NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Wednesday that it attracted more local visitors last year than it did before the pandemic, and that the number of visitors from elsewhere in the United States had nearly completely rebounded.

But the museum said that it was still only attracting about half the international visitors that it did before the pandemic upended the tourism industry.

All told, the Met attracted nearly 5.5 million to its main home on Fifth Avenue and to the Cloisters in the year ending June 30, the museum said. That is still short of 2019, when it attracted 7 million people and was still operating a third location, the Met Breuer on Madison Avenue. But museum officials were pleased with the progress they have made.

“We are clearly back,” Max Hollein, the Met Museum’s director, said in an interview. “We have a total attendance that is on the level we would like to see.”

As one of the largest museums in the United States, the Met Museum’s attendance figures are closely analyzed by industry professionals who see the organization as a bellwether of the culture sector. The museum said that 60% of its audience (3.3 million people) came from the local region. Another 24% (1.3 million people) traveled from elsewhere in the United States. The remaining 16% (900,000 people) came from abroad, roughly half the number the museum attracted in 2019.

Hollein blamed the slow recovery of international tourism, which has been hurt by the strong dollar and decreased travel from Asian countries. A recent report by the state comptroller’s office found that the number of international visitors to New York City was down nearly 14% from 2019.

The museum attributed its success with local visitors to strengthened relationships with local communities and more diverse audiences. A new children’s center called 81st Street Studio has attracted more than 170,000 visitors since opening in September, and its blockbuster exhibition of the Black artists of the Harlem Renaissance has welcomed more than 430,000 visitors during a five-month run that ends July 28.

New York state residents and students from New Jersey and Connecticut can pay what they wish to enter the Met; in 2022 the museum raised its prices for adult visitors from elsewhere to $30, up from $25.

Across the United States, museums have largely failed to recapture the international tourists who once drove ticket sales and revenue spikes. Over the past year, some have come to terms with the possibility that international visitors might not return for a long time: laying off employees, raising ticket prices or closing their doors.

In sharing its attendance figures, the Met also celebrated what it said was record attendance from people of color, who accounted for 56% of its domestic audience. Officials said that future programming would continue to spotlight artists and cultures that were historically underrepresented at the museum.

On Wednesday, the museum also announced that a major exhibition called “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now,” would open in November with a celebration of how Black artists and others have incorporated ancient Egyptian imagery in their work.

“The exhibition was formally conceived in 2018 with a conversation that I had with a friend of mine, the artist Chet Gold, at the Museum of Modern Art, in a staff staircase,” said the curator, Akili Tommasino. “But I have been stewing over this concept for my entire life.”

The show will include 200 works from more than 100 artists, including an 1876 sculpture by Edmonia Lewis and a recently commissioned film by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich titled “Cleopatra at the Mall.” Tommasino will also exhibit a work by Fred Wilson that sparked his imagination nearly six years ago: “Grey Area (Brown Version),” a sculpture series that was in the 1992 Cairo Biennial and later as part of his “Re:Claiming Egypt” installation at the 1993 Whitney Biennial.

It will feature works by other artists including Barbara Chase-Riboud, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Rashid Johnson, as well as a photograph of a stage set featuring twin pyramids designed by singer Solange Knowles and a screening of a skit in which comedian Richard Pryor plays an archaeologist making a discovery in Egypt.

“It is my hope that this exhibition will attract people to the Met who were not previously aware that the institution was available to them,” Tommasino said. “I would say that this exhibition will have something for everyone in terms of its breadth of materials.”

Hollein said the exhibition was part of a long-term commitment to diversity that has driven the recent increase in attendance and the museum’s scholarly pursuits.

“You see not only the Met expanding the diversity of its curatorial work force, but what counts is letting these curators do major things,” he said. “All that will help further expand our thinking of art history.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.