Visiting the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of many US art museums where standard adult admission has risen to $30 in recent years, will be free for all visitors aged 25 and younger from mid-December.
The museum’s new policy, announced Tuesday (22 October), was made possible in part by a donation of more than $2m by the artist Julie Mehretu—who serves on the museum’s board of trustees—according to the Wall Street Journal. The new policy was also enabled by a gift from another board member, and former board chairman, Susan K. Hess, and her husband John.
“You can’t have any conversations around diversity, equity and inclusion without providing access, and the culture can’t change and it can’t continue to grow without new and diverse voices having access to the culture being created at the moment,” Mehretu said in a statement.
“I did not have access to contemporary art museums as a young adult, and when I moved to New York, I was waiting tables—it was hard to access contemporary art and culture, as it’s hard for so many grad students and young people. If you really want to push the discourse and evolve the discourse, many more people need to have access to be able to participate, and this programme is a step in the right direction—and we need more.”
Previously, admission to the Whitney was free for all visitors aged 18 and under. The museum also offers free admission on Friday evenings and, since the beginning of 2024, on the second Sunday of every month.
The museum raised its general admission ticket prices from $25 to $30 in the summer of 2023, a fee in line with many other large US museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
According to figures shared by the Whitney, its admission-free Friday evenings and second Sundays of the month are effective at bringing in younger and more diverse audiences. In these timespans, the museum receives twice as many visitors as during regular hours. On Friday evenings, when admission is free from 5pm to 10pm, the average visitor age is ten years younger than the rest of the week, and more than 60% of visitors are Black, Indigenous and people of colour.
“Even before I became director last November, Julie had been challenging me for years to think about expanding free admission as the single most important thing that the Whitney could do to further its mission,” the museum’s director, Scott Rothkopf, said in a statement. “She has been the most incredible inspiration and advocate for this work, and I certainly share her passion when it comes to connecting audiences of the future with the power of art and ideas.”
The Whitney had around 768,000 visitors in 2023, according to The Art Newspaper’s most recent annual survey of museums’ visitor figures. That total represented an 8% drop from the number of visitors it received in 2022, and a 26% drop from 2019.
Mehretu, a Ethiopian American artist who was born in Addis Ababa and is based in New York, was the subject of a major mid-career survey at the Whitney in 2021, which subsequently travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Last year her painting Walkers with the Dawn and Morning (2008) sold for $10.38m (with fees) at a Sotheby’s sale in New York, beating her own record as the most expensive work by an African-born artist at auction.
