If Steven Kern has his way, the Newark Museum is going to reopen its old main entrance on Washington St., the one closed in 2001, in favor of the doors facing its small "Horizon Plaza" garden. Those narrower side doors sit behind the cast-iron fence surrounding the museum parking lot.

"It will take some work," says Kern, director of the museum for almost two very difficult years of funding cuts and staff lay-offs. "The doors would have to be replaced, because they're not up to climate-control standards, and the steps aren't wheelchair accessible. It will take some money.

"But what does it say that the museum's street entrance is closed?"

The statement Kern wants to make with reopening the old doorway is pretty obvious -- Newark is back, riding a real estate boom, and no longer a city dogged by its reputation for riots and crime.

Kern walks the city streets to work. He and his wife, Josephine, who is originally from Amsterdam, live in a duplex apartment on the top floor of a rehabbed building on Market St., near the Prudential Center hockey arena.

"We downsized from a 5,000-sq.-ft. place to 1,200 sq. ft.," Kern says, climbing the spiral staircase from the kitchen/study area to the bedroom level that opens onto the apartment's rooftop deck. "I'm part of the community I work in, real city living, and we love it."

His museum has downsized, too. In 2011, two years before Kern gave up running the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse to take over the Newark Museum, Gov. Chris Christie cut Newark's direct line item funding from the state budget, slicing the state's contribution in half. The New Jersey State Council on the Arts scrambled to help the institution plug the gaping budget hole, but nearly a fifth of the staff and some of the museum's outreach programs have been let go since. The exhibition schedule has been cut from four cycles a year to three.

The Newark Museum is still the premier arts institution in New Jersey, of course. Begun in 1909 as an extension of the Newark Public Library by legendary founder John Cotton Dana, the museum boasts a truly world-class collection of American art (Joseph Stella's "The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted" and Robert Henri's "Portrait of Willie G" are only two examples). And under Dana's direction it acquired remarkable assemblages of domestic arts from cultures around the world, including the foremost selection of Tibetan art outside its native country and one of the first galleries specifically dedicated to Korean art in the U.S.

Those collections might be worth billions on the open market, but Newark's various associations, like its membership in the American Alliance of Museums, forbid making up temporary budget shortfalls by selling off artwork. One of the ironies of the Newark Museum's recent budget problems has been the split between its undeniable national prestige as a collection and its sudden money problems -- a situation echoed by museums funded by public/private income sources around the country.

"The most dramatic example would be the Detroit Museum, but our situation isn't nearly as drastic as that," Kern says. "We still enjoy a great deal of community support. As the mayor [Ras Baraka] says, and this is a quote, growing up in Newark 'every Saturday I had to go through those big doors' for the cultural programming we offer....That's the kind of institution the museum has always been, and those programs have been essential for generations of Newark school kids."

Reopening those big doors today isn't nostalgic so much as a reflection of what's happening in the museum's neighborhood. Express Newark, a Rutgers University program that will be part of the new commercial/residential development of the old Hahne & Co. department store on Halsey St., scheduled to open next year, will extend the Rutgers campus to the other side of the museum compound. Kern was director of the Everson at the same time that Nancy Cantor, now chancellor of Rutgers-Newark, headed Syracuse University. They've brought college students, art, and neighborhood renewal together before.

"Upstate is sort of legendary in its Rust Belt decline," Kern says. "Newark is nothing like that -- basically, we're part of the largest metropolitan region in the country. New York City is 15 minutes away. We have far more resources to work with here.

"There is a kind of mismatch between the reputation of the Newark Museum as an arts institution, where our incredibly deep and extraordinary collection is always described as 'world class,' and the city's reputation. But we need to stop apologizing."

"Here's what I mean," Kern continues, getting up from his kitchen table to take a photograph down from his refrigerator door. The photo shows Kern behind a podium at the museum with billionaire Alice Walton.

"Last year she came to the museum to receive the first annual John Cotton Dana Award for Visionary Leadership in Museums," Kern says. The Walmart heiress was recognized for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, AR, which she founded. "I mean, here I am with a Walton."

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