1. Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
Best time to visit: April-May, Sept-Oct
Cost: $
- Museum founded in 1879, and one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world
- Its collection includes iconic works such as Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, and Grant Wood's American Gothic
- Its permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art is augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly
Featured in The Best of Illinois
#28 in Best Museums in the World
#42 in Best Attractions in the USA
2. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Best time to visit: April-June, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Largest art museum in the Americas
- It is ranked eighth in the list of most-visited art museums in the world, and is the second-most visited art museum in the United States
- Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments
3. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- National art museum, established in 1937, that features a collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts, and traces the development of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present
- The collection includes the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas
Featured in The Best of Washington D.C.
#19 in Best Museums in the World
#54 in Best Attractions in the USA
4. Getty Center, California
Best time to visit: Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Campus of the Getty Museum and other programs of the Getty Trust
- The center opened to the public in 1997
- It is well known for its architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles
- The center sits atop a hill connected to a visitors' parking garage at the bottom of the hill by a three-car, cable-pulled hovertrain people mover
Featured in The Best of California
#24 in Best Museums in the World
#65 in Best Attractions in the USA
5. Museum of Modern Art, New York
Best time to visit: April-June, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, that plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world
- MoMA's collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated and artist's books, film, and electronic media
Featured in The Best of New York
#14 in Best Museums in the World
#45 in Best Attractions in the USA
6. USS Midway Museum, California
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Historical naval aircraft carrier museum located in downtown San Diego, at Navy Pier
- The ship houses an extensive collection of aircraft, many of which were built in Southern California
Featured in The Best of California
7. National Air and Space Museum, Washington D.C.
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Museum dedicated to human flight and space exploration
- Established in 1946, it is the fifth-most-visited museum in the world, and the second-most-visited museum in the United States
- The museum is a center for research into the history and science of aviation and spaceflight, as well as planetary science and terrestrial geology and geophysics
- Its collection includes the Apollo 11 Command Module Columbia, the Bell X-1 which broke the sound barrier, and the Wright brothers' Wright Flyer airplane
Featured in The Best of Washington D.C.
#71 in Best Attractions in the USA
8. Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
Best time to visit: April-May, Sept-Oct
Cost: $
- Art museum in Cleveland, internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian art
- The museum houses a diverse permanent collection of more than 61,000 works of art from around the world
- The Cleveland Museum of Art's Modern European Painting and Sculpture collection holds pieces dating from 1800 to 1960, and contains about 537 pieces
- The collection contains Impressionism and Post-impressionism works, avant-garde art styles, and German Expressionism
Featured in The Best of Ohio
9. Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts
Best time to visit: June-Oct
Cost: $
- Art museum in Boston, and the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area
- It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas
Featured in The Best of Massachusetts
10. American Museum of Natural History, New York
Best time to visit: April-June, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Museum complex that comprises 26 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library
- The museum collections contain over 34 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time
Featured in The Best of New York
#27 in Best Museums in the World
#83 in Best Attractions in the USA
11. National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New York
Best time to visit: April-June, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Memorial and museum in New York City commemorating the September 11 attacks of 2001, which killed 2,977 people, and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six
- The memorial is located at the World Trade Center site, the former location of the Twin Towers that were destroyed during the September 11 attacks
Featured in The Best of New York
12. Field Museum of Natural History, Illinois
Best time to visit: April-May, Sept-Oct
Cost: $
- Natural history museum in Chicago, and one of the largest such museums in the world
- The permanent exhibitions include fossils, current cultures from around the world, and interactive programming demonstrating today's urgent conservation needs
- The museum and its collections originated from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the artifacts displayed at the fair
Featured in The Best of Illinois
13. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania
Best time to visit: March-May
Cost: $
- Art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia
- The main museum building was completed in 1928, and the museum administers collections containing over 240,000 objects including major holdings of European, American and Asian origin
- The various classes of artwork include sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, armor, and decorative arts
Featured in The Best of Pennsylvania
14. Chihuly Garden and Glass, Washington
Best time to visit: Sept-Oct
Cost: $
- Exhibit in the Seattle Center showcasing the studio glass of Dale Chihuly
- Opened in May 2012, the project features three primary components: the Garden, the Glasshouse, and the Interior Exhibits
- The 100-foot-long installation inside of the Glasshouse is one of Chihuly's largest suspended sculptures
Featured in The Best of Washington
15. Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan
Best time to visit: May-Sept
Cost: $
- One of the largest and most significant art collections in the United States
- With over 100 galleries, the DIA collection is an encyclopedic collection which spans the globe from ancient Egyptian and European works to contemporary art
