The Denver Art Museum’s attendance in the first year following the glitzy opening of its $110 million Hamilton Building was either a big success or a major disappointment. It all depends on your point of view.
Museum officials said the institution’s attendance for fiscal year 2007, which ended Sunday – less than a week shy of the one-year anniversary of the Hamilton’s opening on Oct. 6 – will be about 630,000 people. (Exact final numbers have not been tallied.)
That’s 37 percent below the museum’s original first-year projection of 1 million people and 16 percent below a projection of 750,000 that director Lewis Sharp put forward as late as a May 27 Denver Post interview.
Vicki Sterling, the museum’s assistant director, does not dispute the discrepancies between the final attendance and earlier projections.
But she prefers to focus on the fact that the 2007 visitorship was the largest one-year attendance in the museum’s history. It slightly topped the 619,000 people who came in fiscal year 2000, which featured several blockbusters, including a Toulouse-Lautrec show.
“This was a new building with a lot of new things happening, and we did kind of the best estimating we could,” Sterling said.
“What we are is thrilled with this number, because it is higher than any other number we’ve had in visitors to the museum. At the same time, we also have some studies we’ve done on visitor satisfaction, and this is the best visitor satisfaction we’ve had as well.
“So, we think this is incredibly successful.”
In the aftermath of intense local and national coverage of the museum’s attendance in the last year, the institution has announced that it will no longer provide projections for yearly visitorship (a return to a previous policy) or special-exhibition attendance.
Sterling denied the change has anything to with what happened in 2007, pointing to other reasons instead.
“There’s so much more than just the numbers,” she said. “There are so many incredible things that are happening at the Denver Art Museum and will continue to happen as we go forward. We feel it’s as important, if not more important, to talk about some of those, than responding to how many people came through the doors last week.”
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
