I’m a fiend for museums. Every time I travel for work (which is thankfully alone most of the time), I find museums to go to. When I travel for leisure, I pretty much always find some museum to go to in between whatever else I’m doing, too.
I am particularly fond of contemporary art, and technology museums, closely followed by natural history museums.
My favorite museum of all time is Mass MoCa in North Adams, MA, USA. I go at least twice a year, even though it’s a ~4 hour drive. I used to be a member at $250 a year, which also gave me ROAM reciprocal admission to tons of other museums, but money is tight these days and I had to give that up. There was a time when I was doing enough work travel that the money I saved via all the free admission to ROAM museums I got on the road was actually a net savings over the $250 membership!
Has anyone else been to Mass MoCa? We may have crossed paths!
What is your favorite museum? How often do you go? Are you a member?
I’ve been thinking about museums a bunch since I started planning my Art Basel Miami trip later this year… I’m trying to figure out how to bundle the Kennedy Space Center and Art Basel into one weeklong trip with minimal expense lol.
You must log in or # to comment.
I’m not sure if it counts as a “museum”, but the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh, PA is fantastic. I went during COVID and unfortunately wasn’t able to remove my mask to smell the flowers, but even then it was stunning.
The science museum of Minnesota in Minneapolis is also a great time. There were a ton of hands on exhibits that were super interesting. The tornado simulator was a lot of fun.
Tacoma Glass Museum is short but a stunner. I’ve been to this one and the glass gardens in Seattle and I think the Tacoma museum wins by a decent margin. Plus there’s live demonstrations where you can watch from any angle. Very cool.
Phipps absolutely counts! My brother used to live in Pittsburgh, so I know that place well. I haven’t been in several years since my brother moved back to our hometown… I should find an excuse to get back there.
I recently had a business trip to Rochester NY to visit a prospective integrator’s site, and then we were going to be driving down to Painted Post, NY to visit their second facility, which is directly next door to Corning, NY, home of the Corning Museum of Glass, which has always been somewhere I have wanted to go. Originally, it was just supposed to be me, which was perfect, as I could have my own time to go to the Corning museum, and also an art museum in Rochester. At the last second, my boss had his schedule open up, and he ended up coming… and he would rather sit at the hotel bar and consume literally 19 Miller Lights on a random Tuesday night… I don’t even drink, so that was a… “fun” afternoon. And I did broach the topic of at least stopping by the museum of glass, but he had a tight timeline and needed to be home asap the day we left… I’ll just need to head back out to Rochester/Corning on my own time!
Ditto on the Phipps Conservatory and the Tacoma Glass Museum, both are great. Tacoma has a number of good museums. The WA State History Museum, Tacoma Art Museum (they get great exhibits), and the Lemay Car Museum are all great as well.
Favorite museums would probably have to be the Smithsonian’s in DC, the Natural History and Air/space in particular. Of course there are a bazillion museums in DC though, and I haven’t seen MANY of them.
I haven’t been in years, but I really like the LaBrea Tar Pits. Those reciprocal memberships are nice. We’ve done the arboretum and art museum ones. When our kids were young we did the zoo. It gave us a free thing to do with them when we traveled and since it was free we didn’t feel like we had to stay the entire day .
I almost went to the Tar Pits last year on a work trip to Anaheim, but ended up driving out through Joshua Tree National Park. I had never really been to “the desert” before, and ended up having an amazing, almost spiritual experience. I really want to go back. Waiting for the flights to Vegas to go even lower to try and lure people in, then just rent a car and drive off into the sunset.
This may sound odd living in Chicago, with so many great museums it’s hard to pick a favorite… but I still have a soft spot for the Old Courthouse Museum in my hometown of Sioux Falls, SD. It cost only a voluntary donation, but it was always a cool, quiet place to retreat from the hustle of city life and interact with some history, some technology, some art, and some architecture. I hope it’s still there; I have so many fond memories of afternoons spent there either with my family or on my own.
There’s something to be said about a small museum. I’ve been to plenty of very small places, and have enjoyed them all. It is great to get away from the bustle of a super popular place. I talked about a steam-engine museum I found in my town in another reply here, it’s its own little magical place.
