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 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

View of the main facade from Madison Drive

The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) is a natural history museum administered by the Smithsonian Institution, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. It has free admission and is open 364 days a year. With 4.4 million visitors in 2023, it was the most-visited museum in the United States.

Opened in 1910, the museum on the National Mall was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities. The main building has an overall area of 1.5 million square feet (140,000 m²) with 325,000 square feet (30,200 m²) of exhibition and public space and houses over 1,000 employees.

The museum's collections contain over 146 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, the largest natural history collection in the world. It is also home to about 185 professional natural history scientists—the largest group of scientists dedicated to the study of natural and cultural history in the world. ( Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

Selected general article

Heritage science is the interdisciplinary domain of scientific study of cultural and natural heritage. Heritage science draws on diverse humanities, sciences and engineering disciplines. It focuses on enhancing the understanding, care and sustainable use of heritage so it can enrich people's lives, both today and in the future. Heritage science is an umbrella term encompassing all forms of scientific enquiry into human works and the combined works of nature and humans, of value to people.

The above definition was developed though a community consultation organised by ICCROM and the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science in 2019. ( Full article...)

Did you know...

... that in order to keep two paintings by Pablo Picasso in the Kunstmuseum Basel, the people of Basel voted in the 1967 Basel Picasso paintings purchase referendum to buy them?
... that the 1911 benefit game for Addie Joss was an all-star game that included nine members of the Baseball Hall of Fame?
... that New York City's Bartow–Pell Mansion became a museum after its operator was restricted from importing and exporting plants?
... that for the construction of the Mediterranean-style Jesús Soto Museum of Modern Art, architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva brought builders from Spain to Venezuela?
... that in 1999 two necklaces were repatriated to the Cook Islands National Museum from a museum in Angus, Scotland?
... that Kolkata's Currency Building has housed the Agra Bank, an office for the issue and exchange of currency, the Reserve Bank of India, and a public art museum?

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

Selected type of museum

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 curiosities 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...)