San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), which also houses some of the city’s other top cultural organizations, announced this week that it would consider selling the building in the city’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood.
A press release said the decision to sell is part of “a series of strategic steps to ensure a sustainable and impactful future for the museum,” which includes stabilizing the organization’s finances and ensuring its endowment is not depleted. The release also noted that this “new vision” for CJM will enable “greater flexibility and ensure a viable operating model.”
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CJM, which was founded in 1984 and has been closed to the public since December 2024, has reduced its operating budget from $7.5 million to $3 million in those 15 months, reducing its debt in half to less than $14 million, according to a CJM report. san francisco chroniclefirst reported the news. The museum’s closure also resulted in a pause in the museum’s programming and a staff reduction of approximately 80%.
“We explored a number of options, but what became clear was that our building was beyond our capabilities,” said Kerry King, executive director of CJM. art news in an email. “My top priority, and the Board’s top priority, is to ensure that the Contemporary Jewish Museum continues to exist and serve audiences for generations to come. While putting this building up for sale is a difficult step, I also have every confidence that it is the right step for the entire organization.”
“We have an important role to play in the Bay Area and we are committed to continuing that work,” she added.
Designed by Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the CJM opened in 2008 and currently spans 63,000 square feet and features a blue cube as an intervention in the historic power station that Libeskind converted into a museum.
It will go public next week. A spokesman for the museum said the asking price would not be included in the listing, “which is common practice when a property is so unique”. The museum said in a press release that it would seek a buyer who would be “complementary” to other cultural offerings in the area, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Museum of the African Diaspora.
CJM is the last Bay Area institution to be affected by rising costs in the region, although the most high-profile examples are limited to art schools. After several years of declining enrollment and multiple failed mergers with other universities, the Art Institute of San Francisco will close permanently in 2022. It eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2023, selling the campus as a way to help pay off its massive debt. In 2024, Laurene Powell Jobs, one of the top collectors in the United States, purchased the SFAI campus for $30 million and announced that it would be used as an art institution.
News broke in January that CalArts would close next year and that Vanderbilt University had purchased the campus for an undisclosed price.
“At a time when arts organizations and nonprofits across the country, especially in the Bay Area, are struggling, pausing operations is both necessary and beneficial for us,” King said in an email. “We are continuing to refine our vision and focus more directly on using contemporary art to interpret and shape the Jewish experience. Today’s news is not easy, but it is an important step toward an exciting and promising future for CJM.”
