A Traverse City museum’s expansion project is expected to wrap up by the end of this year.
The Dennos Museum Center is getting a 15,000 square foot expansion. The expansion was made possible by gifts from the community totaling in $3 million.
Eugene Jenneman is the Executive Director of the museum. He said the expansion is primarily to accommodate the museum’s vast art collections.
“Most of the expansion is devoted to showing art from our collection. Both our Inuit art of the Canadian Arctic for which we have an international reputation, that collection when the museum opened in 1991 had 500 works in it, it now has 1,500 works and growing.”
Jenneman said the expansion will also hold storage space, classrooms, and provide support for the concert hall.
“About a decade ago it was evident that as our permanent collections were growing that we were going to need space either for more storage or we were going to need gallery space to show what we had in the collection. And so we developed concepts for what that expansion might look like.”
Jenneman said this was just before the 2008 economic collapse so he didn’t think he’d see the expansion in his lifetime.
He said the rest of the museum is currently open, and he expects the addition to be open to the public sometime in November.