Picture this – $3 million renovation of the Art Museum of Missoula scheduled to be completed by fall 2005

Nine galleries filled with art; two classrooms for student painters and sculptors; a research library; elevators; vaulted ceilings; lots of natural light. These are some of the amenities the new, improved Art Museum of Missoula will offer to patrons beginning, if all goes as planned, in the autumn of 2005, when the doors are set to open on $3 million expansion and renovation that will nearly double the size of the existing facility.

By SHERRY JONES of the Missoulian

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"We’ve been good stewards of this building," museum director Laura Millin says of the 100-year-old Carnegie Library, which began housing art some 28 years ago. "We’ve maintained it; we’ve improved it. But it’s long past time to do (expand) it."

Why now? The question, Vivian Brooke says, can be answered in a single word: accessibility.

"I know some older people that were pretty involved in getting it started and" – a rueful chuckle here – "I don’t know how often they come to the museum any more," says Brooke, a former Montana legislator and co-chair, with University of Montana law professor Martin Burke, of the committee charged with raising the funds for the project.

Elderly people won’t be the only ones to benefit from the new, street-level entrance and elevator. People using wheelchairs, for instance, will for the first time be able to visit the museum’s upper galleries. What’s more, museum staffers won’t have to lug big, heavy artworks up flights of stairs, risking injury to themselves and the art.

The need for an elevator, says Millin, sparked the idea for the expansion as far back as 1998. In order to meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the museum, being publicly funded, had to provide a way other than stairs for people to get to the second floor. Installing an elevator inside the building would compromise its historic integrity, though, and to build an elevator tower on the building’s outside was so expensive that some wondered if the museum might as well not put up an entire building.

Seven years and countless meetings, public workshops, private interviews and museum tours later, the museum’s board of directors are gearing up for a ground-breaking this spring. They kicked off the public campaign for funds during Saturday’s art auction benefit; they’ve got an architect in Missoula’s Warren Hampton; and they’ve already got

$1.8 million of the money they think they’ll need to get the job done.

The Missoula Redevelopment Agency, which uses tax increment funds to help pay for building and renovation projects downtown, pledged $500,000 to the cause. The City of Missoula matched that pledge. Missoula County offered a $75,000-per-year enhancement to the museum’s annual budget. The museum’s board of directors and the Art Associates of Missoula, which administers the Fifth Grade Art Experience each year, pledged $175,000. The Goldberg Family Foundation pledged $50,000.

And the list goes on, including a donation from the estate of the late businessman and art patron Gilbert Milliken and a grant from the Englehard Foundation, a family foundation based in New York, Millin says.

Still, more than $1 million remains to be gathered, and ground-breaking theoretically is just months away. Those involved in the project aren’t letting themselves think negative thoughts, though, not officially. "We’ve never figured that we wouldn’t have it," says Brooke when asked about a back-up plan in case of a funding shortage. "I’m not sure what the plan is if we get to a point where we haven’t raised it. We’re so confident that we will, since we’ve raised quite a bit to date without having the publicity."

"We have a solid footing at this point," Millin says, "and we feel certain that it’s going to happen."