Experience

Antwerp municipal museums welcomed more than 1.9 million visitors in 2024

Posted by Timothy on

The visitors from the Antwerp municipal museums have been counted. More than 1.9 million visitors found their way to the exhibitions, the permanent collections and the many projects in the different houses in 2024. 

It was an exceptionally good exhibition year, but also projects such as Come Closer, the Ensor Year, Museum Night and the opening of the Rubens House continue the trend from 2023 in figures.

In total, more than 1.9 million people visited the museums in 2024. The art festival Come Closer, organized by the Middelheim Museum with DeSingel, created an exciting exchange between artists and the public and set up 300,000 people in the summer. Rubens Experience, the library and the garden of the Rubenshuis opened again on 30 August and provided 45,000 visitors.

In addition to the traditional general crowd pullers, Museum Plantin-Moretus (130,000), fashion museum MoMu (more than 115,000) and photography museum FOMU (93,000) had a very nice number of visitors, for the FOMU that is even an increase of 39%. 

The Ensor Year was certainly in between, with three top exposes in these houses. More than 33,000 visitors visited Museum Vleeshuis before it closed its doors to start the thorough renovation. Museum Night attracted just under 10,000 nocturnal visitors to Antwerp in total.

Successful exhibitions

In addition to these beautiful visitor numbers, the exhibitions in the Red Star Line Museum (‘Einstein, a wanted refugee‘), Museum Plantin-Moretus (‘From scribble to cartoon‘), Museum Mayer van den Bergh (‘Conversations‘), FOMU (Dirk Braeckman and ‘ReSisters‘), MoMu (Willy Vandeperre) and DIVA (‘Pinned!‘) helped the increase in the number of visitors. 

In 2024, the Museum At the Stream (Museum Aan de Stroom, MAS) had more than 200,000 paying tickets in the aftermath of the echibition ‘Rare & Indispensable‘.

Discount cards remain powerful instruments in function of repeat visits and broadening of the public: the Museum Pass was used more than 154,000 times and the Antwerp City Pass more than 15,000 times.

Happy with the numbers

Alderman for Culture Lien van de Kelder (Vooruit): “The municipal museums present pretty statistics indeed. We see that last year a total of 7% more tickets were sold compared to in 2023. It was an exceptionally good exhibition year and the many events also went to our museums in large numbers. I am also very happy with the many young people who went to our museums and events, we see, for example, at the Museum Night. And 2025 also promises a lot of beautiful things, with the exhibitions ‘Compassion‘ in the MAS and ‘Happy Family 全家福‘ in the Red Star Line Museum, and many other fantastic projects inside and outside the walls of our urban institutions.”

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