How Museums and Galleries Become a Community's Third Space
Research on the loss of third spaces makes the cost clear. With fewer places to gather, galleries, museums, and cultural institutions are positioned to fill the role.
Cultural Institutions as Third Spaces · 2026
Americans have fewer places to gather than they did a generation ago. The Survey Center on American Life's 2024 American Social Capital Survey found that 63 percent of Americans never or seldom visit a library, and nearly half say the same about parks. Art museums and galleries have seen the same decline. The share of adults who visited one in the past year dropped by close to nine percentage points between 2017 and 2022, the largest fall of any arts activity the National Endowment for the Arts measures.
At the same time, loneliness has been rising for years, and the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory found about half of American adults lonely, with fewer shared public places, or "third spaces," named as part of the cause. The term "third place" was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, and describes a neutral, communal space outside of your work or home, where regulars come and go and strangers are welcome.
Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University, argues in his book Palaces for the People that libraries, parks, and public buildings are the thread that holds a community together by giving people a place to meet and a social infrastructure. His research, and a growing body of work since, finds that when social infrastructure is well used, neighborhoods feel less isolated and more resilient.
The effects don't stop there. The National Endowment for the Arts also found in 2024 that adults who attend live arts events, including museum and gallery exhibits, are markedly less lonely than those who don't, and a 2019 University College London study found that older adults who visit museums every few months carry a 32 percent lower risk of depression, rising to 48 percent for those who visit monthly, regardless of their wealth, education, health conditions, and wider social lives.
When people are yearning for third places, cultural institutions have a chance to fill the gap. A&O is proud to partner with cultural institutions to build the very community threads that create robust third places, at a time when our communities need them now more than ever.
"Older adults who visit museums every few months carry a 32% lower risk of depression, rising to 48% for those who visit monthly, regardless of their wealth, education, health conditions, and wider social lives."
Museums as third spaces, at every age
Civic institutions are community anchors, revitalizing and giving life to neighborhoods by giving people a reason to be there. Museums, galleries, and cultural institutions should consider themselves a place for gathering and not just for viewing. San Francisco's de Young, SFMOMA, the San Diego Natural History Museum, and the California Academy of Sciences each run regular late-night programs, often at a discounted evening rate, with music, a bar, and room to mingle, and they draw a younger crowd than the daytime hours do.
Older adults have their own programs, and the impact is measured. A Museums on Prescription study from UCL and Canterbury Christ Church, ten weekly sessions for adults aged 65 to 94 at risk of isolation, recorded a significant rise in their psychological wellbeing. MoMA's Meet Me at MoMA, evaluated with NYU, found improved mood and self-esteem among people living with Alzheimer's, and their care partners reported feeling close to more people than before.
With such profound impact on our communities, it should only make sense that fostering community engagement in local museums, art galleries, public libraries, performing arts centers, heritage foundations and the like becomes a form of public health and wellness work, reducing depression, easing loneliness, and creating the threads for social infrastructure to thrive.
Galleries as third spaces for art
Galleries ask the least of a visitor. Most charge no admission, keep regular public hours, and let anyone come in to look. Where a museum sells a ticket, a commercial gallery rarely does, which makes a gallery one of the most accessible third spaces a neighborhood has.
Some of these gatherings have run for decades. The most familiar is the art crawl, an evening when a district's galleries open together. On the first Thursday of the month, Portland's Pearl District galleries open late, free, with new shows and the artists on hand, and people walk from one to the next. Portland also hosts large annual neighborhood events. At the juried Mt. Tabor Art Walk, dozens of artists open their home studios across the neighborhood, and the St. Johns Art Walk fills the business district along North Lombard Street with local artists and makers. In Los Angeles, the Downtown Art Walk does the same on the second Thursday of each month, free and self-guided across about fifty galleries, drawing roughly 25,000 people a month. Art walks bridge a city's working artists and the wider community, democratizing fine art, preserving a neighborhood's identity, and sustaining its creative life.
Become a place where people gather
People are looking for somewhere to belong, and museums and galleries have the opportunity to program for company, not just for viewing. If that is where your institution is headed, we help galleries, museums, and cultural institutions build a press strategy around participating in and creating community.