Colorado College announced Thursday that it will acquire the nearby Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The private school will commit more than $20 million to the merger.
The college will take over the center's facility and its permanent art collection. The non-profit organization houses a museum and a theater.
Erin Hannan, executive director of advancement, said the move will bring more financial stability to the center.
Only about half of the Fine Arts Center's $5 million annual budget comes from earned revenue such as ticket sales. The center also sits on a $13 million endowment, which its own foundation will continue to manage.
"Unlike a lot of other arts institutions across the country, we don’t receive public funding," Hannan said. "So there’s a fairly good size of our budget every year that we have to fundraise from the community in order to present our programming, and that has made us a bit vulnerable."
The two sides expect to finalize the deal in 2020.
