Portal:Museums

The Museums Portal

The Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile

A museum is an institution dedicated to displaying and preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects. Many museums have exhibitions of these objects on public display, and some have non-exhibited collections that are used by researchers and specialists. Museums hold a wide range of objects and often focus on a particular theme, such as the arts, science, natural history, or local history. Museums that host exhibitions and interactive demonstrations are often tourist attractions, and many draw large numbers of visitors from outside of 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

Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is located in the former Bankside Power Station, in the Bankside area of the London Borough of Southwark.

Tate Modern is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world. As with the UK's other national galleries and museums, there is no admission charge for access to the collection displays, which take up the majority of the gallery space, whereas tickets must be purchased for the major temporary exhibitions.

In 2025, it had 4,514,266 visitors, making it the fourth most popular attraction and the most popular art gallery in the United Kingdom.

The nearest railway and London Underground station is Blackfriars, which is 550 yards (0.5 km) from the gallery. (Full article...)

Selected interior image

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

Selected general article

A collection manager ensures the proper care and preservation of objects within cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, and archives. Collection managers, along with registrars, curators, and conservators, play an important role in collections care. Collection Managers and Registrars are two distinct collection roles that are often combined into one within small to mid-size cultural institutions. Collection Managers can be found in large museums and those with a history and natural history focus whose diverse collections require experienced assessment to properly sort, catalog, and store artifacts. A collection manager may oversee the registrar, archivist, curator, photographer, or other collection professionals, and may assume the responsibilities of these roles in their absence within an organization. (Full article...)

Did you know...

... that an Indonesian museum that receives c. 100,000 visitors a year was built in a graveyard parking lot?
... that Gracie Mansion became New York City's mayoral residence after serving as a public toilet and a museum?
... that Martin Robertson kept his job at the British Museum only because he did not clean the exhibits?
... that pages of Lewis Hancox's graphic novel were displayed in The Cartoon Museum of London?
... that museum administrator Herbert Smith hired a special train so that civil servants could watch a total solar eclipse in 1927?
... 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?

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

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...)