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Friday Question of the Day – What’s Your Favorite Museum in DC?
Since we’ve got a three-day weekend I thought this could be a useful question. It actually came to my mind when I saw the sign above for an Octagon House Museum and I was like, what the hell is that? Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to share our favorite museums in DC. For those who really love museums I’ll ask for three categories – favorite free museum, favorite museum with a fee and favorite lesser known museum?
Incidentally, I’m sorry I didn’t realize this earlier but the Corcoran Gallery of Art was offering free Summer Saturdays. For those staying in town this Sat. is the last free one!
Category: Friday Question of the Day, museum
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Postal Museum. Planes, trains and stagecoaches. Plus Owney the mail dog. For real. Though deceased. He’s stuffed and ready to go. No crowds, plus Cap City is across the hall.
+1
I like the Hirshhorn. In terms of less-visited ones, the Smithsonian African Art Museum is great.
National Gallery of Art. Come for the cool old paintings.
Stay for the shockingly good (but over-priced) cafeteria.
Sorry to be a jerk and ignore the question a bit, but the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore is the best damn museum in the area. It breaks down the artist’s need to create art in a way that no other place does. It is very much worth a day trip.
+1
My favorite too.
Completely agree. I recently stayed in a B&B in New Orleans that looked like it had been decorated by the curator of AVAM. It was amazing.
Hirshhorn. Specifically the Black Box theater in the basement level. I could live in that freaking thing.
National Building Museum. Incredibly fascinating inside; best building in DC outside.
Best outside, worst inside
I think that distinction goes to the American Indian Museum.
+1.
I love that museum.
Anacostia Museum of Black History
http://anacostia.si.edu/
Favorite Museum with a Fee: Spy museum. Worth every penny.
Favorite Free Museum: Spy museum. If you’re half the spy you should be, you can sneak in for free.
Favorite Leser Know Museum: Spy museum. The REAL spy museum that only spies know about.
The Miss Ann!
I love the American Art Museum which has this: http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/spring04/throne.cfm. The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly is something everyone in the city should see. Plus you can visit the portrait gallery next door.
The NGA is amazing but I’m going to go with the Portrait Gallery/ American Art museum.
It’s just so damn convenient. You can just pop in fresh out the metro and spend a few minutes or a whole day.
It’s also open later.
Toss up between National Building Museum and the American Art Museum. I’m so in love with the courtyard there. It’s just one of the best places in the city.
+1 on the courtyard too. They have jazz there sometimes also.
The Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens, former home of Margorie Merriweather Post, is twenty-five hidden acres off of Tilden Street on Linnean Avenue behind Howard U’s School of Law.
Holocaust museum period. Granted they have the most powerful subject matter to work with but name me a museum that has a better flow through the exhibits.
+1
I took a class at American called “The Holocaust,” taught by Richard Breitman. We had a class assignment to visit and then we all discussed it in class one day. Some of the symbolism was totally lost on me the first time, but every brick of that place was thought out. Its amazing.
free- nbm and saam
fee – hillwood
lesser know- textile museum
Freer and Sackler galleries! I love Asian art.
+1 – their film and music programming is also consistently great.
Fee: Koshland Museum
Free: National Museum of Health and Medicine. The little fetus babies with gigantisism/dwarfism/etc in jars is amazing and gross. But mostly amazing.
Is that the same as The Army Medical Museum at Walter Reed? By far my favorite place for babies in jars.
http://www.princeofpetworth.com/2008/10/weird-stuff-in-jars-nichole-visits-the-national-museum-of-health-and-medicine/
National Portrait Gallery has some really cool stuff.
Free – Sackler & Textile Museum
Fee – Newseum (I could spend days there reading the old papers and scanning the Pulitzer archives)
Lesser Known – I really like the changing exhibits at the S. Dillon Ripley Center, and I love the underground space
I thought the Newseum was like 20 bucks? It does get my vote for best museum overall though.
Sorry. fee and free are so damn similar.
