2. Museum of Modern Art Raising Admission and Membership Fees

By CAROL VOGEL

The Museum of Modern Art, faced with what it calls “escalating costs in virtually all aspects of operating the museum,’’ is raising its admission price to $25 for adults from $20, where it has been since 2004. The change takes effect on Sept. 1. Admission will remain free for children 16 and under; the charge for full-time students will rise to $14 from $12.

MoMA is following the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In June the Met announced that its suggested admission price would rise to $25 from $20 starting in July. Unlike the Met’s suggested fee, MoMA’s is mandatory. Membership rates for the Museum of Modern Art are rising as well, as of Nov. 1. Individuals will have to pay $85 to be a member rather than $75; a dual membership will be $140 instead of $120, and it will cost a family $175, up from $150.

“These carefully considered increases in admission prices will help ensure that the museum is able to maintain financial stability and a balanced budget,’’ a statement from the museum said.

3. New museum exhibits invite touching, maybe too much

By Brian Maffly

Real fossils are a rarity in public dinosaur displays, but the rebuilt Natural History Museum of Utah did not shy away from mounting late Cretaceous bones in its new paleontology gallery.

The new museum showcases the actual remains of a 76-million-year-old native Utahn named Gryposaurus monumentensis, a near-complete specimen of a duck-bill dinosaur recovered in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. But museum officials quickly learned that the toe bones, within easy reach of your average 7-year-old, are too tempting to touch.

Before the museum opens Friday, a freshly built rail will protect the specimen from busy fingers.

"It’s hard for people to know what not to touch, when they are invited to touch so many things," said museum director Sarah George said. The gryposaurus is just one of 2,500 mounts in the new museum and not even the most exciting. But it exemplifies the lengths to which the museum and its exhibit designers went to bring science and nature alive.

The museum’s new home near Red Butte Garden, knows as the Rio Tinto Center, will be dedicated Thursday. Speakers include Gov. Gary Herbert, Salt Lake Council Chairman Max Burdick, interim U. President Lorris Betz, and representatives of the museum’s major private funders, Rio Tinto and the Emma Eccles Jones Foundation.

The museum is hosting a gala event Thursday night and opens its doors to the public Friday. Admission is free opening day, but all 3,600 tickets were spoken for within hours of being made available online last Friday.

Officials believe the museum’s 51,000 square feet of exhibition space can handle 3,500 to 4,000 people in a day. About 4,000 have visited the museum during recent test events, providing valuable insights into how visitors flow through the 10 galleries and numerous interactive features. One replicates an archeological excavation of a Fremont Indian village in Parowan Valley. Visitor are invited to enter the ancient pithouse and learn about scientific methods, like recording the contents of individual sectors created by a grid of strings.

Exhibit designers probably didn’t envision some of the ways kids would play with features of this exhibit’s features. At one test event, young girls played hopscotch in the projected grid representing archeologists’ strings.

The gryposaurus is one of dozens of dinosaur and mammal specimens mounted in Past Worlds, the museum’s largest gallery. Most are held in frames visitors can barely see, but this one is secured in a cage-like structure that allows individual bones to be removed for scientific inspection, according to paleontology curator Randall Irmis.

The museum also is a repository for 1.2 million artifacts, fossils, animals, plants and other specimens, now secured in state-of-the-art storage facilities to ensure their preservation and access to researchers. Ninety percent of the new exhibits feature specimens that were never displayed in the former museum at the University of Utah’s old library.

Exhibits and the building were designed with people of all ages in mind, but officials were particularly interested in engaging children. Kids can learn about science with hands-on tools in four learning labs attached to key galleries.

"This is a place where we can inspire that curiosity early on," said exhibits manager Becky Menlove. "We have never been able to put this many of our objects on display."