EAST LANSING -- Six thousand people attended the three-day opening of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in November of 2012.

There was live music, art-making and tours of the glass-and-steel structure designed by star architect Zaha Hadid.

And there were grand predictions.

Billionaire businessman Eli Broad, who had donated $28 million to the project and set a few of its key parameters, said the museum had "the potential to do for Michigan State University and East Lansing what Frank Gehry's Guggenheim did for Bilbao, Spain."

That is, to bring in gaggles of tourists and millions of dollars where few had been before.

Indeed, a study conducted by the Anderson Economic Group predicted that the Broad would attract anywhere between 125,000 and 150,000 visitors annually, as well as generate $5.75 million in spending into the regional economy.

It hasn't.

The Broad had a strong first 14 months. More than 16,000 people passed through its doors in the first few weeks, as art and architecture magazines gushed about its striking, angular building.

There was a "noticeable increase" in visitorship to the region, said Julie Pingston, senior vice president and chief operating officer at the Greater Lansing Convention & Visitors Bureau. And it continued into 2013, when the Broad welcomed 98,000 visitors.

But, the following year, even as the museum provided the background for a few scenes in "Batman v. Superman," that number dropped to just shy of 62,000, which is about where it has stayed.

The Broad was an ambitious project from the beginning: a museum paid for by one of the world's foremost collectors of contemporary art, designed by a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, aiming for relevance well beyond Michigan.

If it sometimes fell short, its supporters say, it still brought much to East Lansing that wasn't here before.

And, it's regrouping for another go.

"The museum is young," said Carla Acevedo-Yates, an assistant curator at the Broad, who was hired over a year ago. "It gives us the freedom to re-imagine what an exhibition can be like since we're not tied to some long history."

Leadership

Michael Rush, the founding director of the Broad, once described his task as making a contemporary art museum work in "an area where contemporary art is not very well known or not much experienced."

But he gave it a good shot.

He organized pop-up exhibitions when the museum's construction was delayed, and he hired a Beijing-based curator to develop exhibitions around contemporary arts in China.

But in 2013, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He continued to lead the museum for close to two years, but the disease and treatment sapped his energies.

He died on March 27, 2015.

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Marc-Olivier Wahler had big shoes to fill when he was appointed as the museum's director in the summer of that year.

“As an institution, we're trying to regain the momentum that was lost after Rush's untimely death,” MSU President Lou Anna Simon said. “We're intent on gaining it back. (Wahler has) come with a set of experiences about international audiences.”

A Swiss native, Wahler served as director of the Chalet Society in Paris, as the artistic director for De Appel Arts Center in Amsterdam, as the director of the Swiss Institute in New York and as the founding director of the Transformer Sculpture Park in Portugal.

He came to the Broad because, "for me, it made sense," he said. "What I can do here I wouldn't be able to do it in New York or in Los Angeles or in Paris."

Overseeing a university museum has its advantages, Wahler said, because there is always research going on and opportunities to collaborate.

"Contemporary art is about challenges, taking risks, new ideas and collaborating across different disciplines," he said. "This is a place where that can be done."

And, if doubling attendance would be a mark of success, Wahler said, numbers aren't the only consideration.

Wahler's first Broad exhibition, "The Transported Man," debuted in the spring. Showcasing more 40 artists, it was also the biggest the museum had mounted since opening in 2012.

Inspired by the world of magic and illusion, it included a table floating in mid-air and an elephant hanging from its trunk and a recently rediscovered film by Georges Méliès, a pioneer of the medium.

"If an exhibition changes someone's way of looking at things, then for me it's a success," Wahler said. "I really hope our museum is seen as something the community feels they own."

Ambitions

The Broads were uninterested in donating millions for a modest expansion of the Kresge Art Museum, MSU's small art collection of mostly older works that preceded the Broad.

Simon proposed the idea to Eli Broad, who is an MSU alumnus, back in 2006. Broad built two Fortune 500 companies. He amassed what's regarded as one of the best private collections of contemporary art in the world. He wanted something bigger for his alma mater.

The Broads "wanted to build a new art museum with the condition that its design and its work would have to be of international quality," Simon said. "Quite frankly, while the Kresge has distinguished pieces, it is not an internationally distinguished collection. That's a criticism that just is."

The Broads gave $26 million for the construction of a new contemporary art museum in 2007 and another $2 million in 2010. One of his conditions was that the project should go to an internationally prominent architect.

Roy Saper, owner of Saper Galleries and Custom Framing, was enthusiastic about the building at the grand opening.

"This is a Los Angeles, New York building in downtown East Lansing," he told the State Journal in 2012. "It's a major museum in what now will be a major art center in this country."

Five years later, Saper says the museum is headed in the wrong direction and believes the difficulties were part and parcel of how it came to be.

"(The Broad) was created by outsiders with no apparent community connection, involvement or interest," he said. "The big mistake was (MSU) saying 'yes' to somebody else's vision and never questioning it."

The exhibitions, he added, are “didactic and elitist.”

