Correction Appended
Free Museums
You may know from projects that your teachers have assigned you that many museums in New York City are free. Some are run by the state, and thus are not allowed to charge visitors. Museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History have a “suggested donation,” the full price of which is not required to be paid for admission. Other museums, such as the Museum of the Native American Indian and the Sony Wonder Technology Lab, charge no admission price. A variety of art galleries also offer student discounts. Admission to the Noguchi Museum, the former studio in Queens of the famous sculptor, architect and furnisher Isamu Noguchi, is free for all NYC public high school students.
Lincoln Center
Lincoln Center is where the virtuosos collide, the divas and superstars meet, and the pinnacle of the arts is achieved. Located just north of Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center has a number of student discount programs. According to Lincoln Center’s Assistant to the Vice President of Public Relations Mary Ziegler, a student guide is published every year, outlining all the discounts Lincoln Center venues offer. “These discounts are great because they open up the arts to a much younger audience,” she said. Lincoln Center also sells student rush tickets, sold one hour before an event, for all shows (the ticket price depends on the venue).
Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), located in the Time Warner building in Columbus Circle, sells the remaining tickets to a show for 10 dollars one hour before show time, which is a great discount compared to regular ticket prices, which can be more than 100 dollars depending on who is performing and where you want to sit. “So far, the student discounts have been pretty successful. Jazz is a great music, but we’ve found that people don’t know a lot about it so it scares them away,” JALC Public Relations Assistant Bridget Wilson said. “Students are generally more open-minded about new music. Students don’t usually have a lot of money, so this is a good way of getting them to come hear jazz.”
Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the jazz complex’s resident club, also has a student promotional program: every first Monday of the month, students can RSVP online to pay a mere five dollars, which includes free food and soda, for one set.
Lincoln Center Theater (LCT) is another branch of Lincoln Center that is extremely popular with students. “The StudenTix program, [a membership that provides 20 dollar tickets to students], is so popular that it has already sold out for this year. But we always want more and more young people to come to our shows,” Marketing Associate David Hatkoff said. “Our mission has always been to spread the message of the arts and through this, we’ve taken steps towards achieving this.”
High 5 Tickets to the Arts
Stuyvesant alumna Rebecca Neuwirth (’92) founded High 5 Tickets to the Arts, a nonprofit organization, after studying abroad as a high school student and benefiting from the accessibility of the arts in Austria.
Located in Midtown, just a block away from the Museum of Modern Art, High 5 sells 5-dollar tickets to students for events at both world-famous venues as well as smaller ones. In the past, High 5 has had tickets to shows at places such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dance New Amsterdam, New York City Opera, and Carnegie Hall. Occasionally, High 5 also sells tickets to Blue Man Group and Broadway as well as off-Broadway shows.
High 5 also offers a nine-week writing program, called Teen Reviewers and Critics (TRaC), every fall and spring. “The type of student that would have a niche for a place like High 5 is someone who wants full cultural immersion and is willing to explore at unfamiliar areas for them in the arts,” Director of Education and Outreach Eric Ost said.
Most of these programs are paid for either by private donors or the state.
As a result, there is a very limited budget for advertising. “High 5 runs solely by word of mouth,” Ost said. As for LCT’s StudenTix program, Hatkoff said he mostly reaches out to “college professors to tell their students about StudenTix.”
To learn more about student programs at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, visit http://www.jalc.org/dccc/ambassadors.html
To learn more about Lincoln Center Theater’s StudenTix program, visit http://www.lct.org/studentix
To learn more about High 5 Tickets to the Arts, visit http://www.high5tix.org
Correction:
There was no byline for “Enlightenment in the Cheap Seats”; the article was wirtten by Jacob Sunshine.