Dupont Italian Kitchen!
National Portrait Gallery/American Art Museum, mainly for this:
http://www.fredweaver.com/throne/thronebody.html
In a poll of favorite DC Museums that I read in an airline magazine, #5 was the “Presidential Pet Museum,” located in Williamsburg.
The Building Museum!
Favorite Free Museum: National Gallery of Art/Sculpture Garden (does that count?)
Favorite Museum with a fee: Spy Museum.
Museums with a fee that I haven’t been to yet, but I am anxious to see: Newseum and National Crime and Punishment Museum (going to check out this one for FREE on museum day, September 25: http://microsite.smithsonianmag.com/museumday/index.html)
The Crime & Punishment Museum is by far my favorite place. When my husband took me there for my birthday, we ended up spending 4…yes, FOUR HOURS there and we didn’t get to see everything. The only reason we left was because we had theater tickets for an afternoon show and we would have missed the play had we stayed.
Freer & Sackler Galleries for their exhibitions and FREE Asian-themed films on Sundays)
National Gallery of Art!
National Portrait Gallery!
The NASM might be a bit cliche, but if Udvar-Hazy were closer to DC and accessible by rail, it’d be the most popular tourist attraction in the city, hands down. It’s not just the amount of what they have, it’s the quality of it all. It’s shocking. Anyone even remotely interested in aircraft or space flight should take a morning and go out there.
They’ve got everything from the earliest aircraft to one-off Nazi planes to an SR-71 Blackbird to a JSF to a V2 rocket. The shuttle Enterprise is a bit hokey, since it was only designed to be dropped off a 747. But soon enough they’ll have a real shuttle out there.
+1 i like the art, but air and space still gets me excited like when i was a kid. it’s just super cool. and the nga gets my second vote.
I’m not sure I can pick a favorite– but here are a few I like that I don’t think anyone has mentioned:
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Phillips Collection
National Geographic Museum
I’d like to see an informal survey of what our favorite small galleries are. There are so many I haven’t been to yet and I’d love some recommendations.
The Newseum! It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it if you have time to spend a few hours there. Kids get in free till Labor Day.
National Gallery East for the Calder mobile. National Museum of Natural History for its architecture & butterfly pavilion. Full disclosure: used to work at the former, currently working at the latter!
Not technically in DC, but the new Air and Space museum by Dulles is amazing. There’s a space shutttle(!), an SR71, a Concorde, the Enola Gay, a control tower, and a bunch of other cool nerdy stuff.
What about the Zoo?!? Does that count? You learn and its free, unlike most zoos. I have some great memories of trips through there. My personal recommendation: get a giant slushy at the 7-11 on your way in.
Building Museum
National Capital Trolley Museum (Maryland)
i though NCTM was closed.
nope, i just went! it did move to a new address pretty recently though.
For a short visit, I like the Renwick. Especially during lunch hour.
I’ve always dreamed of working close enough to a museum that I could spend a lunch hour there.
My favorite (NBM) has already been mentioned, so I’ll plug the National Archives – their Civil War exhibition is about to close, so now’s the time to go see it!
Definitely the Archives!
National Gallery of Art: Not only does it feed you lots of art and have some really interesting exhibitions pass through, but some of the film screenings there are good as well (I saw “Herb & Dorothy” there which I highly recommend)
The Phillips Collection or the National Gallery, it’s toss up, but I also like the glass house Botanical Garden and it is open on Christmas Day! Great place to get out of the house when it’s freezing and everything else is closed.
Phillips. No doubt.
A couple of my favorites are already here, but the Folger Shakespeare Library shouldn’t be discounted–it’s a nice old-school museum. Also, the Navy Museum is a hidden gem.
A lesser known but still kid friendly museum is the University of College Park Aviation Museum. Lots of Wright brothers stuff there since it was grounds for early tests and also flight simulators.
I love the Portrait Gallery. Corcoran is good too, even though “Michelangelo” is spelled wrong on the building’s facade.