After steering Bellevue Arts Museum through a gnarly financial storm, executive director Kate Casprowiak Scher has resigned. The museum, which is closed indefinitely, announced Tuesday that Scher had stepped down Dec. 31.
Scher, a former board member, was appointed to lead the museum in September 2023 as BAM’s deep-seated financial challenges came to a head. While Scher kept the boat from sinking entirely with a $350,000 emergency fundraising campaign, the storm turned out to be too potent — and the buy-in from local “stakeholders” more tepid than Scher had hoped.
In September 2024, the museum closed indefinitely and entered into a receivership, a court process in which an independent custodian is appointed to manage a company and its assets — in BAM’s case, it was an alternative to formal bankruptcy proceedings. At that time, the court appointed Shelly Crocker as the museum’s receiver, its acting and most senior executive.
While most employees were laid off in September, Crocker kept a skeleton staff, including Scher. But Scher and Crocker said that didn’t make sense beyond a transition period, as there were no exhibits to work on.
“It really felt to both of us that it was the right time,” Crocker said of Scher’s departure.
Scher said she had always seen her position as temporary.
“I never imagined that this would be my pathway,” she said. “I just kind of fell into it. I embraced it. … And in some ways, it would be really fun to continue being the leader of an institution, but this institution is not an art museum right now.”
Crocker said Scher helped stabilize the museum after the somewhat abrupt departure of its previous director, E. Michael Whittington, in September 2023. While Scher’s leadership wasn’t enough to save the museum, “no one person is going to accomplish what needs to be done,” Crocker said.
Scher said she’s proud of the way she advocated for arts on the Eastside and tried “to bring awareness to this incredibly bewildering and frustrating problem of having a very special building in the heart of downtown Bellevue that, for some reason, cannot be supported.”
As the museum remains closed, the path toward reopening and reinvention is likely to be lengthy and challenging. That’s in part because, as reported by The Seattle Times last year, BAM faces long-running issues, including the lack of a substantial endowment, over-optimistic financial forecasting, leadership turnover and overreliance on a small group of funders.
Crocker has appointed Cassandra Johnston as vice president of operations and finance to assist with day-to-day management responsibilities. For now, while financially stable, the museum remains closed. It will likely remain so for 2025.
The focus now is on making this year’s Bellevue Arts Fair — a long-running annual tradition — the “best … they’ve ever seen,” Crocker said.
Meanwhile, she continues to seek a permanent solution for the museum. Crocker said she is exploring whether the city would be the right future owner of the building but that there was nothing formal “on either side.” And, she added, “I continue to have conversations with a lot of different interested parties.”
Information from The Seattle Times archive was used in this report.
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