Portal:Museums

The Museums Portal

The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile

A museum is an institution dedicated to displaying and preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects. Many museums have exhibitions of these objects on public display, and some have non-exhibited collections that are used by researchers and specialists. Museums hold a wide range of objects and often focus on a particular theme, such as the arts, science, natural history, or local history. Museums that host exhibitions and interactive demonstrations are often tourist attractions, and many draw large numbers of visitors from outside of their host country, with the most visited museums in the world attracting millions of visitors annually.

Since the establishment of the earliest known museum in ancient times, museums have been associated with academia and the preservation of rare items. Museums originated as private collections of interesting items, and not until much later did the emphasis on educating the public take root. (Full article...)

Selected museum

The National September 11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan

The National September 11 Memorial & Museum (also known as the 9/11 Memorial & Museum) is a memorial and museum that are part of the World Trade Center complex, in New York City, created for remembering the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which killed 2,977 people, as well as the February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing which killed six. The memorial is located at the World Trade Center site, the former location of the Twin Towers that were destroyed during the September 11 attacks. It is operated by a non-profit institution whose mission is to raise funds to program and operate the memorial and museum at the World Trade Center site.

A memorial was planned in the immediate aftermath of the attacks and destruction of the World Trade Center for the victims and those involved in rescue and recovery operations. The winner of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition was Israeli-American architect Michael Arad of Handel Architects, a New York City and San Francisco–based firm. Arad worked with landscape-architecture firm Peter Walker and Partners on the design, creating a forest of swamp white oak trees with two square reflecting pools in the center marking where the Twin Towers stood.

In August 2006, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began heavy construction on the memorial and museum. The design is consistent with the original master plan by Daniel Libeskind, which called for the memorial to be 30 feet (9.1 m) below street level—originally 70 feet (21 m)—in a plaza, and was the only finalist to disregard Libeskind's requirement that the buildings overhang the footprints of the Twin Towers. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation was renamed the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in 2007.

A dedication ceremony commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks was held at the memorial on September 11, 2011, and it opened to the public the following day. The museum was dedicated on May 15, 2014, with remarks from Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama. Six days later, the museum opened to the public. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

Image 1Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale
Image 2The Dinosaur Hall of the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin, showing the skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, among the largest mounted skeletons in the world
Image 3Antique cuckoo clocks displayed at Cuckooland Museum, Tabley, an example of a specialised museum
Image 4An early 18th-century German Schrank with a traditional display of corals, from the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin
Image 5Entrance hall of the Vienna Technical Museum, one of the largest technology museums in Europe
Image 6Panoramic view of the library of the Guimet Museum, Paris, an art museum specialising in Asian art
Image 7Triangular prism-shaped display cases in the Red Dot Design Museum, Essen
Image 8Old Dutch display case in Branderszaal Lange Haven 97, Schiedam
Image 9Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, an archaeology and anthropology museum
Image 10The South Hall of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, Virginia, an aerospace museum, showing the Enola Gay bomber and other aeroplanes
Image 11The queen's chamber of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, the former residence of Marie Antoinette
Image 12The Egyptian Museum, Cairo, showing some of its collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities
Image 13Iron bed in torture room at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh
Image 14The Industrial Gallery, housed in the original part of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, designed by Yeoville Thomason and opened in 1885
Image 15Storage gallery of the Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, a museum of pre-Columbian art
Image 16Floating Heads by Sophie Cave (2006), installed in the East Court of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Image 17A museum in Verkhniye Mandrogi, Leningrad Oblast, specialising in vodka
Image 18The Galerie des Glaces of the Palace of Versailles
Image 19Display cases in Altena Castle
Image 20Exhibit in Indonesia Museum, Jakarta, displaying the traditional costumes of Indonesian ethnic groups
Image 21The Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, has the world's largest stained-glass ceiling, designed by Leonard French.
Image 22The Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

Selected general article

Museum architecture has been of increasing importance over the centuries, especially more recently.

