There is no shortage of researchers and educators who tell us that art is good for our health and well-being, our quality of life, and as a means for understanding ourselves and others. Where too many people come up short is paying to get into art museums—$25 at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and $15 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; $25 to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York and $22 for the Guggenheim, $22 at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, $23 at the Art Institute of Chicago, $18 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and $15 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ($15). (Nor are high prices limited to art museums; the Field Museum in Chicago, for example, charges $18 for adult admission.) Cost is often a reason that people simply don’t go to museums, particularly if they have large families.

What keeps this story from being nothing but depressing is the fact that a small but growing number of museums around the country have moved in the other direction, eliminating admissions fees altogether. Leading the charge are the Dallas Museum of Art and the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, both of which eliminated their fees in 2013. Jack Becker, director and chief executive officer of the Joslyn, claimed that the goal “is accessibility, to never deny the opportunity to view original works of art in our collection to anyone because of an inability to pay.” The Joslyn had been free to the public for decades since its founding in 1931 but added an admissions charge of $8 for adults in the 1990s, annually adding up to roughly $200,000, or between two and four percent of the museum’s total revenues. There was one admission-free time in the course of the week, from 10:00 a.m. to noon on Saturdays, “and we had more than 40 percent of all our weekly visitors show up then,” he said. “That revealed the widespread desire for us to be free, as we always had been, and we followed through on that.”