MoMA PS1 goes free for its 50th anniversary year

MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art's affiliate in a former Long Island City schoolhouse, has been free to all visitors since January 1, 2026, per the museum's announcement of December 9, 2025. A $900,000 gift from the collector Sonya Yu underwrites free admission for at least three years, in honor of the institution's 50th anniversary.

The museum says the arrangement makes the Queens institution the largest free museum in New York City. The policy asks nothing of anyone: unlike the pay-what-you-wish schemes elsewhere in the city, which the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for one, extends only to New York State residents and tri-state students who buy tickets in person, PS1's waiver carries no residency test and no in-person purchase requirement. Queens residents, who have long had the museum in their backyard, now share its terms of entry with visitors from anywhere.

The timing is structural rather than incidental. The free year coincides with the museum's 50th-anniversary programming, including Greater New York, its recurring survey of New York-area artists, which is due to open on April 16, 2026 — the first edition for which entry will cost nothing.

The free term spans more than the anniversary itself. It runs through the end of 2028, covering the survey's closing weeks on August 17, 2026 and two further seasons of exhibitions in the converted schoolhouse and its courtyard.

For the city's art public, the removal of a ticket barrier at one of its most adventurous exhibition venues is the most consequential access change of the season: a school group, a commuter between boroughs and a first-time visitor now face identical terms of entry. The detail worth watching is duration — the gift secures three years, not perpetuity, which makes the arrangement a running test of whether free admission measurably changes who walks through the door, and a decision point for a successor funder when the term lapses.