Featured in The Best of Michigan
16. National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C.
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Smithsonian Institution museum opened in its permanent home in 2016 with a ceremony led by President Barack Obama
- Early efforts to establish a federally owned museum featuring African-American history and culture can be traced to 1915 and the National Memorial Association
- After many years of little success, a legislative push began in 1988 that led to authorization of the museum in 2003, and the museum was completed in 2016
- The NMAAHC is the world's largest museum dedicated to African-American history and culture
- It ranked as the fourth most-visited Smithsonian museum in its first full year of operation
Featured in The Best of Washington D.C.
#23 in Best Museums in the World
17. California Academy of Sciences, California
Best time to visit: Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world
- Houses over 46 million specimens
- The Academy began in 1853
Featured in The Best of California
18. The Henry Ford, Michigan
Best time to visit: May-Sept
Cost: $
- History museum complex in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn
- The museum collection contains the presidential limousine of John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln's chair from Ford's Theatre, Thomas Edison's laboratory, the Wright Brothers' bicycle shop, the Rosa Parks bus, and many other historical exhibits
- It is the largest indoor–outdoor museum complex in the United States
Featured in The Best of Michigan
#18 in Best Landmarks in the USA
#91 in Best Attractions in the USA
19. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C.
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- The United States' official memorial to the Holocaust, which provides for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history
- The memorial is dedicated to helping leaders and citizens of the world confront hatred, prevent genocide, promote human dignity, and strengthen democracy
- Since its dedication in 1993, the museum collection has grown to more than 12,750 artifacts, 49 million pages of archival documents, 85,000 historical photographs, a list of over 200,000 registered survivors and their families, 1,000 hours of archival footage, 93,000 library items, and 9,000 oral history testimonies
Featured in The Best of Washington D.C.
20. National Museum of American History, Washington D.C.
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- The National Museum of American History collects, preserves, and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific, and military history
- Among the items on display is the original Star-Spangled Banner which inspired the Francis Scott Key poem
Featured in The Best of Washington D.C.
21. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Largest art museum 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 features film and concert series
Featured in The Best of California
22. Whitney Museum, New York
Best time to visit: April-June, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Art museum in Manhattan, in New York City, founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), a wealthy and prominent American socialite, sculptor, and art patron after whom it is named
- The Whitney focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American art
- Its permanent collection, spanning the late-19th century to the present, comprises more than 25,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, films, videos, and artifacts of new media by more than 3,500 artists
- It places particular emphasis on exhibiting the work of living artists as well as maintaining an extensive permanent collection of important pieces from the first half of the last century
Featured in The Best of New York
23. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Art museum of post-World War II art in Fort Worth, with a collection of international modern and contemporary art
- Founded in 1892, The Modern is located in the city's cultural district, opened to the public in 2002
- The museum holds a permanent collection with more than 3,000 works of art
Featured in The Best of Texas
24. Asian Art Museum, California
Best time to visit: Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Museum in San Francisco, that specializes in Asian art
- It was founded by Olympian Avery Brundage in the 1960s and has more than 18,000 works of art in its permanent collection, some as much as 6,000 years old
Featured in The Best of California
25. National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C.
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- The National Museum of Natural History is the second most visited natural history museum in the world after the Natural History Museum in London
- Opened in 1910, the museum was one of the first Smithsonian buildings constructed exclusively to hold the national collections and research facilities
- The museum's collections contain over 146 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, the largest natural history collection in the world
Featured in The Best of Washington D.C.
