Last year, a western Massachusetts museum made a radical change to its admissions policy – waiving entry fees thanks to some generous contributions. WAMC checked in a year later to see how it’s played out.
A couple dozen preschoolers had a playdate at the Smith College Museum of Art this month – with kids and family members touring the galleries off Elm Street in Northampton.
The program, part of a partnership with Northampton Public Schools’ early education department, puts children in contact with contemporary pieces and classics, whether it’s the big, colorful work of expressionist Helen Frankenthaler or an impressionistic Monet close by.
Ashley Miller is the Coordinated Family and Community Engagement Program Specialist for the NPS Early Childhood Center.
“Exposure to lots of different cultural activities is an amazing springboard for children as they get older, so that they feel more comfortable in finding and seeking out these activities as they’re adults, or even as teens and young adults in the area, because the museums and community events like this are for everyone,” she said.
As Miller tells WAMC, the playdate program is grant-funded and has meant free admissions for participating families, wherever it pops up. But since late 2023, families have also been able to return to the museum for free, thanks to the college dropping paid admission fees.
In a somewhat sudden announcement last year, Smith College declared entrance fees would be dropped immediately, effective September 2023, for the museum of some 28,000 works of art.
Paving the way for the change was a significant gift from Smith alumnae Jan Fullgraf Golann and Jane Timken. Bolstering that was a $280,000 grant announced a few months later, made possible by the Art Bridges Foundation’s “Access for All” initiative.
For Jessica Nicoll, the museum’s director and chief curator, waiving the fees had been a priority for some time.
The opportunity came closer after the pandemic left the facility closed for 15 months. During that time, she and others say more inclusivity emerged as a goal – with getting rid of the fee being a critical piece.
“Jan Fullgraf Golan and Jane Timken, who teamed up - heard this pitch and appeal and it resonated with them, and so they made a gift that essentially … it's an endowment that provides a new revenue stream for the museum that's replaced the revenue that we lost from those admission fees,” she explained.
The 2023 decision came on the heels of the museum dealing with severely depressed attendance numbers coming out of the pandemic, Nicoll told WAMC.
Reopening in late 2021 sans programming, attendance hit 4,000, ticking up to 16,000 a year after that, and 21,000 for the 2022-23 academic year - all a far cry from the usual pre-pandemic numbers of over 30,000.
But last year, Nicoll says, those figures got a shot in the arm with free admission, paired with the return of programming, and only seem to be trending upward.
“We saw our visitation increase by 51 percent, so it came back up to pre-pandemic levels - over 31,000 people,” Nicoll said. “And the really exciting thing is that this year - our fiscal year’s July 1through June 30 - so we're … four months into this fiscal year [and] we're up, month-over-month, 30 percent over last year. So, it's all moving in the right direction.”
Nicoll tells WAMC even before the pandemic, getting rid of the entrance fee was on her mind.
She and contemporary art curator Emma Chubb tell WAMC that, in the grand scheme of things, removing barriers of any kind, no matter how small, should be a goal for similar institutions.
Chubb noted any fee ends up coming off as a soft barrier of sorts, stymieing openness compared to other types of institutions like libraries.
The dropped fee only builds on the museum’s mission of connecting art and ideas with the public, she says, better serving a number of groups, including local creatives.
“There are so many artists in the area, and I want us to be a resource for all the people who are making art, people who are finding ways to talk about things that are hard to talk about, because art can be like a way to do that,” the curator said. “I think about myself as like a kid in a public school who went to a museum on a field trip and had this door open for me that I am still, going down that path. So, I think we get to do all of those things better, because we don't have the barrier.”
Nicoll adds this isn’t a one-year deal, either – the free admission policy is here to stay.
