12 cities · 30 museums
Best Museums in United States
Independent visitor guides with admission, hours, and collection highlights.
Quick answer
World Museum Guide covers 30 museums in United States across 12cities — including American Museum of Natural History, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum — with admission prices, opening hours, and highlights for each. 16 of them offer always-free standard admission.
Planning your visit
How many museums are in United States?
World Museum Guide covers 30 museums in United States — 16 with free standard admission.
What are the best museums in United States?
American Museum of Natural History, Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Dallas Museum of Art.
Are museums in United States free?
16 museums offer always-free standard admission. Special exhibitions may require separate tickets.
New York City
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) on Central Park West is one of the world's preeminent scientific and cultural institutions, founded in 1869 and now encompassing 25 interconnected buildings across four city blocks. Its collections exceed 34 million specimens and cultural artifacts — among the largest holdings of any natural history museum on Earth.
Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 million people annually.
New York City
Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is the second-largest art museum in New York City and one of the oldest and largest in the United States, housed in a Beaux-Arts building designed by McKim, Mead & White that opened in 1897. Its 560,000 square feet make it physically larger than the Manhattan Met, yet it remains Brooklyn's neighborhood museum — rooted in one of America's most diverse boroughs.
Bentonville
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Crystal Bridges was founded by Alice Walton (of the Walmart family) and opened in 2011 in Bentonville, Arkansas. The building was designed by Moshe Safdie and built directly over two spring-fed ponds in the Ozark forest — its name refers to the crystal-clear springs and the glass bridges that connect its gallery pavilions. The design creates an immersive relationship between art, architecture, and the surrounding woodland trails.
Dallas
Dallas Museum of Art
One of America's largest art museums — 25,000 works spanning 5,000 years in the Dallas Arts District, with free general admission and strong collections of American, African, and contemporary art.
San Francisco
de Young Museum
San Francisco's flagship fine arts museum in Golden Gate Park, with American art from the 17th century to the present, Oceanic and African collections, and a copper-clad tower with panoramic city views.
Denver
Denver Art Museum
Founded in 1893, the Denver Art Museum is one of the largest art museums between Chicago and the West Coast. Its collection of more than 70,000 works spans American art, Native American and Indigenous art, western American art, European art, architecture and design, and Asian art.
Chicago
Field Museum
One of the world's largest natural history museums, home to SUE the T. rex — the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever found — plus ancient Egypt, gems, and anthropology collections spanning 4.6 billion years.
Boston
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) spent thirty years assembling one of the finest private art collections in America, then built a Venetian Gothic palace in Boston to house it exactly as she wanted it to be seen. The museum opened in 1903 and has changed almost nothing since Gardner's death — her will stipulated that no object could be moved or sold, on pain of selling the entire collection to Harvard and dispersing it.
Los Angeles
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is the largest art museum in the western United States, holding more than 150,000 works spanning art history from antiquity to the present. Its campus sprawls along Wilshire Boulevard's Miracle Mile — a cluster of buildings from different eras connected by outdoor sculpture gardens and Chris Burden's Urban Light installation at the main entrance.
Houston
Museum of Fine Arts Houston
Founded in 1900, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) is the largest art museum in the southern United States, with a collection of more than 70,000 works spanning 6,000 years of art history. Its campus encompasses two main buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a sculpture garden by Isamu Noguchi, and the Rienzi house museum.
Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The MFA opened in Copley Square in 1876 and moved to its current Beaux-Arts building on Huntington Avenue in 1909. Major additions by I. M. Pei and Foster + Partners have expanded the campus dramatically.
New York City
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It 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.
Washington D.C.
National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art, and its attached Sculpture Garden, is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the American people by a joint resolution of Congress.
Washington D.C.
National Museum of African American History and Culture
The Smithsonian's newest museum on the National Mall — a landmark institution documenting African American life, history, and culture from slavery through the civil rights movement to the present.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art was founded in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition. Its current building atop Fairmount opened in 1928 and is one of the largest art museums in the United States.
San Francisco
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Founded in 1935, SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast dedicated to modern art. Its 2016 expansion — designed by Snøhetta — nearly tripled its size to 170,000 square feet of gallery space, making it one of the largest modern art museums in the United States.
Seattle
Seattle Art Museum
The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) is the Pacific Northwest's leading visual arts institution, occupying a Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown building on First Avenue in downtown Seattle since 1991. The original 1933 Art Deco building by Carl Gould was expanded and wrapped in Venturi's granite facade, creating a museum that bridges historic and postmodern architecture.
Washington D.C.
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's largest and most inclusive collections of art, from the colonial period to the present, made in the United States.
Washington D.C.
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
The National Air and Space Museum consistently ranks as the most visited museum in the United States, with over 7 million visitors annually before the pandemic. Established in 1946 and opened on the National Mall in 1976, it holds the world's largest collection of historic aircraft and spacecraft.
Washington D.C.
Smithsonian National Museum of American History
Opened in 1964, the National Museum of American History holds some of the most iconic objects in the United States — from the flag that inspired the national anthem to pop culture artefacts, military history, and Julia Child's kitchen. It is a museum of things rather than fine art, and that makes it one of the most immediate and engaging museums in the country.
Washington D.C.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Opened in 1910 on the National Mall, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History is one of the most visited museums in the world, attracting over 4 million visitors a year. Its collection of 145 million specimens spans geology, mineralogy, biology, anthropology, and paleontology.
New York City
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Founded in 1939 as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the Guggenheim moved into Frank Lloyd Wright's revolutionary spiral building on its Fifth Avenue site in 1959.
Los Angeles
The Broad
A contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, housing the Eli and Edythe Broad collection — Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room, Basquiat, Koons, and post-war American art.
New York City
The Frick Collection
Henry Clay Frick built his Beaux-Arts mansion in 1914 to house his collection. It opened as a public museum in 1935 with the residence largely intact.
Los Angeles
The J. Paul Getty Museum
The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa. The primary location is the Getty Center in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, which features pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts.
New York City
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially 'the Met', is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments.
New York City
The Morgan Library & Museum
Built between 1902 and 1906 by McKim, Mead & White as J. P. Morgan's private library, the Morgan opened to the public in 1924. Renzo Piano's 2006 expansion added new galleries and a glass atrium.
Washington D.C.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Opened in 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America's national institution for the documentation, study, and interpretation of Holocaust history. It sits steps from the National Mall and draws over 1.5 million visitors a year — among the most visited memorial museums in the world.
New York City
Whitney Museum of American Art
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the museum in 1930 with her own collection of works by then-overlooked American artists. The museum moved into Renzo Piano's stepped building beside the High Line in 2015.