By Erin Cromwell
Every Saturday and Sunday, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston hosts a weekly drop-in art making event that honors one of the museum’s exhibits.
The event runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and is also held occasionally on Thursday evenings. It is open to all ages and admission is included with a regular ticket, allowing visitors to stop in. When the weather is nice, the event is often hosted on the Huntington Avenue Lawn, making it accessible to the public and allowing non-ticket holders to join for free.
Although attendance at the MFA has yet to meet pre-pandemic levels, the overall number of visitors has been steadily climbing each year, with a 34% increase from 2022 to 2023, and an additional 13% increase from 2023 to 2024, according to the MFA’s 2023 and 2024 annual reports.
Caitlin Doyle, Manager of Family Programs at the MFA, said that her team of museum educators implemented the drop-in event after the pandemic as a way of getting the community involved again. What started as distance-friendly art kits eventually evolved into the in-person program that the museum offers today.
“It was a way to kind of engage visitors and welcome them back into the space,” she said.
Doyle and her team of museum educators also host tours, cultural celebrations and late-night programs.
Gabby Perez-Dietz, a museum educator, has helped coordinate events for the past three years and said that creating art helps get people excited about art.
“When you make something, I feel like you always connect more to what you’re looking at,” she said.
Participants at this event pasted together strips of patterned fabric onto heat-activated lining to create patchwork designs. The activity is inspired by the museum’s exhibit “One Hundred Stitches, One Hundred Villages,” which features patchwork from rural China.
Sabrina Doshi, a communications manager for Harvard Medical School, visited the drop-in art making event for the second time after attending one on Huntington Lawn last year. She said she loves finding something new to explore at the MFA and events like these help her to appreciate the exhibits.
“This is a really helpful way of connecting with the artist, even if there’s hundreds and hundreds of years between us making the same art,” Doshi said.
Victoria Bezpalko, a Massachusetts resident, said that the MFA does an amazing job of engaging the community. She has been frequenting the museum for years ever since she began bringing her daughter to art classes on the weekend. Now, she’s continuing the tradition with her two granddaughters, Avery and Dakota.
“[The] MFA was one of our favorites with both of our daughters and now granddaughters,” she said.
In addition to drop-in art making, the MFA offers a range of community programs, including scavenger hunts, concerts and film screenings.
“The MFA is humongous. I think every time I come, even if it’s the same exhibits I’ve seen last time, there’s still new things to explore,” Doshi said. “ I really love coming back, just to walk around and discover something new every time.”
This story is part of a partnership between The Independent Newspaper Group and Boston University Department of Journalism’s Newsroom program.