[title]
“If you build it, they will come” doesn't just apply to baseball ghosts. As it turns out, it also applies to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which just discovered that it hosted over 5.7 million visitors between The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters in the 2025 fiscal year. (That would be financial talk for the 12-month period that ended on June 30, 2025.)
Part of that growth came late in the tracking period, with a big ol' day party celebrating the new The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing on Saturday, May 31, which was the Met’s highest single-day attendance record since 2017. How many people could possibly swing through The Met in a single day? Turns out, 33,700. That’s a lot of stickers.
RECOMMENDED: A first look at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s last rooftop exhibition (for a while)
Exhibitions still on view from this period are Sargent and Paris (427,000 visitors and counting), which closes August 3, and Superfine: Tailoring Black Style (through October 26), which has had 291,000 guests. Previous exhibitions were Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature (300,000 visitors), Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 (298,000 visitors), and the final weeks of The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism (464,000 visitors) and Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion (401,000 visitors).
“We are thrilled by the continued growth of our audiences, particularly across New York City and the surrounding area, with visitors showing incredible enthusiasm for our ambitious programming,” Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and CEO, said in a statement. “Whether through our thought-provoking exhibitions, inventive educational initiatives, or wide-ranging digital offerings, The Met provides an array of ways to engage with our collection spanning 5,000 years of art from across time and around the world.”
Overall, The Met saw a 5-percent growth in attendance over fiscal year 2024; 62-percent of the visitors were locals from the tri-state area.
Upcoming exhibits at The Met include The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am (September 12–June 9, 2026), Man Ray: When Objects Dream (September 14–February 1, 2026), Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson (September 20–February 8, 2026), Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages (October 17–March 29, 2026), and Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck (December 5–April 5, 2026).