A challenge for museum architecture is the differing purposes of the building. The museum collection must be preserved, but it also needs to be made accessible to the public. Climate control may be very important for the objects in the collection. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that a museum of tomato processing in Greece uses holographic mechanical fans to display images of workers?
... that exhibits at Peale's Philadelphia Museum included the first nearly complete skeleton of a mastodon?
... that the Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell operated as a residence, a house of correction, a factory, and finally a museum?
... that the Springfield Science Museum is home to the oldest operating projection planetarium in the United States?
... that one of the buildings that house the Safe House Museum was where Martin Luther King Jr. hid from the Ku Klux Klan on 21 March 1968, just weeks before he was assassinated?
... that Martin Robertson kept his job at the British Museum only because he did not clean the exhibits?

Get involved

For editor resources and to collaborate with other editors on improving Wikipedia's Museums-related articles, see WikiProject Museums.

Selected exterior image

Image 1The National Art Center, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is an "empty museum", lacking its own collection, which hosts temporary exhibitions from other organisations.
Image 2The Palazzo Vecchio Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the most-visited museum in Italy
Image 3The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
Image 4Small cloister of the charterhouse of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, built on the site of the Baths of Diocletian; part of the National Roman Museum of Rome
Image 5Shanghai Museum, a museum of ancient Chinese art, was rebuilt in 1996 to a design inspired by the ding, an ancient bronze cooking vessel.
Image 6Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
Image 7Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
Image 8The Museum Island, Berlin
Image 9Exhibitions Pavilion and Rotunda of the Getty Center, Los Angeles, an art museum
Image 10The State Historical Museum, Moscow
Image 11The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest
Image 12Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
Image 13The Dalí Theatre and Museum, commemorating Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, Catalonia, has a geodesic dome and is decorated with giant eggs.
Image 14The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image 15The Lower Castle of Ambras Castle, Innsbruck, one of the earliest buildings constructed specifically for use as a museum; it remains a museum displaying its original collections
Image 16The Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, has an extensive collection of Armenian manuscripts.
Image 17The Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world's largest science and technology museums
Image 18São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo, a 1968 concrete-and-glass structure designed by Lina Bo Bardi, considered a landmark of the city and a major example of modern Brazilian architecture
Image 19Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
Image 20The British Museum, London
Image 21The Louvre, Paris, showing the glass-and-metal Pyramid, designed by I. M. Pei to act as the museum's main entrance, and completed in 1989
Image 22The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
Image 23Aerial view of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel's Holocaust memorial; the museum, designed by Moshe Safdie, opened in 2005 and tells the personal stories of ninety Holocaust victims and survivors
Image 24The Cambodian National Museum, Phnom Penh, showing its vernacular architectural style
Image 25National Museum, Szczecin, Poland
Image 26A maritime museum located in the village of Bolungarvík, Vestfirðir, Iceland, showing a 19th-century fishing base with a typical boat of the period and associated industrial buildings: an example of a very small museum
Image 27Paifang or arched entrance of the Northern Branch of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, whose collection covers 8,000 years of the history of Chinese art
Image 28The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, a modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997

Selected type of museum

A national history museum or national historical museum is a history museum dedicated to presenting artifacts and exhibits reflecting the history of a particular nation, usually its home country. The earliest public museums, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Louvre Museum in Paris, were focused on natural history and art, respectively, and not necessarily on subjects related to the history of any nation. Following Napoleon's use of the Louvre as a center of national pride during his reign, other countries began to use museums not just to store artifacts of aesthetic or educational value, but to portray the country itself in a positive light.

Historically, some national history museums have been used purely as propaganda tools through which governments attempt to convey an official history. For example, "the Nazi regime employed the museum as a deliberate tool of propaganda and 'public education'". It has further been argued that "the very idea of an officially sponsored national history museum is simply outdated" in light of the trend towards pluralistic interpretation of artifacts. On the other hand, it has been argued that: "To create a national history museum that discards unitary national narratives as well as causal trajectories (the teleology of the nation)—in effect to subvert the form—is probably impossible". One concern of national history museums, therefore, is how to fairly and neutrally depict negative periods in a nation's own history. (Full article...)