Portal:Museums
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The Museums Portal
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 Palazzo Pitti (Italian: [paˈlattso ˈpitti]), in English sometimes called the Pitti Palace, is a vast, mainly Renaissance, palace in Florence, Italy. It is situated on the south side of the River Arno, a short distance from the Ponte Vecchio. The core of the present palazzo dates from 1458 and was originally the town residence of Luca Pitti, an ambitious Florentine banker.
The palace was bought by the Medici family in 1549 and became the chief residence of the ruling families of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. It grew as a great treasure house as later generations amassed paintings, plates, jewelry and luxurious possessions.
In the late 18th century, the palazzo was used as a power base by Napoleon and later served for a brief period as the principal royal palace of the newly united Italy. The palace and its contents were donated to the Italian people by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1919.
The palazzo is now the largest museum complex in Florence. The principal palazzo block, often in a building of this design known as the corps de logis, is 32,000 square metres. It is divided into several principal galleries or museums detailed below. (Full article...)
Selected interior image
- Image 2The South Hall of the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, Chantilly, Virginia, an aerospace museum, showing the Enola Gay bomber and other aeroplanes
- Image 3The Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
- Image 4Entrance hall of the Vienna Technical Museum, one of the largest technology museums in Europe
- Image 6Antique cuckoo clocks displayed at Cuckooland Museum, Tabley, an example of a specialised museum
- Image 7An early 18th-century German Schrank with a traditional display of corals, from the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin
- Image 11The Dinosaur Hall of the Naturkundemuseum, Berlin, showing the skeleton of Giraffatitan brancai, among the largest mounted skeletons in the world
- Image 12The Industrial Gallery, housed in the original part of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, designed by Yeoville Thomason and opened in 1885
- Image 15The Great Hall of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, has the world's largest stained-glass ceiling, designed by Leonard French.
- Image 16Panoramic view of the library of the Guimet Museum, Paris, an art museum specialising in Asian art
- Image 17Old Dutch display case in Branderszaal Lange Haven 97, Schiedam
- Image 18The queen's chamber of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, the former residence of Marie Antoinette
- Image 20Exhibit in Indonesia Museum, Jakarta, displaying the traditional costumes of Indonesian ethnic groups
- Image 21Display cases in Altena Castle
- Image 22Floating Heads by Sophie Cave (2006), installed in the East Court of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
Selected general article
Collection maintenance is an area of collections management that consists of the day-to-day hands on care of collections and cultural heritage. The primary goal of collections maintenance or preventive conservation is to prevent further decay of cultural heritage by ensuring proper storage and upkeep including performing regular housekeeping of the spaces and objects and monitoring and controlling storage and gallery environments. Collections maintenance is part of the risk management field of collections management. The professionals most involved with collections maintenance include collection managers, registrars, and archivists, depending on the size and scope of the institution. Collections maintenance takes place in two primary areas of the museum: storage areas and display areas.
Collection maintenance and its tasks all work as a means to continually observe the condition of collections and ensure they are properly maintained and cared for. Because museums and repositories are stewards of cultural property in the public trust, they have a "responsibility to provide reasonable care for the objects entrusted" to them. Museum's collections maintenance tasks can also involve assessing and implementing strategies to improve storage areas and containers while continuously monitoring environmental conditions that may affect objects. (Full article...)
Did you know...
- ... that squatters in Hamburg briefly occupied the former Erotic Art Museum?
- ... 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?
- ... 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 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 American professor Emerson Charles Denny co-published the Nelson–Denny Reading Test in 1930, which has parts held at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History?
- ... 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 1The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain, a modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997
- Image 2Now closed, the California Aerospace Museum, designed by Frank Gehry, formerly displayed a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
- Image 3Entrance to Auschwitz I, part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, a Holocaust museum on the site of the former Nazi concentration camps
- Image 4The British Museum, London
- Image 5Shanghai 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 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 11São 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 12The Museum Island, Berlin
- Image 13Museo de la Arquitectura Ponceña, an architecture museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico, that focuses on the Ponce Creole architectural style
- Image 14A 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 15Indonesia Museum, in Taman Mini Indonesia Indah, an ethnology museum exemplifying Balinese architecture
- Image 16Aerial 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 17The 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 20The National Art Center, Tokyo, designed by Kisho Kurokawa, is an "empty museum", lacking its own collection, which hosts temporary exhibitions from other organisations.
- Image 21The Peristylia hall in National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta, the largest museum in Indonesia and one of that country's oldest
- Image 23Paifang 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 24The Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, has a permanent collection of murals and hosts an architecture museum.
- Image 25The State Historical Museum, Moscow
- 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 28The Museo del Prado, Madrid, established in 1785
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...)
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