Portal:Museums

The Museums Portal

The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile

A museum is an institution dedicated to displaying or preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects. Many museums have exhibitions of these objects on public display, and some have private collections that are used by researchers and specialists. Museums host a much wider range of objects than a library, and they usually focus on a specific theme, such as the arts, science, natural history or local history. Public 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 Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the third-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5.36 million visitors in 2023, it is the most-visited museum in the United States and the fifth-most visited art museum in the world.

In 2000, its permanent collection had over two million works; it currently lists a total of 1.5 million works. The collection is divided into 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m²) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870, the museum was established by a group of Americans, including philanthropists, artists, and businessmen, with the goal of creating a national institution that would inspire and educate the public. The museum's permanent collection consists of works of art ranging from the ancient Near East and ancient Egypt, through classical antiquity to the contemporary world. It includes paintings, sculptures, and graphic works from many European Old Masters, as well as an extensive collection of American, modern, and contemporary art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanian, Byzantine, and Islamic art. The museum is home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes, and decorative arts and textiles, as well as antique weapons and armor from around the world. Several notable interiors, ranging from 1st-century Rome through modern American design, are installed in its galleries. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

Selected general article

Museum education is a specialized field devoted to developing and strengthening the education role of informal education spaces and institutions such as museums.

In a critical report called Excellence and Equity published in 1992 by the American Association of Museums, the educational role of museums was identified as the core to museums' service to the public. As museum education has developed as a field of study and interest in its own right, efforts have been made to record its history and to establish a research agenda to strengthen its position as a discipline in the wider work of museums. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that while the objects on the Farnese Artemis had initially been identified as female breasts, the museum housing the statue now describes them as bull scrotums?
... that New York City's Bartow–Pell Mansion became a museum after its operator was restricted from importing and exporting plants?
... that the prison scenes in the film Plurality were shot in an archaeology museum?
... that after one of Piet Mondrian's paintings (shown) was discovered to have been hanging upside down for decades, the museum left it as is?
... that Peckham Rock, a fake cave painting surreptitiously installed in the British Museum by Banksy, is actually concrete from Hackney?
... that the Paul Delvaux Museum exhibits not only Paul Delvaux's paintings, but also a collection of model trains?

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 1National Museum, Szczecin, Poland
Image 2A 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 3The Cambodian National Museum, Phnom Penh, showing its vernacular architectural style
Image 4São 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 5The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
Image 6Exhibitions Pavilion and Rotunda of the Getty Center, Los Angeles, an art museum
Image 7Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
Image 8The Museum Island, Berlin
Image 9The 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 10Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
Image 11The Palazzo Vecchio Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the most-visited museum in Italy
Image 12The Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, has an extensive collection of Armenian manuscripts.
Image 13The British Museum, London
Image 14The Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world's largest science and technology museums
Image 15Small 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 16Aerial 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 17The National Art Center, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is an "empty museum", lacking its own collection, which hosts temporary exhibitions from other organisations.
Image 18The 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 19Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
Image 20The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
Image 21The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image 22Shanghai Museum, a museum of ancient Chinese art, was rebuilt in 1996 to a design inspired by the ding, an ancient bronze cooking vessel.
Image 23The 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 24The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest
Image 25The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, a modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997
Image 26Paifang 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 27Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
Image 28The State Historical Museum, Moscow

Selected type of museum

An agricultural museum is a museum dedicated to preserving agricultural history and heritage. It aims to educate the public on the subject of agricultural history, their legacy and impact on society. To accomplish this, it specializes in the display and interpretation of artifacts related to agriculture, often of a specific time period or in a specific region. They may also display memorabilia related to farmers or businesspeople who impacted society via agriculture (for example, size of the land cultivated as compared to other farmers) or agricultural advances (for example, technology implementation).

An agricultural museum is said to be diachronic if it presents the entire narrative associated with subject of agriculture within its walls, or to be synchronic if it limits its displays to a single experience. (Full article...)