10 Museums Every Creative Should Visit In The USA
Museums are treasures of the community. For the creative, museums can build bridges between learning and inspiring. Here are 10 museums every creative should visit in the USA.
According to the US government, there are more than 35,000 museums in America. So how do you decide which one to go to? For the creative, museums can help with several different parts of the creative process. Need some inspiration? Learn from famous creative minds throughout history. Need a break from a creative problem? Visit some interactive exhibits for rest and play to inspire aha moments. Whatever your creative goals are, museums are a great source of inspiration.
Located in Chicago’s Grant Park, the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. It features a permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art, a leading research conservatory, and one of the largest art history and architecture libraries in the country. The Art Institute is also associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a leading art school, making it one of the few remaining unified arts institutions in the United States.
Notable Artwork and Features
- Sunday on La Grande Jatte (Georges Seurat)
- The Old Guitarist (Pablo Picasso)
- Nighthawks (Edward Hopper)
- American Gothic (Grant Wood)
- Andō Gallery (Tadao Andō)
- Sky above Clouds IV (Georgia O’Keeffe)
- Bedroom in Arles (Vincent van Gogh)
- Water Lilies (Claude Monet)
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 2-3 hours
- Address: 111 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603
- Hours: 10:30 AM – 8 PM
- Tickets: $19 – 25
- Website: artic.edu
Located in San Francisco, the Exploratorium is a participatory museum of science, technology, and arts. Self-identified as a center for informal learning, it has become the prototype for participatory museums around the world. Since its founding, over 1,000 participatory exhibits have been created, with 600 on the floor at any given time.
Notable Artwork and Features
- Tornado machine
- Giant curved mirror
- Walk on a fog bridge
- Sun painting
- Bicycle-Wheel Gyro
- Mood Lighting
- Lumen-Illusion
- Colored Shadows
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: More than 3 hours
- Address: Pier 15, The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94100
- Hours: 10 AM – 5 PM
- Tickets: $24 – 30
- Website: exploratorium.edu
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, also known as ‘the Met‘, is the largest art museum in the United States and is the fourth most visited art museum in the world. Its permanent collection features over two million works of art from classical antiquity, Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art.
Notable Artwork and Features
- The Death of Socrates (Jaques Louis David)
- Interior of Saint Peter’s, Rome (Giovanni Paolo Panini)
- Washington Crossing the Delaware (Emanuel Leutze)
- Sketches (Leonardo da Vinci)
- Venus Italica (Antonio Canova)
- Gertrude Stein (Pablo Picasso)
- Sunflowers (Vincent van Gogh)
- The Crucifixion; the Last Judgment (Jan van Eyck)
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 2-3 hours
- Address: 1000 5th Ave, New York, NY 10028
- Hours: 10 AM – 5 PM
- Tickets: $12 – 25
- Website: Metmuseum.org
The Broad is a relatively new contemporary art museum in Downtown Los Angeles named after philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. The museum features over 2,000 works of art, with the most prominent being postwar art and contemporary art from around the world.
Notable Artwork and Features
- Infinity Mirrored Room (Yayoi Kusama)
- Two Marilyns (Andy Warhol)
- The Visitors (Ragnar Kjartansson)
- I…I’m Sorry! (Roy Lichtenstein)
- Jean-Michel Basquiat Collection
- Scorched Earth (Mark Bradford)
- Rabbit and Baloon Dog (Jeff Koons)
- In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (Takashi Murakami)
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 1-2 hours
- Address: 221 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012
- Hours: 11 AM – 8 PM
- Tickets: Free
- Website: Thebroad.org
Meow Wolf is an American art and entertainment company that creates large-scale immersive art installations and produces arts, music festivals, music videos, and streaming entertainment. Its flagship attraction, House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but will be opening new locations in Las Vegas and coming to Denver in 2021, with more planned in the future. The art installations provide unique interactive and immersive art experiences created by their own artist collective of over 200 full-time employees and hundreds of other collaborators. They create art across a variety of media, including architecture, sculpture, painting, photography, video production, cross-reality (AR/VR/MR), music, audio engineering, narrative writing, costuming, performance, and more.