#15 in Best Museums in the World
#99 in Best Attractions in the USA
26. Musical Instrument Museum, Arizona
Best time to visit: Jan-April, Nov-Dec
Cost: $
- Opened in 2010, it is the largest museum of its type in the world
- The collection of over 15,000 musical instruments and associated objects includes examples from nearly 200 countries and territories, representing every inhabited continent
- Some larger countries such as the United States, Mexico, India, China, and Brazil have multiple displays with subsections for different types of ethnic, folk, and tribal music
Featured in The Best of Arizona
27. Brooklyn Museum, New York
Best time to visit: April-June, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- New York City's second largest art museum, it contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects
- Significant areas of the collection include antiquities, specifically their collection of Egyptian antiquities spanning over 3,000 years
- European, African, Oceanic, and Japanese art make for notable antiquities collections
- American art is heavily represented, starting at the Colonial period
- Artists represented in the collection include Norman Rockwell, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Max Weber
Featured in The Best of New York
28. Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, New Jersey
Best time to visit: Jan-Dec
Cost: $
- Ellis Island is a federally owned island in New York Harbor, situated within the U.S. states of New Jersey and New York, that was the busiest immigrant inspection and processing station in the United States
- From 1892 to 1954, nearly 12 million immigrants arriving at the Port of New York and New Jersey were processed there under federal law
- Today, it is part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument and is accessible to the public only by ferry
Featured in The Best of New Jersey
29. National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.
Best time to visit: March-May, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Historic art museum known for its permanent collection, in the Hall of Presidents, which contains portraits of nearly all American presidents
- The centerpiece of the Hall of Presidents is the famous Lansdowne portrait of George Washington
- Presidential portraits from 1962 to 1987 were usually obtained through purchase or donation
Featured in The Best of Washington D.C.
30. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California
Best time to visit: Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco
- The museum was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art
- The museum's current collection includes over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts
- The museum is one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art
Featured in The Best of California
31. Madame Tussauds New York, New York
Best time to visit: Jan-May, Sept-Oct
Cost: $
- Tourist attraction and wax museum located in the Times Square neighborhood of Midtown Manhattan in New York City, founded by the wax sculptor, Marie Tussaud
- Notable wax figures include famous actors, musicians, leaders, and pop culture icons
- Opened on November 15, 2000
Featured in The Best of New York
32. Exploratorium, California
Best time to visit: Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Museum of science, technology, and arts in San Francisco
- The participatory nature of its exhibits and its self-identification as a center for informal learning has led to it being cited as the prototype for participatory museums around the world
Featured in The Best of California
33. Museum of Pop Culture, Washington
Best time to visit: Sept-Oct
Cost: $
- Nonprofit museum in Seattle, dedicated to contemporary popular culture
- MoPOP has organized dozens of exhibits, 17 of which have toured across the U.S. and internationally
- MoPOP, in collaboration with the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), presents the Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival which takes place every winter
Featured in The Best of Washington
34. Salvador Dali Museum, Florida
Best time to visit: March-May
Cost: $
- Art museum in St. Petersburg, dedicated to the works of Salvador Dalí
- The museum's collection includes 96 oil paintings, over 100 watercolors and drawings, 1,300 graphics, photographs, sculptures, and objets d'art, plus an extensive archival library
- The museum is home to more masterpieces of Dalí than any other museum in the world
Featured in The Best of Florida
35. Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Missouri
Best time to visit: April-May, Sept-Oct
Cost: $
- Art museum in Kansas City, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of Asian art, especially that of Imperial China
Featured in The Best of Missouri
36. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Best time to visit: April-June, Sept-Nov
Cost: $
- Art museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, it is the permanent home of a continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, early Modern, and contemporary art
- The museum was established by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting
- The museum's building, a landmark work of 20th-century architecture designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, drew controversy for the unusual shape of its display spaces and took 15 years to design and build; it was completed in 1959
Featured in The Best of New York