By Greg Archer | Contributing Columnist
The Museum of Riverside is heading toward a stellar new era. A recent grant from Inland Empire Community Foundation further fuels those efforts as the museum prepares for its grand reopening in 2027.
“The recent Charles F. and Wilhelmina E. Clark Botanical Fund grant that we received allows us to oversee the care, growth, and interpretation of botanical collections and an herbarium — the Clark Herbarium — which we have built upon over the subsequent decades since the Clark’s original bequest in 1949,” said Robyn G. Peterson, museum director. “The funds that the endowment generates, currently around $8,000 or so a year, are being set aside and aggregated to assist in the botanical interpretation that will go into the new main museum when it reopens in 2027.”
There’s big hope for that reopening. The museum closed in 2017 with a plan to undergo renovations. As that process continues, Peterson and the museum’s creative team are planning new exhibits for the museum’s reopening.
She said she’d love for people “to know we’re not the Cheech,” referring to The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, which opened in June 2022 as a public/private partnership between Riverside Art Museum and the city of Riverside.
“There’s a certain amount of identity crisis that we have,” she said. “There’s some confusion between us and the Riverside Art Museum, and part of the problem is that we know our main site has been closed for so long. So that’s our biggest challenge, is just to remind everybody that we exist, that we’ve been doing programming consistently, that we care for historic houses and have locally significant collections.
“I’d love for people to know that when we reopen the downtown museum, it will be a canvas for interpreting all those stories over and over and over,” she said.
Flashback to 1900, and you’ll find the first inklings of the Museum of Riverside. At the time, the area had become one of the most popular winter resort communities. Riverside was also a prime locale for agricultural innovation. Soon enough, The Riverside Municipal Museum opened in late 1924 — in the basement of City Hall no less. Decades later it would become the Museum of Riverside.
In time, it became a frequented site filled with exhibits and information on natural and cultural history, and a solid archival base.
Thanks to the 100th anniversary gala recently, complete with a Roaring ’20s theme, the buzz has been building about the 2027 reopening.
“When the museum reopens, it will be a combination of a renovation of the core 1912 Federal Post Office that fronts onto Mission Inn Avenue with a new purpose-built, two-story expansion on the back that will be high-grade gallery space,” Peterson said. “It will be much better quality space than we ever had before.”
She also is pleased the museum will remain within its downtown footprint.
“The new spaces are not going to be immense, but we’re trying to be good neighbors and just work with the room we have to create really high-quality intimate spaces to examine all these many stories that relate to our area.”
Learn more at museumofriverside.org.
The Inland Empire Community Foundation works to strengthen Inland Southern California through philanthropy. Visit iegives.org.
