I Don’t Leave Home Without This Card

[It’s definitely not the card from the famous commercials.]

On the surface of it, I understand why people would wonder about the usefulness of a membership card from a San Francisco museum when I travel domestically outside of my home territory.

The key to the mystery lies in all those little stickers on the back of the card.

These stickers indicate that my home museum, the Asian Art Museum, is a participating member in three different programs that will admit me for free, along with a guest I have with me. [See the website links below.]

This card travels with me and I also regularly consult the NARM website to see if a museum I want to visit is on the list.

In fact, sometimes a participating museum is not on the list but accepts the card, as was the case last month when I showed up at the spacious and gorgeous Philadelphia Art Museum, asked if they were a member of NARM, and the person at the ticket desk told me YES.

My membership in the Asian Art Museum is a basic dual senior membership that I share with a friend. As such, it qualifies for these affiliations. I have never been questioned or turned away from a participating museum when I have presented them with this card.

Wait! There’s more!

A few years ago, when I asked at the Brooklyn Museum about NARM entry, they told me that they were part of an alliance I had not heard of: the Museum Alliance Reciprocal program.

I looked into it when I got home. That’s when I found out that I could ramp up my local membership in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [SFMOMA] as a means of gaining access to yet another group of museums.

That’s what I did. As a result, more of those museum doors have opened for me, and I have been enjoying these visits, too.

If museums are on your typical list of sites you want to see when you travel within North America, I suggest looking into finding out if a museum near you belongs to any of these alliances that can offer you the same rights of entry to other museums.

Website links to these programs

ROAM: https://sites.google.com/site/roammuseums/home/list-of-roam-museums

WR: https://hammer.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/2019-10/Western_Reciprocal_Benefits_Aug2019.pdf

NARM: https://narmassociation.org/

Museum Alliance Reciprocal: https://mocastore.org/pages/museum-alliance-reciprocal-membership-program