Academy of Country Music donates $2.5 million to Country Music Hall of Fame

Southern California-based Academy of Country Music will donate $2.5 million to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum to open a new gallery showcasing trends in modern country music, the two organizations confirmed to "The Tennessean" on Tuesday.

The contribution will help underwrite a new “ACM Contemporary Gallery” at the downtown museum.

The pledge brings to $70 million the total in cash and pledges collected since last summer for the museum’s expansion plans. Those include doubling the size of the 140,000-square-foot museum by 2014 and integrating it into a wide downtown campus that encompasses the still-under-construction Music City Center, Omni Nashville Hotel and a hoped-for proliferation of restaurants and retail shops.

The Academy’s gift follows May’s announcement from artist Taylor Swift of a $4 million pledge to underwrite a 7,500-square-foot Taylor Swift Education Center. It will have two floors, three classrooms and a children’s exhibit gallery.

In December, the Country Music Association announced it had pledged $10 million to help underwrite an 800-seat CMA Theater.

The ACM Contemporary Gallery will consist of 5,000 square feet of exhibition space, located on the museum’s second floor. It will be a flexible space, continually updated, museum officials said.

Museum director Kyle Young said establishing a gallery devoted to contemporary country in a museum dedicated to the history of the American music form is key to charting the constant changes in the genre.
“The music is dynamic,” Young said. “It’s always changing. Maintaining relevance is really important to us. I think the general feeling out there are that museums are old and dusty. We want to tell the story as it develops.”

The Academy of Country Music is the West Coast outpost of country music. It was established in 1964 and hosts the longest-running country music show, the ACM Awards, broadcast from Las Vegas. The show earns the academy about $750,000 per year in ticket revenues, in addition to TV licensing fees and corporate sponsorships.