Twenty years of Kumu in numbers

We put together a brief overview of most significant numbers to sum up Kumu’s twenty years:

• At the international architectural competition for the new building of the Art Museum of Estonia in 1993, a total of 233 entries were submitted by architects from ten countries. The winning design was Circulos by the Finnish architect Pekka Vapaavuori.
• It took another nine years before construction could begin, finally starting in 2002. Nearly four more years passed until Kumu’s grand opening celebration on 17 February 2006, and on 18 February the museum opened its doors to visitors.
• Over the course of twenty years, Kumu has been visited by a total of 2.7 million people. The most visited years were 2006 (228,520 visits), 2018 (184,403 visits), and 2023 (172,906 visits). The notable visitors have been Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, every President of Finland since Tarja Halonen, the American film directors Christopher Nolan and Lana Wachowski, the Icelandic band Sigur Rós, and many others.
• A total of 249 temporary exhibitions have been held at Kumu. The three most visited have been: teamLab: Impermanent Flowers Floating in a Continuous Sea (95 000, 2022/23), Michel Sittow: Estonian Painter at the Courts of Renaissance Europe (64 000, 2018), and Art in the Comfort Zone? The 2000s in Estonian Art (58 000, 2021/22).
• Kumu has had three directors over the past twenty years: Sirje Helme, Anu Liivak and Kadi Polli.
• The record year for the Kumu Education Centre was 2018, when 1138 museum lessons were held with 17,372 children.
• The most enduring Kumu brand is Kumu Documentary, which has been screening art and architecture films in the Kumu auditorium every Wednesday for 20 years.

Building of Kumu

Gallery

1 / 20

1 / 20