I’m now back from my whirlwind tour of the US, sorting through hundreds of photos taken in around 30 museums in Raleigh, Washington DC, Philadelphia and New York. I visited an average of two museums a day so now have considerable first-hand experience in museum fatigue!
Over the coming weeks I’ll post about some of the general observations I made over the course of these visits, as well as some reviews of selected sites and exhibitions. In the meantime, the following is a list of the museums and heritage sites I visited in Philadelphia and New York (the Washington ones are here) – drop me a line if you have any questions about any of these sites in particular:
Philadelphia
New York
- Tenement Museum
- MoMA: Museum of Modern Art
- New York Public Library (quick visit)
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Guggenheim Museum
- American Museum of Natural History
- New York Historical Society
- New York Hall of Science
- Brooklyn Children’s Museum
Which was the most fun?
Hi Theresa,
Funny you ask this – I was just musing last night how difficult I find it to answer questions about superlatives!
Assessing the merits of each museum will be strongly influenced by my prior expectations and the context of my visit. I’m also not sure if “fun” is the right word for many of the places I visited.
That said, I think my favourites were those that were either place-specific or that offered pleasant surprises. Yes the large art museums have their grandeur, but having visited three large, encyclopedic art museums in three cities I started to get a slight sense of deja vu about the displays after a while – the collections were outstanding but at the same time there is something bordering on the ‘generic’ about them – I could have been anywhere in the world. (Am I being heretical?)
By contrast, sites like the Eastern State Penitentiary had strong place connections – there is also something to be said for slightly smaller sites that you feel you can get a handle on before mental exhaustion sets in.
This is not to say that a sense of place is essential – the Newseum in Washington had some excellent exhibits and impactful objects that have really stuck in my mind. It wasn’t particularly Washington-specific, and I did have some question marks over its relatively uncritical take on the journalistic profession (Paparazzi and grubby tabloid tactics were conspicuous by their absence), but nonetheless there was something distinctive about it.
Also, given my research interests I spent a fair bit of time watching other visitors – and some of my highlights are little snippets of interactions I saw between people and exhibits, especially ‘non-traditional’ audiences (a trio of skater boys seriously discussing a surrealist painting in the Hirshhorn museum springs to mind here).