Lewis Museum President Defends Spending Amid High Operating Cost Concerns

Terri Freeman, president of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture on East Pratt Street, fired back this week after a Baltimore Sun analysis found Maryland taxpayers spent roughly $91 every time someone walked through the museum's doors in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025.

"The recent Baltimore Sun article reducing the Reginald F. Lewis Museum to a 'cost per visitor' metric presents an incomplete and deeply concerning view of our work," Freeman wrote. "Equating a Black cultural institution to a dollar amount is not only reductive — it echoes a long and painful history in this country of assigning monetary value to Black lives and experiences. That framing, whether intentional or not, is disrespectful, dismissive and demeaning."

The $91 figure stems from a steep decline in attendance, which dropped from 104,500 during the museum's first fiscal year to 29,648 visitors for the year ending June 30, 2025, compounded by a quarter century's worth of inflation. Partly because of a funding mechanism written into the state charter, taxpayers' per-visitor expenditure at the Lewis is nearly nine times higher than at other prominent Baltimore nonprofit museums.

The structural reasons behind that gap are rooted in how the museum was created. The Lewis is one of four museums and historic sites in Maryland classified as quasi-governmental agencies, and taxpayers supply up to 50% of its annual budget, a much higher percentage than the single-digit support most Maryland museums get. In the 2025-26 fiscal year, the Lewis received $2.7 million in taxpayer support, up from $2 million in the 2022-23 fiscal year.

Freeman pushed back on comparing the Lewis to institutions with far deeper institutional roots. The Lewis is 21 years old, compared to the Maryland Center for History and Culture, founded as the Maryland Historical Society, at 182 years old; the Baltimore Museum of Art at 112 years old; the Walters Art Museum at 92 years old; and the American Visionary Art Museum, conceived 42 years ago. Attendance patterns are shaped early, and Black communities were historically excluded from many of these spaces and, in many cases, from the stories told within them. Institutions like the Lewis are doing the necessary work of building access, relevance and engagement in communities that were long denied both.

Pete Sepp, a Silver Spring resident and president of the Washington, D.C.-based National Taxpayers Union, said studies have found that cultural institutions run by government-allied agencies often spend more money than do their privately owned counterparts.

The funding debate arrives against the backdrop of a state audit that found serious internal control gaps. An August 2025 audit by the Maryland Department of Legislative Services uncovered charges on the museum's corporate credit card "without a readily apparent business purpose," payments made to an employee's PayPal account, a former employee instructing visitors to pay him for parking personally and keeping the cash, and a practice of pre-signing blank checks stored in an unsecured office. Only $10,115 total was unaccounted for between April 2021 and January 2025. Freeman and board chairman Drew Hawkins told the Sun that they have since destroyed all pre-signed checks and now store checks in a safe in a locked office.

Freeman said the museum has addressed most of the audit's findings. "Of the 18 findings and recommendations raised in the audit, we have already implemented 12 of them," Freeman said. "Four are in progress, and two others have not yet started."

On the broader question of the museum's mission, Freeman argued the cost-per-visitor lens misses the point entirely. "Public institutions are not designed to deliver the lowest cost per visitor, but to ensure access, preservation and education for all. The value of this work cannot — and should not — be reduced to a per-visitor cost." She also pointed to what she described as increasing momentum: the museum's own reporting highlights a rebound in admissions and a multi-year effort to refresh exhibits and internal systems.

The audit also found that more than 9,000 objects in the museum's collection have not been properly appraised, a requirement for insurance purposes, and auditors noted that this problem has been cited in audits dating back to 2013. Whether the museum reaches its stated goal of roughly 70,000 annual visitors, a benchmark its board identified years ago, will ultimately determine whether that $91 figure shrinks on its own.