With 96,000 people visiting the Denver Art Museum in October, the institution is on track to meet its goal of 1 million visitors in the first year after the much-publicized opening of its angled, unorthodox $110 million addition.
“We’re not going to stop working hard, but we’re feeling pretty good,” said Janet Meredith, the museum’s director of marketing.
The museum drew 48,900 people during opening festivities on Oct. 7 and 8 and previews the previous week for museum members. And 47,100 visits were reported from Oct. 10 through the end of the month – an average of more than 2,100 a day.
Besides hitting its quantitative goals, the museum also is scoring well on the qualitative scale. In informal surveys, 98 percent of respondents say they would recommend the museum to a friend, and most say the experience exceeds expectations.
“Those things are indicators to us that the word of mouth is positive, that revisits are likely and that there’s positive information out there in the community about what’s it like when you actually do visit,” Meredith said.
Countering possible preconceptions of long lines and capacity crowds, visitors are able to walk up most days and obtain tickets for immediate entry to the museum.
But Meredith cautions that the holidays likely will bring a larger surge of visitors and that attendance is likely to fluctuate from one month to the next.
“We’ve got a big goal for the year, and the trickiest thing at a moment is trying to predict exactly what the flow is going to be of those visitors,” Meredith said. “A million visitors over the year translates roughly into just more than 80,000 a month.
“We know that there will be some months that are over that average and some months that are under the average, because we’ve always had a kind of cylical attendance anyway.”
Meredith recommends visitors target Friday evenings, when the museum remains open until 10 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday mornings, when it opens at 9 a.m. Because many people are not yet aware of the expanded hours, the museum rarely is crowded at those times.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