I have been to Chicago a couple times in the past, but have always been super busy. I did find time to make it to the Museum of Science and Industry, which was amazing (I went again the second time I went to Chicago lol)
I will be in Chicago AGAIN this November, and will have ~2 free days (A Friday and a Sunday). Do you have any good local recommendations? I have tentatively just chosen the other 2 big’ns I haven’t been to yet, the Field Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Field and MAIC are both great museums, but don’t sleep on the Museum of Contemporary Art. I haven’t been to them, but there’s also contemporary art museums that focus on Ukrainian art (in Ukrainian Village, natch) and Mexican art (in Pilsen, which makes sense if you know Chicago). If you’re going to the former, you’ll also be right by the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, set in the former Humboldt Park stables. If you’re going to the latter, get lunch at 5 Rabanitos and order the Torta Ahogada.
If you want to get a little weirder, try the Museum of Surgical Science — unless you’re squeamish. And visit the Harold Washington Library Center: not only is it beautiful in its own right, but the eighth floor hosts both a “Winter Garden” and a small museum with a rotating exhibit.
If you’re coming with anyone under the age of eleven, the Children’s Museum at Navy Pier is legitimately amazing. Field also has a Children’s Museum on the ground floor (below the first floor) that’s pretty fun. And finally, not a museum, but the Maggie Daley Park playgarden is amazing for kids.
Thanks for the recommendations! I hadn’t even seen the museum of contemporary art. It looks a bit smaller, might be better for my last day when I’ll be blitzed from the whole week of work stuff haha. I’ll be there all alone, my preferred way to travel…
I would so badly want to go to the museum of surgical science… but alas, I am indeed very very squeamish. I went to the Mutter museum in Philadelphia once and almost passed out (specifically at the exhibit showing the entire human vascular system removed from a body and displayed in a hollow human-shaped shell… My skin is crawling just thinking about it)… I find everything so fascinating, though, I wish I could handle looking at it!
I’ll add 5 Rabanitos to my list, that Torta does look delicious. I’m staying in the Loop, so I could just hop a train over there. I’m absolutely terrible at choosing places to eat when it’s just me, so having some guidance is always extremely welcome.
I’ve wanted to go to The Poison Garden in Northumberland. But it never worked out.
Haven’t been to that many, as I kinda live in the middle of nowhere. But when I had a day free in Houston I made sure to visit Johnson Space Center, and as a bit of a space geek, it was pretty awesome. I got to see, amongst other things, a Saturn V up close, as well as the control center from the Apollo programme.
I’m also a space geek. I’ve never been to Houston, but I had a weeklong work trip to Dallas last year. I was VERY tempted to take my unlimited-mileage rental down to Houston to go to the space center, but I just couldn’t fit it into all the other work stuff I had to do.
That trip was actually one of the very few that I didn’t end up going to a museum. There just wasn’t anything within a reasonable distance that I found interesting.
I have been to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida once, back in college, while I was at a competition for the NASA robotics competition I was part of… And I’ve been itching to go back ever since, on my own terms, without other responsibilities and a competition to attend to. Art Basel is in Miami December, which is a great time to fly into Orlando, it’s super cheap, trying to suck in all the tourists… Then I was thinking of driving down to Miami, and flying back from Miami, but apparently there’s rail service between Orlando/Miami (or very cheap flights), I just need to figure out if it’s reliable enough to risk my itinerary on it haha.
And there are plenty of interesting museums in the middle of nowhere. Right near my work there’s a tiny little museum called the New England Steam and Wireless museum, which hosts a couple dozen historic stationary steam engines (the largest one has a ~20 foot flywheel or something crazy like that), and they almost all work, and they have several running most weekends. It’s really cool because you can get right up close to the working engines (and could definitely be killed if you aren’t careful), so it’s definitely an up-close-and-personal experience. I’d have never known about it without some serendipitous chance, I just drove down a back road one time to look for a place to set up my hammock by the river and read, and I saw the sign. I guess it’s not truly “the middle of nowhere”, but it’s a poorly advertised diamond in the rough.
I’ve been to Houston a few times, and the work usually alternates between Houston and Galveston, so I driving to JSC was no problem.
Another work trip took me to Mobile, Alabama, and it annoys me to no end that I only learned after the trip that I could’ve visited USS Alabama there. Especially since I spend half a week killing time before any work could commence.
I had a work trip to… I think it was the Montgomery area in Alabama.
