The Little-Known Business of Traveling Exhibitions Is Booming

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.

Last month, in a Wisconsin court, the De Pere Cultural Foundation filed a lawsuit against Exhibits Development Group (EDG), a company that travels exhibitions. In the suit, the foundation, which runs the Mulva Cultural Center, alleges that EDG repeatedly breached its agreement to produce exhibitions on the Beatles, the Grammy Awards, dinosaurs, and Lego. EDG, which is based in St. Paul, Minnesota, also offers traveling art exhibitions on Rembrandt, Picasso, Joan Miró, Edgar Degas, and Marc Chagall, among others.

In particular, the De Pere Cultural Foundation alleges that EDG “could not live up to its promises” for the shows and that it failed to procure pieces for the dinosaur exhibition due to unspecified “terrorist attacks in the Middle East.” The foundation is seeking at least $1.4 million in damages. 

The lawsuit, which has yet to be settled, sheds light on the business of traveling exhibition companies, a fast-growing and little-examined part of the art industry. The sector has quickly become essential for small, mid-size, and regional museums, which have small staffs and limited programming budgets, and often rely on companies like EDG for access to exhibitions that would otherwise be too complicated or expensive to produce in-house.

Curatorial, one of the oldest traveling exhibition companies in the US, was founded in 1988 by CEO Graham Howe. Its primary focus is photography shows, since works in that medium are easy to move between institutions. Today, the organization has for-profit and nonprofit arms. The company’s services include facilitating the traveling part of a show originated by a museum, staging its own traveling exhibitions, and working with artists and estates to develop shows. 

“We’re offering an economical, shared cost model that represents a better deal than they would have if they were doing it themselves,” Curatorial’s executive director Phillip Prodgertold ARTnews. “Museums, particularly small museums with limited resources, have access to collections that they may not have access to on their own.”

“There’s always been a fundamental truth about art museums and museums in general: they’re always squeezed,” Howe added. “They always need to do more programming for less money, and that’s a reality that we responded to.” 

One industry professional estimated there are 500 to 600 museums of the 35,000 in the United States with the ability and budget to do traveling exhibitions. The venues that are most likely to book a traveling exhibition, or several, are mid-size science museums and institutions with either gaps in their collection, or ones that don’t have a permanent collection at all, like the Mulva Cultural Center. 

“It’s a constantly changing industry because museum people are constantly changing, and so are their needs, stars, tastes, and administrations,” Jeff Landau, director of Landau Traveling Exhibitions, told ARTnews. 

The clients for Landau’s “turnkey” shows on art and photography are often mid-size institutions and university art galleries. The company charges flat fees between $20,000 to $100,000 for a three-month run, with the cost varying based on the rarity and importance of the items included in a given show, as well as the size of the exhibition and the number of lenders involved. 

“A lot of the ones we deal with come either from one or a limited number of sources, like one museum, one private collection, or one foundation,” Landau said. Landau has organized numerous kinds of traveling shows in the 35 years he has been at the company, including exhibitions on Robert Indiana, Elizabeth Catlett, and David Hockney, among others.

Exhibition Hub, a Brussels-based company founded in 2015, has lately focused on producing digital art and immersive exhibitions like “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” It also owns and operates art centers in Chicago, Denver, and Atlanta.

John Zaller, the company’s US executive producer, told ARTnews that its exhibitions are highly commercial, which means that the shows tend to attract visitors who might not come to a museum on a regular basis. “But then when they come, they say, ‘Wow, I really like this museum. I think I’m going to become a member,’” Zaller said.

Curatorial’s Prodger said many museums have also undergone a shift from doing everything in-house to relying more upon outside expertise. 

“There’s more appetite for interaction with the on-site world,” he said. “A museum can come to us and basically say, ‘I have a problem. Can you help us solve it?’ And nine times out of ten, we can.” 

It helps that traveling exhibition companies can handle everything, including loans, shipping, crating, signage, catalog production, import agreements, foreign exchange rates, and complicated logistics. But multiple experts told ARTnews that costs can quickly grow, especially when an exhibition involves loans from multiple sources. 

Traveling exhibition companies have also helped fill institutional gaps, such as when there was a sudden spike in demand for exhibitions focused on underrepresented artists and artists of color following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The American Federation for the Arts (AFA), for example, has since staged exhibitions on Whitfield Lovell, African modernism, the historically Black school Tougaloo College, and Romare Bearden. The nonprofit fundraises to reduce the cost of such exhibitions and has often worked with institutions on payment plans. 

“Suddenly museums were like, ‘Wait a minute. We’re not doing enough,’” Pauline Forlenza, AFA’s director and CEO, told ARTnews. “Museums were kind of at the point where they were ready to take on these kinds of shows, and they weren’t necessarily doing as many of them as they felt they should.”

AFA’s focus on under-recognized artists helped it get through the Covid-19 pandemic, when many institutions closed or operated at a reduced capacity, forcing these museums to ask AFA to postpone standing agreements for traveling exhibitions. However, according to Forlenza, AFA still faces many of the same challenges hitting other parts of the art industry, including spiking costs for utilities, raw materials, fuel, and insurance, as well as difficulties recruiting and retaining highly specialized staff. 

While there is scant information on the size of the traveling exhibitions industry, AFA provides a useful self-portrait in its 2022 tax filings. Of its $2.8 million in total revenue, $1.5 million was marked as program service revenue for its exhibitions and museum services. (The other $600,000 came from contributions and grants). Its expenses, however, were $3.5 million, the majority of which was salaries and other benefits. Only about $680,000 went directly toward exhibition expenses.

“What happened during the pandemic is that those estimates that were done before went up—in many cases, three, four, or five times,” Forlenza said. “The shipping went up, the crating went up, everything went up.”

Landau estimated the cost of shipping one of his shows to Denmark was $25,000 each way. “And that was small for an international exhibition,” he said.

Prodger said that Curatorial faced similar difficulties with rising costs. “The way that we operate, some of those costs we have to pass on, and not all museums are prepared to pay it,” he said. “It’s a really difficult situation.”

For immersive exhibitions, there are additional challenges on the technology side, including development of the scenery as well as the installation staff. “It’s a tricky balance, too, because the consumer is only going to pay so much for a ticket,” Zaller said. “The higher the ticket cost, the higher the expectation. And if you don’t deliver on that, you’re not going to be open for very long.”

Multiple experts emphasized to ARTnews the importance of communication with venues to set clear goals and manage expectations, especially when any changes occur—something that De Pere Cultural Foundation alleges that EDG repeatedly did not do. In its filing, the foundation alleged that EDG “repeatedly [made] unilateral changes … without notice to, much less discussion with” the organization. (EDG did not respond to a request for comment; De Pere said it could not comment on “ongoing legal matters.”)

As Forlenza said, when the checklist changes, it is critical to make sure exhibition companies tell their partner museums why and replace it with a work that’s “equally good.” That communication is key to successful partnerships.