Among the museum directors paying keen attention to the ruling, on 3 December, that all federal grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) would be reinstated, the director of the Seattle Art Museum Scott Stulen heaved a sigh of relief. In 2025, the Pacific Northwest’s leading art museum saw all its federal funding cut. That represented the loss of an annual income stream, he says, of between $300,000 and $400,000.
Stulen’s museum has an annual operating budget of $42m, so the federal funding cuts were not life-threatening. But, as he puts it, they did hurt. “We filled holes as we could, with the hope that we would get reimbursed in the future.”
That hope appears to have been well-founded, but wider economic uncertainty and shifts in visitor—and donor—patterns are growing concerns. Of the 511 museum directors the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) surveyed in its National Snapshot of United States Museums, published in November, one in four said their bottom lines were weaker than in 2019. Federal funding accounts for just 3% of average museum income. The larger factors contributing to directors’ unease are the impact of the affordability crisis and where audiences are choosing to spend their dollars—whether as visitors or donors.
Attendance drop
Over 50% of the AAM survey’s respondents reported fewer visitors than in 2019 and 29% reported “declines tied to weakened travel and tourism and/or economic uncertainty”. This, of course, varies hugely from state to state.
For museums whose attendance has always tracked more local than national or foreign, things are looking good. The Toledo Museum of Art’s director and chief executive Adam Levine says attendance is now 50% higher than immediately after lockdown, and exceeding pre-pandemic levels. “The caveat is that we are a free museum,” he says. Before Covid-19, attendance was measured in the aggregate, whether someone had come to see the art indoors or to walk their dog in the sculpture garden. Since lockdown, the museum has counted in a more granular way, so that 50% increase pertains specifically to gallery visitation.
Attendance at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is also 13% higher year on year, though it is still lagging by 7% compared with before the pandemic. The museum’s president and director James Rondeau ascribes this “almost exclusively” to sluggish recovery of international visitation. “Despite slower international tourism, those declines have been offset by significant growth in domestic tourism,” he says, “which has recovered in full, as well as important gains in local Chicago attendance. Paid local attendance is actually higher than it was pre-pandemic.”
In Seattle, meanwhile, where businesses across the board are bearing the brunt of the ongoing Canadian pullback in US travel, with numbers down by 50%, according to Stulen the museum’s attendance is actually back up to 2019 levels, even though tourist numbers account for 15% of the Seattle Art Museum’s overall attendance.
So, too, in New York. In early December, visitor numbers at the Museum of the Moving Image for 2025 were on course to exceed 2019 total visits, despite the downturn in international tourism to the city. “The most significant growth has come from local and regional visitors, reflecting a strategic focus on broader New York-area communities rather than on longhaul international tourists,” says Aziz Isham, the museum’s director.
Spending slowdown
Patchy attendance, the AAM’s report shows, is compounded by growing financial strain. Nearly one third of respondents cited downturns resulting from less travel and tourism, as well as “economic uncertainty”. These dynamics impact museums in two ways.
First, museums across the country underscore the urgency of rising operational expenditures. Stulen, who sits on the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors, says labour costs are up by 20%, building materials by 15% and shipping by as much as 30%. The expense of doing business has many institutions “treading water”, he says.
Second, individuals are being impacted by the affordability crisis just as much as institutions are. As a free museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) does not rely on visitor numbers in terms of ticket sales, though attendance does affect grant opportunities. In 2025, CAMH was one of many museums to see its National Endowment for the Arts funding cut. Amid the whiplash, Melissa McDonnell-Luján, who is CAMH’s co-director with Ryan Dennis, says they thought the federal funding cuts might spur an uptick in individual philanthropy or membership, but that has not happened. “That’s been a surprise,” she says.
Stulen points to changes in how visitors are choosing to spend their money. “We’re seeing it on the lower income levels,” he says. “People are coming on free days, and maybe not coming as frequently as they were before.”
The data bears this out, according to Joanne Hsu, an economist who heads up the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, conducted since 1946. In early December, 47% of consumers said high prices are weighing down their personal finances, a figure Hsu describes as “really high”. She says more people are cutting back on expenditure, or stopping it altogether, than in 2022.
The cost of living has been a preoccupation for several years. What changed in 2025, according to Hsu, is how worried consumers are about weakening labour markets. “Coming out of the pandemic, people were willing to keep spending through their negative feelings about the economy, because they had reliable incomes. Now more than two-thirds of consumers believe unemployment is going to get worse in the year ahead.”
All the museum leaders The Art Newspaper spoke with agree that more creativity than ever is needed to bring money in. Isham, who has seen all his museum’s federal funding cut to zero, says: “We’ve really had to diversify our funding sources and think very entrepreneurially about our bottom line.”
According to the SMU DataArts research centre at Southern Methodist University in Texas, total revenue for the US nonprofit culture sector fell by 36% between 2019 and 2024, when accounting for inflation. Contributed revenue of every kind (from trustees, individuals, corporate donors, foundations and public bodies) fell to below pre-pandemic levels, with a drops of 25% in foundation funding and 26% in government support, relative to 2023. Average earned income also dropped, by 17.5%.
At the same time, top-tier giving remains the most important source of funding for museums. As Dennis puts it: “the pool is quite large”. The challenge, she says, is “finding ways to connect with more supporters. Because they’re there.” The AIC is a case in point: it has succeeded in growing its endowment by $230m in new philanthropy in recent years.
Doing so is closely connected to the central importance of understanding and serving the local community, at every level—of ensuring a sense of ownership and investment. As Stulen notes, where the old model would have museums aspire to outside coverage—media in New York or Europe, say—now, the Seattle Art Museum is prioritising its neighbours. “We need to actually matter to the people who are walking through our front door.”
