Nearly 20 years ago, former Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder announced that he wanted to create a museum that would tell the story of slavery in the United States. He had the vision, the clout, the charm to make it seem attainable, and he had already made history: the grandson of slaves, he was the nation’s first elected African American governor . Read full article > >

Original post:
Two decades later, donors wondering what happened to plans for slavery museum

A Caithness nuclear power plant’s dome, the SS Great Britain and Belgrave Hall Museum are in the running for a jelly replica.

Original post:
Nuclear power plant in jelly bid

An ambitious plan is in the works to transform the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art into a more efficient and pleasing space.

Read more from the original source:
OLIN Designs Metropolitan Museum a New Fifth Avenue Plaza

The Judah L. Magnes Museum has reopened as the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, and is now part of the library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Visit link:
Exhibition Review: Magnes Judaica Museum Joins Berkeley Library – Review

The Judah L. Magnes Museum has reopened as the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, and is now part of the library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Follow this link:
Exhibition Review: Magnes Judaica Museum Joins Berkeley Library – Review

The fantasy find for historian Lonnie G. Bunch III includes a tattered pair of pantaloons made of that old “Negro cloth” and a coarse linen shirt that all but disintegrated on the back of its enslaved owner. Maybe a thrashed pair of brogans, too, worn around the plantation until the soles fell off. Read full article > >

Continued here:
In search of slave clothes: A museum director’s hunt for a painful symbol

As “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011” at the Museum of the City of New York demonstrates, an 1811 map turned an island into a city that works and walks.

Read this article:
Critic’s Notebook: Manhattan Street Grid at Museum of City of New York

The last New Year’s Day in human history is here. You may not believe so, but millions do. They’re convinced that ancient Maya priests calculated Dec. 21, 2012, as the end of the world as we know it. These claims and warnings, prognostications and reassurances are on bookstore shelves, on Web sites, in museum exhibits and in tourist promotions . The global doomsday industry even has a name — 2012ology. Read full article > >

View original post here:
Is 2012 the end of the world as we know it?

“The Renaissance Portrait From Donatello to Bellini” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shows how subjects flaunted their connections.

Continued here:
Art Review: ‘Renaissance Portrait From Donatello to Bellini’ – Review

The New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights is a museum of specimens, a natural history museum of the city’s public transportation.

Read more:
Museum Review: New York Transit Museum

‘In my notes . . . .” Gary Oldman is waxing professorial, drawing his words out in a donnish drawl. The actor is seated behind an ornate desk in an ersatz “secret” room at the Spy Museum, a borderline-cheesy replica of a spy’s office in a fictional near-Eastern country. Oldman — who plays the British spy George Smiley in the new movie “ Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ” — slips right into character, peering over chic translucent glasses and smiling broadly under an avuncular mustache. Read full article > >

See the article here:
Gary Oldman talks about ‘Tinker, Tailor,’ Smiley and slaying the Guinness dragon

The Design Museum has added a motorway sign to its collection. So is British road signage a design classic?

Visit link:
The road sign as design classic

A multimedia archive of life in the UK in the 1980s and the modern day is put on display at the National Museum of Computing.

See the original post:
Reinvented Domesday exhibit opens

A coffin on display at a museum in Devon is a rare 3,500-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus, it emerges.

More here:
Rare Egyptian coffin identified

Government-sponsored museums that went free in 2001 have seen their combined visitor numbers more than double in the past decade, figures suggest.

See the original post here:
Free museums show rise in visits