Shortfall closes Claremont Museum of Art

An art museum that operated in a former fruit packing house is packing up its collections and placing them into storage. The Claremont Museum of Art was unable to raise enough operating funds to stay open.

Certainly, officials of the museum tried. After its near-death experience in October, the City of Claremont advanced enough money to keep it open through the weekend after Christmas.

A statement from the museum says board members and volunteers met frequently during the last six weeks to try and figure out where they’d find the next financial reprieve. Even so, their fundraising efforts fell short of the $213,000 the Claremont Museum of Art would need to function for a year with one full-time employee and many volunteers.

The museum’s founding president — who’d worked for two decades to establish the institution at the Packing House — says that even though the permanent collection will go into storage, she hopes to display representative works online until the board can help raise enough money to reopen the doors.