As the Chinese New Year approaches, one community is joining the rush to celebrate — American museums.

Seen as a gateway to Chinese culture, the Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival (Feb 5 this year) is widely celebrated by renowned museums across the United States as a chance to attract broader audiences, both inside and beyond the Chinese community, and to invite visitors to learn about Chinese culture.

The celebratory events that feature artworks and traditions from across Asia, with a large number associated with China, attract traffic for the museums.

The Art Institute of Chicago, ranked fourth on TripAdvisor’s 2018 top US museums list, has hosted Lunar New Year celebrations for five years. The museum saw attendance increase 24 percent during the 2018 Chinese New Year celebration, comparing with the previous year.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the largest and to many the pre-eminent American museum has hosted a Lunar New Year festival for nine years and expects more than 5,000 visitors.

In 2018, 89 percent of all attendees indicated that they went to The Met specifically to attend the festival, according to Julie Marie Seibert, assistant educator for family programs at the museum.

Generally daylong or half-day events, the museums’ celebrations normally feature family-friendly, Chinese-themed performances and art-making workshops.

Lion dances, traditional Chinese music and dance, paper-cutting, red envelopes, scrolls and Chinese zodiacs — 2019 is the Year of the Pig — are some of the favorites.

“For each festival, we develop unexpected, multimodal activities with artists, performers, and arts organizations to connect visitors to a broader cultural community,” said Julie Marie Seibert, assistant educator for family programs at The Met.

“We hope that families from Philadelphia’s Asian communities make our Lunar New Year celebration a part of theirs,” said Elizabeth Baill, the manager of family programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has been hosting such celebrations for more than 20 years.