The museum says that its longstanding tradition of free admission on the first Thursday of every month is “temporarily paused,” and though it may return someday, signs point to this being a budget cut due to a lack of sponsors.

It’s been a fairly beloved San Francisco tradition for decades, that many of the city’s top museums are free on a certain first weekday of the month. And one of the most popular of these is the SFMOMA’s free first Thursdays, when admission is free between 4-8 pm on the first Thursday of each month, to anyone who’s a resident of SF or one of eight other Bay Area counties.

Or at least, admission was free on the first Thursday of each month, but SFMOMA has abruptly ended that promotion with little explanation.

“The Free First Thursday program is temporarily paused,” SFMOMA says in a recent update to their free First Thursday web page. No explanation is given.

The issue first bubbled up in the local media Friday morning, when a local newsletter and event listing site called Eddie’s List first noticed that SFMOMA had paused its free First Thursdays. The site’s creator Eddie Hernandez got an email out of SFMOMA saying, “The program is paused indefinitely beginning immediately. No free admission on 2/5.”

Hernandez followed up with a phone call looking for an explanation. "Reason provided (to me over the phone) for pausing the program is because there is no sponsor for it, currently,” that site reports.

As seen above, a cached version of the same SFMOMA page from a month ago shows Google.org was a sponsor of the museum’s free First Thursdays, but they were reportedly

The Chronicle then jumped on the story Friday afternoon, and they received word that the museum has "temporarily paused [the program] as the institution re-examines its scope, costs, impact and long-term funding."

The museum also indicated they may be pretty close to finding new sponsors for First Thursdays, and might soon bring the promotion back.

Yes, SFMOMA does offer some other free admission days, including a Free Family Day on Sunday, June 14, and more information about discounted admission opportunities can be found here.

None of the other free SF museum days seem affected by any of this. The Asian Art Museum is still free on the first Sunday of each month, the Legion of Honor and the de Young Museum are both free on the first Tuesday of each month (as well as the first Saturday for Bay Area residents), and the Museum of the African Diaspora is free every second Saturday. Meanwhile, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is free every single Wednesday.

Related: SFMOMA Layoffs Cause Outrage From Union [SFist]

Image: SFMOMA

*This post has been corrected to show that the pause of the First Thursdays program is not related to the loss of any specific sponsor.