is a first-of-its-kind case. Although the flood of 2008 did not do more than 50 percent worth of structural damage to the building, it did cause the museum's insurers to refuse to insure any artworks stored in the building. That means the building, although structurally sound, can no longer serve the function for which it was built.

“Right now, FEMA is behind, and this is the first time an appeal like this has gone forward,” said Pat Hall, the recovery bureau chief in the Iowa division of Homeland Security. “It's not uncommon for them to not meet the 90-day window. They have a lot of appeals they've been working on.”

We, too, hope that FEMA will come around and agree to fund up to 90 percent of the museum's relocation costs. But even then, the remaining 10 percent represents a huge amount of money.

And that means museum officials - especially museum director Sean O'Harrow - now have to oversee an unprecedented amount of fundraising to make sure that a new facility becomes a reality.

Regardless of how FEMA decides, it's going to require a great deal of dedication from the university and the community at large to ensure that UI's impressive art collection eventually gets housed in a building worthy of it.