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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...)

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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 queen's chamber of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, the former residence of Marie Antoinette
Image 2The Dinosaur Hall of the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin, showing the skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, among the largest mounted skeletons in the world
Image 3Old Dutch display case in Branderszaal Lange Haven 97, Schiedam
Image 4The Galerie des Glaces of the Palace of Versailles
Image 5An early 18th-century German Schrank with a traditional display of corals, from the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin
Image 6Panoramic view of the library of the Guimet Museum, Paris, an art museum specialising in Asian art
Image 7The South Hall of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, Virginia, an aerospace museum, showing the Enola Gay bomber and other aeroplanes
Image 8Triangular prism-shaped display cases in the Red Dot Design Museum, Essen
Image 9Entrance hall of the Vienna Technical Museum, one of the largest technology museums in Europe
Image 10The Egyptian Museum, Cairo, showing some of its collection of ancient Egyptian antiquities
Image 11Exhibit in Indonesia Museum, Jakarta, displaying the traditional costumes of Indonesian ethnic groups
Image 12Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale
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 Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
Image 15Antique cuckoo clocks displayed at Cuckooland Museum, Tabley, an example of a specialised museum
Image 16The Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, has the world's largest stained-glass ceiling, designed by Leonard French.
Image 17Display cases in Altena Castle
Image 18Storage gallery of the Larco Museum, Lima, Peru, a museum of pre-Columbian art
Image 19Iron bed in torture room at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh
Image 20Floating Heads by Sophie Cave (2006), installed in the East Court of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Image 21A museum in Verkhniye Mandrogi, Leningrad Oblast, specialising in vodka
Image 22Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, an archaeology and anthropology 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 the Museum of Classic Sci-Fi is located in the cellar of a house in Allendale, Northumberland?
... that during its run of screenings at the Whitney Museum, the 1979 film Asparagus was shown rear-projected onto a set that appears in the film itself?
... that Kobe and Vanessa Bryant were founding donors of the National Museum of African American History and Culture?
... that Sheikh Mujibur Rahman proclaimed the independence of Bangladesh from his residence in Dhaka before his arrest by the Pakistan Army?
... that two railroad boxcars were needed to ship William W. Jefferis's vast mineral collection to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History?
... that Saint Rose Catholic Church was moved from the ghost town of Fleetwood, Oregon, to the Fort Rock Valley Historical Homestead Museum in 1988?

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 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 2The State Historical Museum, Moscow
Image 3The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Image 4Aerial 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 5The Deutsches Museum, Munich, one of the world's largest science and technology museums
Image 6Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
Image 7National Museum, Szczecin, Poland
Image 8The Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia, has an extensive collection of Armenian manuscripts.
Image 9São 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 10The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
Image 11The Museum Island, Berlin
Image 12The Cambodian National Museum, Phnom Penh, showing its vernacular architectural style
Image 13The 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 14Small 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 15The British Museum, London
Image 16The Palazzo Vecchio Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the most-visited museum in Italy
Image 17Exhibitions Pavilion and Rotunda of the Getty Center, Los Angeles, an art museum
Image 18The 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 19Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
Image 20The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest
Image 21Shanghai Museum, a museum of ancient Chinese art, was rebuilt in 1996 to a design inspired by the ding, an ancient bronze cooking vessel.
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 23Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
Image 24The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
Image 25Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
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 green museum is a museum that incorporates concepts of sustainability into its operations, programming, and facility. Many green museums use their collections to produce exhibitions, events, classes, and other programming to educate the public about the natural environment. Many, but not all, green museums reside in a building featuring sustainable architecture and technology. Green museums interpret their own sustainable practices and green design to present a model of behavior.

Green museums strive to help people become more conscious of the limitations of their world, and how their actions affect their world. The goal is to create positive change by encouraging people to make sustainable choices in their daily lives. They use their position as community-centered institutions to create a culture of sustainability. (Full article...)