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Published On: August 27, 2020 11:22 AM NPT By: Associated Press

Face masks amid the art: New York City’s museums to reopen

Face masks amid the art: New York City’s museums to reopen

NEW YORK

When the iconic T. Rex at the American Museum of Natural History again welcomes visitors, it will gaze down at humans acting a bit differently.

They will still gape up at its massive skeleton, but there will be fewer of them. They’ll stand farther apart and wear masks. Other pandemic precautions will include hand sanitizer stations and one-way signs guiding guests through exhibits.

The museum is like many cultural institutions in the city gingerly reopening their doors, weighing the safety of visitors and staff with the need to educate, inspire and support New York’s recovery.

“We have to re-imagine and re-engineer the museum visit,” says museum President Ellen Futter. “We want to fulfill our civic mission. And we think that our mission has never been more important.”

New York City was by far the hardest-hit U.S. city by the pandemic. It’s also home to world-class cultural institutions that have for decades — and city leaders hope will once again — draw millions.

The Museum of Modern Art opens Thursday, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art reopens its Upper East Side home on Saturday. The American Museum of Natural History plans to reopen to the public Sept. 9.

City museums will institute a range of precautions, including reduced hours, reserved tickets, mandating masks, limiting attendance to a quarter of capacity, and closing movie theaters, coat rooms and food courts.

Some of the new rules might make future trips to a museum less spontaneous and escapist, but there are some benefits.

“It’s true that it will be less crowded. It also will be more intimate and it may give people a different view of things. I don’t think that will diminish in the least the sense of the visit,” said Futter.

Other institutions need a bit more time. The Guggenheim will reopen on Oct. 3, while the 9/11 Memorial Museum will reopen on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks.
Whether anyone will come is the big question.

“There are a lot of unknowns out there. We don’t know whether people will feel comfortable coming back. We don’t know whether they’ll feel comfortable being with several hundred people indoors, even if we’re a very large space,” said Glenn Lowry, MoMA’s director.

“We ardently believe that people will want to come back to museums and to see the things that are both familiar and unfamiliar — see the things that animate their mind, that make them feel alive.”

Welcoming back visitors is also a chance to end months of lost ticket sales. Each facility has different financial models but for those that rely heavily on attendance, the pandemic has been crippling. The Natural History Museum alone has lost as much as $120 million.

While MoMA is looking at “significant losses” for up to three years, it has decided not to charge visitors for the first month. “It just felt like the right gesture,” said Lowry. “I think once you’ve lost a lot of money, losing a little bit more isn’t really the big issue.”

To add to the financial burden, most museums have been forced to pay for safety upgrades, like more staff, touchless bathrooms and costly air filtration systems.

“Every institution is having to look long and hard at their financial model and scale back, postponing and canceling programs and events while simultaneously pushing forward on all fundraising cylinders,” said Regan Grusy, vice president of strategic partnerships at the New Museum.

The pandemic hit only a few months after MoMA reopened in October following a $450 million expansion. Back then, visitors were greeted in the lobby with an enormous Haim Steinbach banner that read: “Hello. Again.” It’s been replaced: Now they’ll see a Milton Glaser piece that reads “I (HEART) NY.”

“This is a moment to assert the resurgence of New York,” said Lowry. “New York has gone from this huge magnet of tourism to being a city that’s just about itself because the tourists aren’t around. So with all of that, we felt this was a more powerful welcome.”

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