Metropolitan Museum Announces Record-breaking 6.3 Million Annual Attendance Our Coverage Sponsored by Maine Woolens
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Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today that a record 6.3 million people—from the five boroughs of New York City, the local tri-state area, across the United States, and around the world—visited the Museum during the fiscal year that ended on June 30 (FY15). This is the highest visitorship since the Met began tracking admission statistics more than 40 years ago, and it is the fourth year in a row that attendance exceeded six million. The total includes visitors both at the main building on Fifth Avenue and at The Cloisters museum and gardens, the branch of the Metropolitan Museum in upper Manhattan devoted to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages.
Mr. Campbell said: “This year’s record-breaking numbers demonstrate the ongoing enthusiasm for the Met’s exhibitions, collections, and programs. For the second full year, we have been open seven days a week to the public, and last September we unveiled our welcoming new Fifth Avenue plaza. In the galleries, we continue to present a spectrum of exhibitions, from small focused installations to major international loan shows like the current China: Through the Looking Glass. And several months from now we will launch our expanded modern and contemporary art programming at The Met Breuer. These and many other new projects carry forward our mission to collect, study, preserve, and make accessible to our visitors the full sweep of art history, from ancient times to the present.”
The Met continues to be a popular destination for local visitors and it is also New York’s most visited tourist attraction for domestic as well as international audiences. Visitors from the five boroughs of New York City comprised 26% of the Museum’s visitorship for FY15, while New York City and tri-state visitors together comprised 41% of the total. International visitors from 189 countries visited the main building and The Cloisters in FY15, accounting for 38% of the annual visitorship.
Exhibitions
Exhibition attendance was strong over the course of the year, with 20 of the exhibitions that opened during FY15 receiving more than 100,000 visitors, including Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (316,095); Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered(281,687); Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire (187,417); Thomas Struth: Photographs (183,061); and Kimono: A Modern History (170,214).
Also contributing to the high attendance in FY15 were the final weeks of last summer’s popular exhibitions The Roof Garden Commission: Dan Graham with Günther Vogt (which closed November 2, 2014, and drew 559,876 visitors) and Charles James: Beyond Fashion (which closed August 10, 2014, and attracted 505,307 people), as well as the early weeks of the spring Costume Institute exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass, which opened on May 4, 2015, and had 358,381 visitors as of June 30. China: Through the Looking Glass remains on view through the early weeks of FY16 and its closing date was recently extended to September 7, 2015. (It has had more than 535,000 visitors to date.)
Education and Public Programs
The Met’s broad range of live arts, educational, and public programming continued to be robust throughout the year, serving visitors of all ages, from novices to experts, including students, teachers, families, visitors with disabilities, scholars, artists, and others from around the world. In FY15, the Met served a total of 216,352 students and teachers on 5,943 school group visits. More than 136,000 of the students were from public, private, and parochial schools across New York City’s five boroughs; and over 76,000 of these were from public schools, an increase of more than 34% compared to last year. The Met’s educator programs on integrating art into classroom teaching were attended by a total of 3,777 participants in FY15.
Digital Visitorship
The Met continues to extend its reach through digital channels. The Metropolitan Museum’swebsite ended FY15 with a total of 32 million visits. The Met app, launched in September 2014 on iPhone and iPad, was used more than one million times in its first nine months. The Museum’s Facebook account had more than 1.3 million followers (with a reach of 48.5 million people) in FY15, and its Twitter feed had 982,000 followers (with tweets receiving 148.5 million impressions). The Met’s Webby Award-winning Instagram account had 637,000 followers at the end of FY15, more than three times that of the previous year.
The Met’s digital audience is increasingly global. International users are up to 36% on the website, 50% on Instagram, 54% on Twitter, and 70% on Facebook. The Museum launched its presence on Weibo, one of China’ largest social media networks, in December 2013, and in FY15, it had 10 million impressions.
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Credits
China: Through the Looking Glass: Made possible by Yahoo. Additional support provided by Condé Nast and several Chinese donors. Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection: Supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Thomas Hart Benton’sAmerica Today Mural Rediscovered: Gift of mural and exhibition made possible by AXA. Thomas Struth: Photographs: Made possible by Vivian and James Zelter. Kimono: A Modern History: Made possible by The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation Fund. The Roof Garden Commission: Dan Graham with Günther Vogt: Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies. Additional support provided by Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon B. Polsky. Charles James: Beyond Fashion: Made possible by AERIN. Additional support provided by Condé Nast.
The Met app is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
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About The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world’s leading art museums, with a collection spanning more than 5,000 years of world culture, from prehistory to the present. It presents dozens of exhibitions each year, and thousands of events and programs including films, talks, performance, guided tours, and family programs. A center for art appreciation, scholarship, research, and conservation, the Met also maintains a vibrant program of publishing scholarly and popular catalogues, and utilizes new technologies to enhance the visitor experience and extend the reach and accessibility of its offerings globally.
In addition to its main building at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street, the Met is launching its modern and contemporary art-themed programming at The Met Breuer in spring 2016, and continues to present exhibitions as well as works from the Met’s collection of medieval art and architecture at The Cloisters museum and gardens, its branch in upper Manhattan.
