The Kansas City Museum has launched a capital campaign called "Making a Museum KC."
Museum and city leaders presented the new campaign at Corinthian Hall on Monday.
“This is something that will have an emotional impact on this city. It will be yet another thing that will make people proud of Kansas City,” Mayor Sly James said.
It’s an impact hoping to bring people, both old and new, to Kansas City, and a chance to see more of its history.
“It's bringing it back in many ways to that heyday, to those glory days when it really was that main facility for students and teachers and the public to learn about Kansas City and Missouri's history,” Kansas City Museum Executive Director Anna Marie Tutera said.
The Kansas City Museum Foundation developed the initiative, hoping to raise private funds for the museum’s multi-year restoration project.
“There are several stages of construction. Each stage of construction is preceded by a phase of architectural design,” Tutera said. “Each stage of construction will open to the public a new face of the museum, so we're never closing the entire property down completely at one point and time.”
Tutera said there have been years of work to get this restoration project off the ground.
“Many people in the Northeast and beyond have been working on this restoration project for the decades,” Tutera said. “There were decades of people working really hard in the first round of restoration of the Kansas City Museum, so it's really important to remember that history before this project.”
The project will be happening in five stages. Stage one of the project will be to Corinthian Hall, an estimated $15 million project.
“What we're going to be doing is the first floor. We're going to be restoring and rehabbing and recreating or reinterpreting architecture of each of the rooms on the first floor and then using those rooms for programs and displays and exhibitions and events,” Tutera said. “Second and third floors will be primarily exhibition galleries where we will have exhibitions that will have permanent collection of historical artifacts of archival materials.”
Construction for stage one will begin in May.
The Kansas City Museum will be having a public open house on the museum’s renovation plan and updates.
It will be held on Wednesday, March 29 at Corinthian Hall from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m., located at 3218 Gladstone Blvd., Kansas City, Missouri 64123.
For more information on this campaign, visit http://www.kansascitymuseum.org/
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Rae Daniel can be reached at Rae.Daniel@KSHB.com.
