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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

The Centre Pompidou (French pronunciation: [sɑ̃tʁ pɔ̃pidu]), more fully the Centre national d'art et de culture Georges-Pompidou ( lit. 'National Georges Pompidou Centre of Art and Culture'), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil, and the Marais. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of Richard Rogers, Su Rogers, Renzo Piano, along with Gianfranco Franchini.

It houses the Bibliothèque publique d'information (Public Information Library), a vast public library; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, which is the largest museum for modern art in Europe; and IRCAM, a centre for music and acoustic research. Because of its location, the centre is known locally as Beaubourg (IPA: [bobuʁ]). It is named after Georges Pompidou, the President of France from 1969 to 1974 who commissioned the building, and was officially opened on 31 January 1977 by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

The centre had 3.1 million visitors in 2022, a large increase from 2021 but still below 2019 levels, due to closings caused by the COVID pandemic. It has had over 180 million visitors since 1977 and more than 5,209,678 visitors in 2013, including 3,746,899 for the museum.

The sculpture Horizontal by Alexander Calder, a free-standing mobile that is 7.6 m (25 ft) tall, was placed in front of the Centre Pompidou in 2012. ( Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

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 Lemmon Petrified Wood Park & Museum contains 3,200 tons of petrified wood?
... that a pair of sealskin-covered high heels by Inuk designer Nicole Camphaug are held in the Bata Shoe Museum of Toronto?
... that the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum in Samoa was founded by two American Mormon missionaries?
... that in 1999 two necklaces were repatriated to the Cook Islands National Museum from a museum in Angus, Scotland?
... that a "bat ensnared by a plant" was discovered in the garden of the Palestine Museum of Natural History?
... that the James Norman Hall Museum is where the The Bounty Trilogy was written?

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

Selected type of museum

A design museum is a museum with a focus on product, industrial, graphic, fashion and architectural design. Many design museums were founded as museums for applied arts or decorative arts and started only in the late 20th century to collect design.

The first museum of this kind was the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In Germany the first museum of decorative arts was the Deutsches-Gewerbe-Museum zu Berlin (now Kunstgewerbemuseum), founded in 1868 in Berlin. ( Full article...)