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The Newark Museum of Art

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The Newark Museum is the largest museum in New Jersey, USA. It holds fine collections of American Art, decorative arts, and arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Ancient World. Its extensive collections of American art include works by Hiram Powers, Thomas Cole, John Singer Sargent, Frederick Church, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Joseph Stella and Frank Stella.

The museum was organized in 1909 by master Newark librarian John Cotton Dana. The kernel of the museum was a collection of Japanese prints, silks, and porcelains assembled by a Newark pharmacist.

Originally located on the fourth floor of the Newark Public Library, the museum moved into its own purpose-built structure in the 1920s after a gift by Louis Bamberger. Since then, the museum has expanded several times, to the south into the former YMCA, to the north into the 1885 Ballantine House, and to the west into an office building. Michael Graves was the architect for the a major renovation which tied these buildings together in 1989.

Much of the Newark Museum is dedicated to science. It includes a Mini-Zoo which is home to more than 100 live animals representing 43 exotic and domestic species. The Dreyfuss Planetarium was the first in New Jersey when it opened in 1953. Since then this 50-seat space theater has introduced more than 1.5 million people to the wonders of the universe.

The Victoria Hall of Science which highlights some of the Museum's 83,000 specimen Natural Science Collection. The collection, bequeathed to the Museum by Dr. William Disbrow in 1922, contained more than 74,000 examples of rocks, minerals, and pressed plants. The Museum's holdings have been augmented over the years, and today specimens from all over the world comprise the ornithology, entomology and shell collections; a reference herbarium is the repository of several rare New Jersey plants, among many others; and over 20,000 rocks, minerals and fossils.

The Newark Museum's Tibetan galleries are considered among the best in world. The collection was purchased from Christian missionaries in the early twentieth century. The Tibetan galleries have an in-situ Buddhist altar that the Dalai Lama has consecrated.


Light Rail Service

The Newark Light Rail line opened on July 17, 2006. The southbound line of this extension includes a station on Broad Street that will potentially bring patrons to the museum from all the rail lines now serving Newark Broad Street Station and Newark Penn Station.

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