I ended up going to Harbor Freight and buying a chisel and a hammer, and driving/walking out into the wilderness along a river to a spot I found on some old forum threads to find some fossils… I ended up finding a couple, which was very cool! Just some primitive plant stem fossils, but still interesting enough that I’ve still got them on display in my little rock cabinet. (I did a similar thing in North Carolina at the Crabtree Emerald mine to try and find an emerald, and I sweat my ass off in the sun for 5 hours and found nothing lol)
The guys I was working with also swore up and down that since it was really my first time “in the south” that I’d never had real Barbecue before, and they proceeded to take me to the grossest, sketchiest, gristly-est, worst Barbecue I have ever consumed in my entire life lol.
Not space related, but in Dallas the 5th floor museum (Kennedy/book depository) and Dallas Museum of Art are good.
The Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford would be my pick. Very much a traditional one, with little in the way of interactive stuff or anything like that and you definitely need to go in mindful of the whole colonial baggage that goes with collections of this type, but it is absolutely packed with the most glorious array of anthropological… well, everything really.
My favourite is the Munch museum in Oslo. It is a fairly new (at least in a new building), very modern museum with Munch’s fantastic art. The most famous version of The Scream is however at the National Museum but that is just a short walk away. The National Museum also has other great collections of course. Fantastic medieval art.
For most of my life I was not at all interested in art museums but now I love visiting them.
I want to work up the courage to start traveling overseas more… Unfortunately the current world opinion of the USA kinda has me hesitant. I went to Amsterdam this past March, my first time leaving the country, and really REALLY wanted to go to the Rijksmuseum, but my (now ex) girlfriend didn’t think we would have enough time, so we didn’t end up going… I guess I’ll just have to go back on my own.
Norway is another bucket list destination for me, I’ll add the Munch to my list!
It’s sort of the same for me, only the last ~5 years or so have I really gotten into museums and that kind of experience. Now, I can’t get enough, and can spend all day in even the most tiny niche museum.
Museum of Science, in Boston.
The T-Rex (if they still have it), the musical stairs, the natural history exhibit on the lower floor and the butterfly garden had me enthralled growing up.
They’ve also got the tech area/giant Van de Graaf generator (I think I spelled that correctly) that you might really enjoy. Their seasonal/rotation exhibits are also really cool.
And baby chicks! I miss that place so much lol still highly recommend though if you haven’t already been there!
Haven’t been to a museum since i was a kid, but the Cincinnati Union Terminal Museum was pretty memorable to me. Giant train station turned museum.
The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You pretty much already know if you’re going to like it based on if you like his art or not. Small and focused comparatively, but has some whimsy as well with a room full of reflective balloons floating around.
The Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. You get headphones attached to a player that picks up what exhibit you’re in front of and plays the audio that goes with it, usually 3 or 4 short samples of relevant music that have video accompaniment. There’s both regional exhibits (grouped by continent) and genre ones (jazz, blues, a little electronica). Apparently most cultures have made bag pipes an one point or another.
I wonder if the “Piss portraits” are still there. Last time I went was like 8 years ago, so it’s probably rotated out. I love weird stuff, so I definitely enjoyed the Warhol museum.
And that musical instrument museum sounds fun! I’ll add it to my museum list if I ever find myself in Phoenix.
They were up until at least February. Found a nifty article about how they changed due to a failure in climate control at some point https://www.warhol.org/conservation/oxidation-paintings/
Gardner Museum, Boston.
Eclectic, immersive, and historic. Cherish every visit.
Despite living a hop, skip, and a jump away from Boston, I’ve never been to the Gardner museum, even though I hear about it all the time on GBH radio. I’m not really as big of a fan of classical art, but one of these days I WILL run out of other things to do, and I will eventually make it to the Gardner museum haha.
The tech and science museum in San Jose 😃
Second choice: the Challenger Space and Aeronautics Museum in, uh… Waterford? I cant remember the town. It’s super small but they have one of those F-16 fighter cockpit sims.
I do love a museum. Usually each holiday has to have a museum and an aquarium. Fav 2 so far, science museum in London for its big steam engine and USS Hornet in NY.
Mine’s the American Museum of Natural History, NYC. They have the best diorama of an early Haida village (an aboriginal people of the third immigration to America over the land bridge) that is better than anything even nearby.
Oh. And a bajillion other things. When I lived in the area, I’d try to get any visitor to go with me as it was an excuse to skyve off and check out dinosaurs and stuff.
