The National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC was the most popular art museum in the United States last year, with nearly 3.3 million visitors. This is the first time since 2008 that the gallery has topped our annual report Visitor figures survey, pushing the Met Fifth Avenue (main building of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in New York to second place with 3.2 million visits.
While the National Gallery of Art nearly doubled its numbers from the 2021 lockdown, it was still down 20% from its pre-pandemic numbers with almost 818,000 fewer visitors than in 2019. The Met, meanwhile, saw a drop of 1.7 million visitors, down 34%.
The Met is generally the most popular American museum in our survey, and its building on Fifth Avenue saw about 48,000 fewer visitors than the NGA. Our survey separates the main building of the Met and its cloisters in Upper Manhattan, which welcomed 196,000 visitors in 2022, to give a more accurate representation of visitors to each location. If the attendance of the two buildings were combined, it would be higher than that of the NGA.
The second most popular museum in the American capital was the National Museum of African American History and Culture with nearly 1.1 million visitors, down 45% from 2019, followed by the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which share the same building and welcomed approximately 954,000 visitors (down 44% from 2019). All museums were up from 2021, when closures severely affected attendance.
NGA’s most popular exhibit last year was Afro-Atlantic Storieswhich welcomed nearly 145,000 visitors. The exhibition reviewed five centuries of African influence on Western art.
The last time the National Gallery of Art came out above the Met in our survey was in 2008 with almost 5 million visitors out of the Met’s 4.8 million.
