Portal:Museums

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The Museums Portal

The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile

A museum (/mjuːˈziːəm/ mew-ZEE-əm) 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. Compared to a library, a museum hosts a much wider range of objects and usually focus around a specific theme such as the arts, science, natural history, local history, and other topics. Public museums that host exhibitions and interactive demonstrations are often considered to be tourist attractions, and many museums attract large numbers of visitors from outside their host country, with the most visited museums in the world regularly 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

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The Musée d'Orsay (UK: /ˌmjuːzeɪ dɔːrˈseɪ/ MEW-zay dor-SAY, US: /mjuːˈzeɪ -/ mew-ZAY -⁠, French: [myze dɔʁsɛ]) (English: Orsay Museum) is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe.

In 2022 the museum had 3.2 million visitors, up from 1.4 million in 2021. It was the sixth-most-visited art museum in the world in 2022, and second-most-visited art museum in France, after the Louvre. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

Selected general article

*This Year Venuses Again!*, 1864. Honoré Daumier satirizes the *bourgeoisie* scandalized by the Paris Salon's Venuses.

An art exhibition is traditionally the space in which art objects (in the most general sense) meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is occasionally true, it is stated to be a "permanent exhibition". In American English, they may be called "exhibit", "exposition" (the French word) or "show". In UK English, they are always called "exhibitions" or "shows", and an individual item in the show is an "exhibit".

Such expositions may present pictures, drawings, video, sound, installation, performance, interactive art, new media art or sculptures by individual artists, groups of artists or collections of a specific form of art. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... 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 before writing The Space Museum, Glyn Jones had never seen Doctor Who?
... that the Springfield Science Museum is home to the oldest operating projection planetarium in the United States?
... that the Huanaki Cultural Centre & Museum was destroyed by a cyclone?
... that a vampire killing kit was donated to the Mercer Museum in the 1980s?
... that Ukrainian museum director Horpyna Vatchenko forced the Hermitage Museum to abide by its agreement and return the Kernosovskiy idol after a loan?

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

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...)

In the news

12 May 2024 –: Forty-nine Vatican Museums employees start an unprecedented labor dispute over unfair and poor working conditions against the Vatican's Pontifical Commission. (Reuters)
6 May 2024 –: The 2024 Met Gala takes place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with the theme "The Garden of Time", celebrating the Met's exhibit Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. (Vanity Fair)