COURTESY THE MET
Thomas P. Campbell, the director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reported today that a record-breaking 6.3 million people from around the world had visited the museum during the fiscal year that ended on June 30. This marks the fourth consecutive year that the museum has boasted attendance over the 6 million mark and the largest total since the museum first began tracking its admissions statistics over 40 years ago. The total number includes the count of visitors to the main museum on Fifth Avenue in addition to its Cloisters museum and garden at the northern tip of Manhattan.
This year, the museum’s popular costume exhibition has been “China: Through the Looking Glass,” which has had more than 525,000 visitors since it opened on May 4. The show has become so popular that the museum decided earlier this month to extend its run.
“This year’s record-breaking numbers demonstrate the ongoing enthusiasm for the Met’s exhibitions, collections, and programs,” Campbell said in a statement released to press. “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.”
The museum also touted its digital outreach in the news release. Its website finished the year with 32 million total visits, it said, and the Met app, launched in September was used more than a million times in the first nine months of its release.
The Met’s attendance total has a good chance of growing next year, with the museum launching predominantly modern and contemporary art programming at the Met Breuer—the name it has given to the former Whitney Museum—next spring.