The Best Museums in North America

Art museums

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago are the two highest art museums on this page. Most of the others are in cities fewer visitors travel to for art: Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, Philadelphia and Boston, which has two, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington are free.

Mexico

The Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City has a hall for each of the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mexico and stands first on the list. Museo Amparo is in the old town of Puebla, with a rooftop terrace over the church domes, and the Museo del Desierto in Saltillo is about the deserts of Coahuila.

War, flight and fossils

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans fills several connected buildings and takes a day or two. Two aviation museums are free: the National Museum of the US Air Force near Dayton, with four hangars, and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center beside Dulles Airport, which holds the space shuttle Discovery. The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn shows cars, trains and aircraft together with the Rosa Parks bus. The one Canadian entry is the Royal Tyrrell Museum in the Alberta badlands, with dinosaur skeletons found nearby.