On 5 August, the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) laid off 11 employees. These included at least one museum guard, two registrars, two preparators, an exhibition manager, a development director and a member of the membership staff. According to a source with knowledge of the situation who spoke with The Art Newspaper on condition of anonymity, at least two of the laid-off employees had worked at the museum for more than 14 years.
“After careful consideration and taking cost-saving steps, the difficult decision by the board of trustees was deemed necessary in the face of the ongoing funding downturn from federal grants, overall budget reductions, increased operational costs and an organisational restructure to support long-term sustainability,” Kari Kovach, the SDMA’s chief operating officer, said in a statement to The Art Newspaper.
According to reporting by The San Diego Union-Tribune, the museum received a $25,000 federal grant in 2025. Kovach says the museum has gotten no further federal grants since then. In 2025, director Roxana Velásquez received a salary of $488,436, according to SDMA’s most recent tax forms. Overall, executive compensation accounted for 7.3% of the museum’s total expenses that year.
In 2023, SDMA absorbed the Museum of Photographic Arts as it pursued plans to expand its West Wing. Designed by the global architecture firm Foster + Partners, the proposed project would expand exhibition space and add collection-storage vaults, a community pavilion and up to 100 underground parking spaces. A 2023 City of San Diego lobbying disclosure lists SDMA’s efforts to secure city approvals for a new rooftop and pavilion, arts-education space and West Wing infrastructure and facility enhancements.
The museum is now soliciting donations for the project, which received a Signature Project Design Award for Museum Renovation from the Design Forward Alliance. The SDMA also received an Onion Award from the San Diego Architectural Foundation last year for proposing to demolish the existing 1966 mid-century modern West Wing, designed by Mosher & Drew.
In a city already troubled by cuts to its cultural institutions and mounting pressure on its arts economy, San Diego’s mayor Todd Gloria recently proposed $11.8m in budget cuts to the existing $13.8m in city arts funding, roughly an 86.6% reduction. In the end, $10m of those cuts were restored through a combination of redirected municipal funds and philanthropic donations.
In early January, Gloria’s administration implemented paid parking in Balboa Park, where SDMA is located, after decades of free parking, adding a new cost for visitors to the city’s largest concentration of cultural institutions. The parking programme was intended to generate revenue for the city and park, but museum attendance fell by an average of 34% in the first quarter of 2026, resulting in an estimated $5m decline in revenue for Balboa Park’s museums and cultural institutions (which also include the San Diego Air and Space Museum, San Diego Natural History Museum and Comic-Con Museum).
Gloria modified the programme in February, expanding free parking for San Diego residents while acknowledging that doing so would reduce revenue. The city council ultimately voted to end paid parking by 1 January 2027, a reversal that is projected to cost the city around $2.2m in revenue.