Saper served on the Board of Directors for the Friends of Kresge Art Museum before MSU closed the museum in July 2011 and passed its collection to the Broad. He's also one of the people for whom that closure still stings.

"The Kresge could have continued. (There was) no reason for it to have been obliterated."

Two months ago, the Broad announced plans for an expansion after receiving a $1 million grant from the MSU Federal Credit Union. It will include a ground-floor space at 565 E. Grand River Ave. across the street from the Broad that will showcase more of the 7,500-piece collection inherited from the Kresge.

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Saper sees it as a nod to more widely shared tastes, an acknowledgement "that they have a buried treasure trove of art that a greater proportion of the community would have interest in seeing."

But the Broad was always meant to be something the community hadn't seen before, an ambition that its cutting-edge design, set against the historical, red-brick buildings on MSU's campus, could hardly make plainer.

It was also meant to be accessible. The museum doesn't charge for admission, part of the reason why MSU will pay $1.7 million to subsidize the museum's operations this year, on top of some $2 million in in-kind services.

Simon is fine with that.

"If you go to any museum around the country that is world class, the directors fundraise around exhibits," she said. "The basic operation of the museum, including (curatorial) staff and paying the heat and lights, was always (MSU's) responsibility, and it is now."

But she would also like the museum to take a page from the Wharton Center's playbook.

"They are bringing entertainment that is at the epitome of the elegance of the arts, with a more broad appeal to make the arts accessible to people, and that's what the Broad needs to do," she said. "There needs to be exhibits that command the attention of people beyond East Lansing."

Connecting

Family Days are held once a month at the museum.

They're always free. Children have an opportunity to explore their creative side through a series of hands-on activities such as printing their own designs onto postcards or helping to build the museum's float for MSU's homecoming parade.

"It’s not fancy, it’s just a thing to do," said Stephaney Guild, one of the moms present at a family day earlier this month.

Guild views it as a way to give her 5-year-old son, Ronan, a chance to experience what she cannot easily provide.

"I’m more focused on giving him the opportunity to experience many things in hopes that he will find his passion or creative outlet," she said.

Family day is one accessible connection to art that is often more conceptual than visual.

"Art is a language that people don't always understand," Acevedo-Yates said. "It's important to find ways to connect on a local level. We need to have those conversations through art."

"We want to be seen as a think tank," added Steven Bridges, an assistant curator, who was hired two years ago. "We want to craft messages that go outside the museum's walls."

That means putting their heads together to cultivate new exhibitions that pique the visitor's interest, while extending the museum's space for a wide range of public programming, including artist talks, films, music, drawing marathons and, well, yoga.

Part of getting a community invested in a contemporary art museum is to showcase art that speaks directly to them, Wahler said.

Take, for instance, "Beyond Streaming: A Sound Mural for Flint," an exhibition shown earlier this year at the Broad.

It appeared to be nothing more than an installation of copper piping — at first. But upon opening various spigots and placing an ear to each one, visitors could listen to thoughts and poems recorded by high school students in response to the Flint water crisis.

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"Another Country," one of the Broad's current exhibitions, addresses the legacies of slavery and the Civil Rights movement. It was inspired by civil rights leader Malcolm X's 1963 speech, "The Race Problem in America,” which was delivered at the Erickson Hall Kiva on MSU's campus.

"We try to talk to people using a language that's outside the art world, whether it's magic, pop culture or sports," Wahler said, adding that he wants people to "interact and criticize."

That sort of impact is harder to quantify, but it's there.

For instance, the works on display at the Broad have helped art students at the university to think beyond pencil and paper, said Britta Urness, an adviser in MSU's Department of Art, Art History and Design.

"Maybe it needs to be a video, or maybe it needs to be a sculpture that people can interact with and touch," she said. "Having a range of media shown at the Broad is important so that our students don't feel like they're limited to some of the more traditional boundaries."

Jacquelynn Sullivan, MSU's director of galleries for the Department of Art, Art History and Design, incorporates the Broad into her curriculum whenever possible. She said she pushes her students to identify what they see, ask questions and then seek out answers, while understanding that sometimes they can't understand a piece and that's OK, too.

"A lot of the work that's been shown has definitely been challenging," she said. "Contemporary art doesn't have a clear, defined path. It's moving 15 directions at once."

If exhibitions at the Broad might push the envelope at times, stir up controversy, draw a mix of good and bad reviews, it's those experiences that make for a vital arts community.

“We’re going to work with the community, and we’re going to make (the Broad) an extraordinary success, but it will take a little bit of time to do that,” Simon said. “The better we are, the tension will always exist, but it exists around all the best museums. And if that tension doesn’t exist, then we’re not one of the best museums.”

Contact Princess Gabbara at pgabbara@lsj.com or (517) 377-1006. Follow her on Twitter at @PrincessGabbara.

Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum

Noon to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday on 547 East Circle Drive in East Lansing. Closed Mondays. Free admission. For more information about the Broad Art Museum, go to broadmuseum.msu.edu.