Notable Artwork and Features
- House of Eternal Return (New Mexico)
- Kaleidoscape (Denver)
- Omega Mart (Las Vegas)
- Nucleotide (Thomas Robertello Gallery, Chicago)
- Nimbus (Luminaria Festival, Hemisfair Park San Antonio, TX)
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 2-3 hours
- Address:
- Summer Hours: Check times on site
- Tickets: Adults $18 Child (12 and under) $12 Seniors $16
- Website: Meowwolf.com
Located in Rochester, New York, The Strong National Museum of Play is a highly interactive, collection-based museum devoted to the history and exploration of play. Its collection features hundreds of thousands of items and hosts a long list of educational activities that serve a diverse audience of adults, families, children, students, teachers, scholars, and collectors. It’s also the home to the National Toy Hall of Fame, the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, and the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play and produces the American Journal of Play.
Notable Artwork and Features
- American Comic Book Heroes: The Battle of Good vs. Evil
- Build, Drive, Go
- Toys Halls of Fame
- World Video Game Hall of Fame
- DanceLab
- Academy of Interactive Arts and Science
- America at Play
- Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 2-3 hours
- Address: One Manhattan Square Dr, Rochester, NY 14607
- Hours: 10AM – 3 PM
- Tickets: $15
- Website: Museumofplay.org
Located in his hometown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, The Andy Warhol Museum is the largest museum in North America dedicated to a single artist and holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives from the pop art icon Andy Warhol. The museum features 17 galleries, including 900 paintings, close to 2,000 works on paper, over 1,000 published unique prints, 77 sculptures, 4,000 photographs, and over 4,350 Warhol films and videotaped works.
Notable Artwork and Features
- Campbell’s Soup Cans and Coke
- Celebrity portraits of stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley
- Sleep
- Fifteen Minutes Eternal
- Andy Warhol’s Life
- Death and Disaster
- Mao
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 2-3 hours
- Address: 117 Sandusky St, Pittsburgh, PA 15212
- Hours: 10 AM – 5 PM
- Tickets: $10–20
- Website: Warhol.org
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is located in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. This art museum was first established in 1939 and has become the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art. It also features special exhibitions throughout the year. The landmark building is a work of art itself, designed by the 20th-century architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
Notable Artwork and Features
- Composition for “Jazz” (Albert Gleizes)
- Woman with yellow hair (Pablo Picasso)
- Composition 8(Wassily Kandinsky)
- Landscape with Snow(Vincent van Gogh)
- Alchemy (Jackson Pollock)
- Morning in the Village after Snowstorm (Kazimir Malevich)
- Puppy (Jeff Koons)
- Yellow Cow (Franz Marc)
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 3 Hours
- Address: 1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128
- Hours: 11 AM – 6 PM
- Tickets: Adults $25 / Students and Seniors 65+ $18 / Visitors with disabilities $18 / Children under 12 Free
- Website: Guggenheim.org
The National Videogame Museum is located in Frisco, Texas, celebrates the history of video games and the video game industry. The interactive museum includes classic a classic video game arcade, a giant living room to play practically all video game consoles, games on historic computers, and many more exhibits and artifacts from the creative history of video games.
Learn more about the science of videos game and how they can boost creativity here.
Notable Artwork and Features
- Timeline of Consoles
- Arcade
- Memorabilia
- Educational Programs
- Giant pong game
- Artifacts
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 1-2 Hours
- Address: 8004 Dallas Pkwy, Frisco, TX 75034
- Hours: Wed – Fri 10AM–5PM / Saturday 10AM–6PM / Sunday 12–5PM / Mon & Tues Closed
- Tickets: $12 (general admission) / $10 (ages 10 and under) / $10 (Senior Citizens, Educators and active Military) / Ages 3 and under are free.
- Website: Nvmusa.org
Once part of the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum that continues to grow and has become the largest in the western United States. It holds more than 150,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present. In addition to art exhibits, the museum also features film and concert series.
Notable Artwork and Features
- Urban Light (Chris Burden)
- Weeping Woman with Handkerchief (Pablo Picasso)
- Flower Day (Dĩa de Flores) (Diego Rivera)
- Bouquet of Flowers on a Ledge (Ambrosius Bosschaert)
- Shiva as Lord of the Dance (c. 950–1000) (Tamil Nadu)
- Nympheas (Claude Monet)
- Cranes (Maruyama Ōkyo)
- The Raising of Lazarus (Rembrandt)
Visitor Info
- Suggested Duration: 1-2 Hours
- Address: 5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036
- Hours: 11 AM – 5 PM
- Tickets: $0- $25 (Depending on the day) Lower prices for teens, seniors, and students
- Website: lacma.org
Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
