Quebec museum attendance down 55 per cent on average, report finds

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA)/ Musee des Beaux-Arts Montreal (Daniel J. Rowe/CTV News)

The province's museums saw an average drop in admissions of 55 per cent in 2021 compared to the pre-pandemic normal, according to a survey by the Quebec statistics institute (ISQ).

The report released Wednesday by the ISQ's Observatoire de la culture et des communications reveals that 6.8 million visitors attended a museum institution in Quebec in 2021, an increase of 72 per cent compared to 3.9 million admissions the previous year.

Despite this increase, museums remained well below the 2015 to 2019 average of about 15.2 million admissions per year.

While science museums and places of historical interpretation recorded the highest number of intramural admissions in 2021 (2.2 million and 1.5 million), art museums experienced the biggest drop in average attendance, with a 72 per cent drop compared to the years 2015 to 2019.

For Jean-Christophe Racette, executive director and acting chief curator of the Musée des beaux-arts de Sherbrooke (MBAS), the sanitary measures imposed last year were felt strongly.

"For us, the biggest impact was on school groups. When the instructions were semi-clarified in relation to the reception of schools, we had almost no one; maybe one group every three weeks," he said in an interview.

The ISQ report also indicates that school attendance in museum institutions has declined steadily over the past three years, from 181,000 admissions in 2020 to 173,000 in 2021. In the five years preceding the pandemic, the average annual number of visits was around 900,000.

EXHIBITIONS LEFT BEHIND

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) has also seen its clientele slip through its fingers.

"Before the pandemic, our number of visitors could reach one million; in 2021, we are barely a quarter of that number," said MMFA communications director Michele Meier. "We were closed until February 2021, and then we had to operate with reduced opening hours."

The closure of museums in France and Quebec also forced the MMFA to abandon the major exhibition "The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the 19th Century."

The exhibition was supposed to launch at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and then come to Montreal in February 2021. The exhibition's opening was initially postponed, but the extended closure of French museums ultimately made it incompatible with the MMFA's schedule.

Despite the challenges of the past few years, Meier says she has seen a renewed enthusiasm from the clientele, which is "diverse in age and culture" and interested in a variety of subjects.

"We were able to recover in 2022, thanks in part to the Nicolas Party exhibition, which attracted nearly 300,000 visitors between February and October," she said. "We have also just presented our 2023 programme, which focuses on women and Indigenous people, and we are very optimistic about the public's reception."

As of November 30, the MMFA's attendance for 2022 exceeded 500,000 visitors, a figure that shows "a gradual return to the new normal," according to Meier.

Despite the turmoil, some museum institutions are now on a roll.

This is the case of the POP Museum in Trois-Rivières, which has seen a strong increase in summer attendance compared to 2019.

"We are already ahead of schedule for 2022 compared to the pre-pandemic years. It's a record, and we can see that families wanted to get out and visit tourist sites," said communications officer Claire Plourde.

In addition to a growing interest in the virtual component developed in conjunction with the health measures, Plourde noted a massive return of individual and school clients to the various exhibitions.

"The only clientele that has not returned is our commercial clientele, and those linked to business tourism," she said. "Room rentals are an important part of our income, and we have not yet recovered the amounts we had before COVID-19."

The various museums agree, however, that the financial assistance provided by the federal and provincial governments has been crucial to their survival. In 2020, Quebec announced a $450 million recovery plan for culture; a sector hit hard by the pandemic.

"The main issue to come will be that of the workforce, especially in relation to front-line staff. We're a non-profit cultural organization, so we can't offer huge salaries," said Plourde.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Dec. 16, 2022.

This article was produced with the financial support of the Meta and Canadian Press News Grants.