LAS VEGAS—“I did not anticipate the total collapse of the museum,” former Las Vegas Art Museum (LVAM) executive director Libby Lumpkin told ARTINFO earlier this week. “The simple fact is that Las Vegas is experiencing an economic Katrina and the museum had not yet achieved the kind of endowment that would have allowed it to weather the storm. As difficult as it is to accept, the board made the right decision to close the doors. The alternative would have been to transform the institution into something far less than any of us wanted it to be.”

But by the time the news broke on February 20 that the museum would close due to a dramatic drop in revenue, Lumpkin was long gone. The Texas-born art historian, who was founding curator of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art in Las Vegas and had joined LVAM in 2005, resigned in early December, after pressure from the board to cut the budget. Over the past few days, she has been back at the museum, having volunteered to “consult on the disposition of works in the permanent collection, archives, and other important museum materials.”

LVAM’s entire staff has now been let go, and the museum is to close tomorrow. It will remain an entity, in the hopes that it may reopen when the economy steps up again, but for now the art scene in Las Vegas is pretty bleak. Earlier this month, London-based collectors Poju and Anita Zabludowicz postponed indefinitely their plans to build a museum of contemporary art downtown.

A month after her departure from the museum, Lumpkin, who is author of the book Deep Design: Nine Little Art Histories and has taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), California State University Long Beach, Yale University, Harvard University, and elsewhere, spoke with ARTINFO about LVAM’s dilemma and the problems facing smaller museums across the country.

Your resignation was described in the press as a “shocking blow” to the arts community in Las Vegas. Is it true that the board had cut next year’s budget in half, to less than $1 million, and demanded layoffs?

Actually it was less than half of the original budget. And there would have been layoffs. It was challenging to assemble a staff in Las Vegas. It’s not a city that attracts experienced museum staff. And at the same time, we were trying to develop a serious museum, and we were doing original exhibitions, so we were doing all the things that big museums do on a more modest scale. I did a lot of the curatorial work. It was exhausting, doing everything! Ultimately, I hired some very smart, sharp young people and essentially trained them. I had a tight team there. Including me, there were just four professional staff with museum experience. (On top of that we had some professional staff in accounting and development.) I was faced with letting most of them go. When I made my decision, I think it was more emotional than logical, but in retrospect it was absolutely logical, because turning out these people who moved here at their own expense, who were facing a pretty dismal job market — in this city, a zero job market — wasn’t something I was willing to do. I was the most expendable person, though the board didn’t see it that way.

What happened in the two or three weeks leading up to your decision?

I had been revising and re-revising budgets, and I had laid off two people who were not essential staff and were in the kinds of jobs where they could find comparable employment in the city. We were making tremendous efforts, and I had made some suggestions about how we could cut the exhibition program and other things. Then the executive board asked me to plan for some more dismissals, so I went back to the drawing board and tried to get the budget down as far as I could. It appeared that if the board could come up with another $100,000 or $200,000, nobody would have to go, and everything could hum along reasonably well. But they were not able to do that. I told them I wasn’t going to do a lower budget, that I would go if it got down below this number. I had already made compromises. I informed the executive board that I would be the first to go. I guess they thought I was playing a card game. And I suppose I was. I lost that hand.