Free Sunday admission to the Speed Art Museum will continue through March, communications director Kim Butterweck said Wednesday.
She said the last free Sunday will be March 29, 2026.
Butterweck said Speed officials originally planned to end fare-free entry in January. After speaking with museum partners and donors, they decided it was a better move to keep free Sundays for now, she said.
In a statement posted to its website in November, the Speed announced several programming changes, citing financial struggles. That included plans to end free admission on Sundays and a pause several of its educational programs and workshops.
By April, the museum hopes to transition to a “pay what you can” model one Sunday a month, Butterweck said. She explained although free Sundays will end this year, patrons will not be turned away if they can’t cover the cost of admission.
“We're talking to donors, things like that,” Butterweck said. “But we still do want to have conversations with folks here in the community about free Sundays and what we can do to make sure that the museum stays accessible for everyone.”
The Speed is one of more than 1,500 other museums in the United States part of the Museums for All program. Through the initiative, individuals and families who receive food assistance or SNAP benefits get free admission to the Speed. It is the largest and oldest art museum in Kentucky.
Other programming changes
K-12 school tours will return this year, Butterweck said. Museum leadership plans to reopen sign-ups by the end of this month. She said the new school tours will be led by a museum docent volunteer, but museum officials are working to create a “standardized version” of the tours to make the experience “a little bit more operationally efficient.”
The Speed’s “Memories at the Museum” program for visitors with Alzheimer's will happen monthly instead of twice a month.
The museum paused several of its other programs and has since scrubbed the “creative learning” tab on its website.
Creative-making programs, adult workshops, family programming, summer camps, the summer portfolio intensive, the Teen Art Lab and clothed figure drawing were among those put on hold.
The Speed’s Learning, Engagement and Belonging team used to manage all of these programs. Nearly five months ago, the museum unexpectedly gutted the entire department and terminated nine employees.
At the time, some of the LEB’s former employees expressed concern about the future of community engagement work at the Speed.
The Speed’s curatorial department, which worked closely with the LEB team, has been tasked with managing the remaining programs and workshops. Butterweck said the curatorial’s team of 13 full-time employees is focusing more on “family-friendly programming,” and some programs “won't come back in the exact same way that they were before,” though she did not provide specifics.
For now, she said the Speed is hoping to make programming “very new and feel very fresh” as the museum works through its current budget. The 2025-2026 budget took a $3.6 million reduction compared to the previous year.
“We saw this as a time to kind of step back and not do the same thing over and over again, right, and expect a different result,” Butterweck said.
The Speed will have to present a new budget to its board of trustees in September.
