The three most viewed art shows in the world in 2019, by the number of visitors a day, were all organised by the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil.

Occupying the first and second spots in the The Art Newspaper ranking was the free travelling exhibition that offered a behind-the-scenes look at DreamWorks. Co-organised by the animation studio and Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 11,380 visitors a day went to it at the CCBB Rio de Janeiro, while a further 9,277 daily saw it at the CCBB Belo Horizonte. 

In third was Ai Weiwei’s travelling survey in Brazil— the highest-ranking show by a single artist in the list. More than 1.1 million people in total saw the exhibition in Brazil that started in São Paulo with stops in Belo Horizonte and Curitiba before arriving at the CCBB Rio de Janeiro, where it was seen by 9,172 visitors a day (around 600,000 in total).

The CCBB last topped the Art Newspaper survey in 2016 with another trio of shows, including one on Post-Impressionist masterpieces (9,700 visitors a day). The CCBB, which hosts free exhibitions at its four locations in Brazil, had nearly 5.6 million visitors in 2019—a 28% increase on 2018 and a 36% increase on 2017. Sadly numbers will not be the same in 2020.