Philadelphia Museum of Art patrons will once again be able to decide for themselves what to pay at the gate Friday evenings.
The museum, eager to change the message to a positive one after a season of “drama and conflict,” will offer admission on a pay-what-you-wish basis every Friday evening for five months starting April 10.
Regular admission to the museum can be as high as $30 per ticket, and the initiative, announced Friday, recognizes that cost excludes or deters some visitors.
“We wanted to remove the barrier,” said museum director and CEO Daniel H. Weiss.
The program, dubbed “Independent Fridays,” coincides with the nation’s 250th celebrations and the opening of “A Nation of Artists,” an expansive, two-museum exhibition of American works at the PMA and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts built around the collection of Phillies managing partner John Middleton and his family.
The museum previously had pay-what-you-wish Friday evenings, but, because of the expense, canceled the program in summer 2024, when Sasha Suda was director. To underwrite its reinstatement, the museum put in place special funding from board chair Ellen T. Caplan and her husband, Ron, and the William Penn Foundation.
Caplan said that her own visits to the museum when she was growing up in Philadelphia happened through the pay-what-you-wish program, so to help fund it now “feels like a full-circle moment.”
Although the current funding underwrites pay-what-you-wish Friday evenings only through the Friday before Labor Day, leaders said it could continue.
“I’m hoping this will inspire others to underwrite it going forward,” Caplan said.
At the moment, the museum is planning to return to its regular half-off discounted rates on Friday evenings ($15 for general admission), after Sept. 4. Admission on the first Sunday of every month continues to be pay-what-you-wish, and anyone 18 years old or under is admitted free any day, any time.
The public signals coming from Philadelphia’s major, comprehensive art museum in the past several months have mostly been about a controversial name change and rebrand, and the acrimonious dismissal of Suda and the legal wrangling in its aftermath. After several months of calling itself the “Philadelphia Art Museum,” the institution has reverted to its previous, longtime name.
The museum’s dispute with Suda will be settled through arbitration, not through a trial with jury, a Common Pleas Court judge recently ruled.
Weiss said that reinstating pay-what-you-wish Friday evenings was partially about “turning the page. We want people to appreciate the museum for what it has been, not for the drama and conflict.”
Admission income is critical to the museum’s bottom line. In fiscal year 2025, earned revenue accounted for a third of the museum’s income, with the rest covered by contributed revenue, such as donations.
But it’s not clear that offering more pay-what-you-wish spots on the calendar will result in overall lower ticket income. The museum piloted the return of the Friday evening program for the final three weeks of its recent Surrealism show, and admission revenue came in 20% higher than in the previous three weeks.
In the same period, attendance received a boost of 128%, according to the museum.
Of the ultimate net effect of pay-what-you-wish on revenue, “Over the long-term we don’t know,” said Weiss. But, he added: “Having it underwritten allows us to not worry about that.”
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