Explore these under-the-radar, small museums

Specialty museums show works of an artist, a region, or one part of the culture

Today's expression: Pop culture
Explore more: Lesson #691
July 11, 2024:

We've all heard of the largest museums. But the United States has many smaller museums, too, often focused on just one subject. From the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to the National World War II museum in New Orleans, learn about some of the nation's best smaller museums.

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Here are some great smaller museums that fly under the radar

Lesson summary

Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with stories about current events and trending topics.

Today on Plain English, you’ll learn about some of the great museums in the United States—not the big ones like the Met or the Air & Space Museum. We talked about those on Monday.

There are so many smaller, regional museums, museums about just one topic, or just one artist. And there are hundreds of them. So this is not a comprehensive list. But I have been to every museum in this episode, and I recommend them all. And even if you can’t go, I think you’ll enjoy learning about them.

The expression we’ll talk about later is “pop culture.” This is lesson 691, so you can find the full lesson at PlainEnglish.com/691.

America’s best small museums

On Monday, we started with art museums; let’s do the same today. Some museums are focused on just one artist. The Andy Warhol Museum is in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the artist’s hometown . Andy Warhol was a visual artist who lived in the mid-twentieth century . His style was pop art : he used images from pop culture as his inspiration .

One of his most famous pieces is a silkscreen painting of Campbell’s Soup cans. He did a series of paintings of Marilyn Monroe. Coca-Cola, dollar bills , photos of important events, celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley: these all gave him inspiration. The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh is the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single artist.

I like museums that depict what life was like in times gone by . And one of the best museums for that is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. It’s a single brick apartment building at 97 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It looks just like many other buildings on the block—and that’s the point.

The museum tells the story of immigrants who lived in that building and in a nearby building in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Life for new arrivals was tough . People lived in tenements , buildings full of small, cheap apartments to rent. And the Tenement Museum recreates rooms and apartments just how they would have looked all those years ago.

Another great museum in New York: the museum of the moving image . This is in Queens, one of the five boroughs of New York City. The moving image: this is television, this is film, and this is the early, early days of motion pictures .

The museum has a television from 1939, one of the earliest TV’s. The very earliest moving images were personal, portable devices . You looked into them and cranked a handle . The museum also has some modern innovations . It shows you a clip of how a modern sports broadcast is produced.

Speaking of sports, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is in New York State. The museum honors the best baseball players in history and tells the story of “America’s pastime throughout its long history. The Roberto Clemente Museum in Pittsburgh is a great baseball museum, too.

The National World War II Museum is in New Orleans , Louisiana. Why is there a war museum in New Orleans? The Higgins boats —the boats used by the Allies to land on the beaches of Normandy—the Higgins boats were invented in New Orleans. The museum opened in 2000 and it tells the story of World War II from an American perspective .

New Orleans is at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Let’s go up north to Minnesota, where the Mississippi River begins. One of my favorite small museums is there: the Mill City Museum. This one is an industrial museum . It shows how the upper Midwest region developed economically . The Midwest is farm country , and Minneapolis, because of its location on the river, was where a lot of the flour was milled for the bakeries that fed the nation .

And the really spectacular thing about this museum is that it’s built right into the ruins of a former flour mill . The mill exploded in 1878: a spark ignited the flour dust that was hanging in the air . Fourteen workers were killed. And the Mill City Museum is built into the ruins of this exploded factory. It’s a great museum in a stunning location . The Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

If you’re more musically inclined , check out the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. The museum documents the history of rock music and all the people who make it possible: the musicians , sure, but also the producers , engineers , and others. The glass diamond entrance was designed by I.M. Pei , the architect who also designed the diamond entrance to the Louvre. You learned about him in Lesson 164.

Jeff’s take

I’ll mention a few others quickly. As cities grew in the 1800s and 1900s, they established big art museums, in the mold of The Met and the Art Institute. The economy has changed, people have moved, cities rose and fell , but the museums are largely still there. Kansas City, Cleveland, Detroit—especially Detroit—and Milwaukee all have great art museums.

A couple more. Train buffs can visit the Transit Museum in New York City. You can see how they dug the subway tunnels . The Boston Public Library and New York Public Library have great galleries and exhibits . You can tour Thomas Edison’s lab in West Orange, New Jersey.

And one of the funniest ones I’ve been to: the SPAM museum in Austin, Minnesota. It’s a museum dedicated to the spiced ham that you find in a tin can in the grocery store. I have been there—it’s great.

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Expression: Pop culture