Portal:Museums

The Museums Portal

The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile

A museum is an institution dedicated to displaying and/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 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 attract large numbers of visitors from outside 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 & 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 attacks of 2001, which killed 2,977 people, and the 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

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

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 the divers who found the c. 9th-century Tully Lough Cross in 1986 were convicted for trying to sell it to American museums?
• ... that museum director Alena Aladava rebuilt the Belarusian national art collection in the aftermath of the Second World War?
• ... that Hasanpaşa Gasworks escaped its demolition through the resistance of local residents, became a festival venue for a time and was finally transformed into a museum after redevelopment?
• ... that Saint Rose Catholic Church was moved from the ghost town of Fleetwood, Oregon, to the Fort Rock Valley Historical Homestead Museum in 1988?
• ... that the New Zealand stonefly Stenoperla prasina was the five millionth specimen digitised by the Natural History Museum in London?
• ... that a travelling museum exhibition in Japan displays "life-size" renditions of Pokémon skeletons alongside the fossils of actual prehistoric animals?

Get involved

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

Selected exterior image

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  Paifang 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
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  National Museum, Szczecin, Poland
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  São 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
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  The Cambodian National Museum, Phnom Penh, showing its vernacular architectural style
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  Small 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
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  The British Museum, London
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  The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
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  The National Art Center, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is an "empty museum", lacking its own collection, which hosts temporary exhibitions from other organisations.
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  The 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
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  Shanghai Museum, a museum of ancient Chinese art, was rebuilt in 1996 to a design inspired by the ding, an ancient bronze cooking vessel.
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  The Palazzo Vecchio Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the most-visited museum in Italy
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  Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
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  The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
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  Exhibitions Pavilion and Rotunda of the Getty Center, Los Angeles, an art museum
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  A 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
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  The Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world's largest science and technology museums
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  Aerial 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
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  Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
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  The Dalí Theatre and Museum, commemorating Salvador Dalí in his home town of Figueres, Catalonia, has a geodesic dome and is decorated with giant eggs.
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  The Museum Island, Berlin
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  The Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, has an extensive collection of Armenian manuscripts.
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  The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
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  The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest
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  The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, a modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997
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  Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
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  The State Historical Museum, Moscow
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  Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
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  The 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

Selected type of museum

"Musei Wormiani Historia", the frontispiece from the Museum Wormianum depicting Ole Worm's cabinet of curiosities.

Cabinets of curiosities (German: Kunstkammer and Kunstkabinett), also known as wonder-rooms (German: Wunderkammer), were encyclopedic collections of objects whose categorical boundaries were, in Renaissance Europe, yet to be defined. Although more rudimentary collections had preceded them, the classic cabinets of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century. The term cabinet originally described a room rather than a piece of furniture. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities. In addition to the most famous and best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums.

Cabinets of curiosities served not only as collections to reflect the particular interests of their curators but also as social devices to establish and uphold rank in society. There are said to be two main types of cabinets. As R. J. W. Evans notes, there could be "the princely cabinet, serving a largely representational function, and dominated by aesthetic concerns and a marked predilection for the exotic," or the less grandiose, "the more modest collection of the humanist scholar or virtuoso, which served more practical and scientific purposes." Evans goes on to explain that "no clear distinction existed between the two categories: all collecting was marked by curiosity, shading into credulity, and by some sort of universal underlying design". (Full article...)

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