The Best Museums in the United States

Art outside New York

Ten of the eighteen American museums are art museums, and eight of them are outside New York: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and two in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Cleveland, the Nelson-Atkins and the National Gallery of Art charge no admission. The Detroit Institute of Arts has Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry murals on the walls of one court.

Military, aviation and industry

The National WWII Museum in New Orleans is the highest American entry. The National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton shows hundreds of aircraft in four hangars, among them Kennedy's Air Force One. The Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, holds the aircraft that are too large for the Smithsonian's building in Washington. The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn keeps cars, trains, farm machinery and the Rosa Parks bus under one roof.

Single subjects

The Legacy Museum in Montgomery follows Black history in the United States from the slave trade to mass incarceration. The Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix hands out headsets that play each instrument as the visitor walks up to it. The Barber museum near Birmingham, Alabama, shows motorcycles from 1884 on, on five floors above a race track. Two are natural history and science museums: the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.