BTS leader RM’s exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is breaking the museum’s attendance records and helping pull it out of a financial slump, according to a Guardian report relayed by South Korean news agency Newsis on October 26.
The exhibition, “RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me,” opened on October 3 and runs through February 7, 2027. Before it even opened, advance bookings reached six times the museum’s previous all-time record, the Guardian reported. More than 66,000 tickets have been sold so far.
The show’s official merchandise sold out across online and offline stores within three hours of going on sale. Shane Salvata, SFMOMA’s store director, told the Guardian the response was “unlike anything we have experienced” and something the museum may struggle to experience again.
The numbers arrive at a difficult moment for the museum. SFMOMA recorded a $5 million deficit last year as pandemic-era visitor declines, worsening federal funding, and a slump in San Francisco tourism piled up. The museum cut 7.5 percent of its workforce and lowered its expected annual attendance to around 600,000 visitors, Newsis reported.
The Guardian concluded that RM’s exhibition has delivered a clear financial uplift for the museum. It placed the show in the lineage of celebrity-collaboration exhibitions such as the Brooklyn Museum’s 2024 show built around Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, while praising the planning quality of the RM exhibition.
The show itself took shape after the museum approached RM two years ago, while he was serving in the military. It pairs 142 works from RM’s personal collection with 36 works from SFMOMA’s holdings, for 178 pieces in total. Among the pairings, Yoon Hyung-keun’s “Umber Blue” hangs beside Mark Rothko’s “No. 24,” and a group work by Lee Ungno carries RM’s own commentary. RM also wrote exhibition captions and recorded the audio guide.
America Castillo, the curator behind the exhibition, told the Guardian that seeing visitors cry inside the gallery was an unexpectedly beautiful thing. Fans had already traveled from as far as London to gather outside the museum for the opening events, underlining how far the show’s pull reaches beyond San Francisco.
The exhibition continues through February 7, 2027, giving the museum months more of the so-called RM effect.
