The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles announced that the exhibition Art in the Streets, presented in the first year of MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch’s tenure at the museum, attracted 201,352 visitors from April 17–August 8, 2011, marking the highest exhibition attendance in the museum’s history. Previous attendance records were set with the museum’s presentations of Andy Warhol Retrospective (2002) and MURAKAMI (2007), which welcomed 195,000 and 149,323 visitors, respectively. With this exhibition, MOCA expects to double its annual attendance this year to 400,000 visitors.
“It is my mission to increase MOCA’s attendance and to engage new audiences,” said Deitch. “Art in the Streets reflected a wide array of creative disciplines and local communities, and these record-breaking attendance figures go a long way to doubling the museum’s attendance this year.“
The exhibition ran for 81 days, with a daily average attendance of 2,486, which breaks previous daily attendance records. The final week of the show drew 32, 278 visitors, also a museum record.
One of the most popular features of the exhibition, and an unprecedented gesture by an artist, was Free Mondays, the first-ever museum sponsorship by British artist Banksy. The program, which provided free exhibition admission on Mondays, drew an average 4,083 visitors each Monday. On closing day, an all-time daily high of 8,424 visitors attended, with lines stretching from the entrance of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to Alameda Street in Little Tokyo.