DC Museums

International Spy Museum
The International Spy Museum is the first public museum in the world solely dedicated to the tradecraft, history, and contemporary role of espionage. The museum features the largest collection of international espionage artifacts ever placed on public display. Spanning the history of espionage around the globe, many of these artifacts can now be seen by the public for the first time.

Kreeger Museum
One of the greatest legacies of David and Carmen Kreeger is the museum that bears their name. In 1959, Mr. & Mrs. Kreeger began to amass a formidable collection of modern art. For the next fifteen yearsthey assembled most of the museum's holdings. The collection of The Kreeger Museum reflects the spirit of the Kreegers.

Woodrow Wilson House Museum
Washington's only presidential Museum. Each year, thousands still visit the final home of the twenty-eighth President. The remarkable collection offers the visitor unique insights into the personality of one of America's greatest leaders. On display are objects from the White House, family items, memorabilia, and elaborate gifts of state from around the world.

National Building Museum
The National Building Museum is America’s premier cultural institution dedicated to exploring and celebrating architecture, design, engineering, construction, and urban planning.

National Museum of Health and Medicine
Discover a smoker's lung, the bullet that took Abraham Lincoln's life, a brain still attached to a spinal cord suspended in formaldehyde.  You can see Paul Revere's dental tools and what a kidney stone looks like.  You can try on a pregnancy garment that makes you feel what it's like to be with child.  You can find out what on earth a shoe fluoroscope is.  You can even touch a real brain if you dare.

Hillwood Museum & Gardens
Hillwood Museum and Gardens is one of America's premier estate museums, featuring the most comprehensive assemblage of imperial Russian fine and decorative arts outside Russia, and an extensive collection of eighteenth-century French works of art.

The Textile Museum
The Textile Museum is dedicated to furthering the understanding of mankind's creative achievements in the textile arts. As a museum, it is committed to its role as a center of excellence in the scholarly research, conservation, interpretation and exhibition of textiles, with particular concern for the artistic, technical and cultural significance of its collections.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Museum's Permanent Exhibition The Holocaust spans three floors of the Museum building. It presents a narrative history using more than 900 artifacts, 70 video monitors, and four theaters that include historic film footage and eyewitness testimonies. Also hosting a variety of traveling exhibitions, the museum is a fascinating and educational experience for the young or old.

Squished Penny Museum
The mission of the Squished Penny Museum is to capture and convey to the fun-oriented public the spirit and history behind the creation and collection of squished pennies throughout the world.

Newseum
Opening Fall of 2007
Advance Reservations are required

National Gallery of Art
The National Gallery of Art houses one of the finest collections in the world illustrating major achievements in painting, sculpture, and graphic arts from the Middle Ages to the present.

Capital Children's Museum
Capital Children's Museum (CCM) has fostered children's love of learning for over 25 years. Children are encouraged to explore by touching, climbing, tasting and using their imagination to learn about the world around them. At CCM, there are five permanent exhibits and more than a dozen traveling exhibits each year.

Decatur House
The Decatur House's distinguished neo-classical architecture and prominent location across from the White House made Decatur House one of the capital's most desirable addresses and home to many of our nation's most prominent figures. Today, visitors hear compelling stories of this unique site, from elite socializing to a fatal duel to a slave's campaign for freedom.

Daughters of the American Revolution Museum
The museum is Washington's only American Decorative Arts Museum. The Museum features 33 period rooms depict scenes of early American life, two galleries with permanent and rotating exhibits, over 33,000 objects made or used in America prior to 1840 and more.

National Museum of Women in the Arts
The National Museum of Women in the Arts is the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to recognizing the contributions of women artists. The museum features a collection of more than 1,500 pieces by 400 women artists from 28 countries, including Cassatt and O'Keeffe.

The Octagon Museum
The oldest museum in the United States devoted to architecture and design, the Octagon Museum enables the American Architectural Foundation to increase public awareness of the power of architecture and its influence on the quality of our lives. This building was designed by Dr. William Thornton for Col. John Tayloe III, and was constructed between 1799 and 1801.

The Phillips Collection
The Phillips Collection, America's first museum of modern art, opened in 1921 in the home of Duncan Phillips (1886-1966). Renoir's great masterpiece Luncheon of the Boating Party hangs here, along with other outstanding Impressionist paintings by Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Cézanne.

Arts and Industries Building
The Arts and Industries Building (originally known as the U.S. National Museum) was designed in a High Victorian style by the Washington architectural firm of Cluss and Schulze. Opened in 1881 in time for the inaugural ball of President James A. Garfield, the building was constructed to exhibit materials acquired from the nation's Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia.

National Air and Space Museum
The Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum (NASM) maintains the largest collection of historic air and spacecraft in the world. It is also a vital center for research into the history, science, and technology of aviation and space flight.

The National Zoo
The Zoo was created in 1889 'for the advancement of science and the instruction and recreation of the people.' Today they are becoming a new kind of zoo, the BioPark. This vision of the modern zoo combines wildlife with the best of natural history museums, botanic gardens, aquaria, and even art galleries to illustrate the splendor of all living things.

Freer Gallery of Art
The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery together form the national museum of Asian art. The galleries offer one of the Western world's most refined collection's of Asian art and the finest collections of paintings by James McNeill Whistler . . . anywhere.

Smithsonian Institution Building
Completed in 1855, the original Smithsonian Institution Building, popularly known as the Castle, was designed by architect James Renwick Jr., whose other works include St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City and the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Today, the Castle houses the Institution’s administrative offices and the Smithsonian Information Center.

National Museum of American History
The Museum offers three floors of exhibitions that explore the rich diversity of American history, from 'After the Revolution: Everyday Life in America, 1780-1800' to the 'Information Age: People, Information, and Technology.'

Anacostia Museum and Center
The Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture has grown from an experiment in community outreach to a national resource devoted to the identification, documentation, protection, and interpretation of the African American experience.

National Portrait Gallery
Unique collection of portraits of famous Americans from the world of politics, sports, literature, stage and screen. The Hall of Presidents features official portraits of U.S. presidents.

National Museum of Natural History
Part of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of Natural History offers displays which comprise more than 120 million scientific specimens and cultural artifacts from around the world.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Hirshhorn offers a superb collection of modern art. The collection features outstanding works by major artists of our time. Changing exhibitions focus mostly on established contemporary masters and emerging artists.

National Museum of African Art
As a leading center for the visual arts of Africa, the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA) fosters and sustains--through exhibitions, collections, research, and public programs--an interest in and an understanding of the diverse cultures in Africa as these are embodied in aesthetic achievements in the visual arts.

Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery together form the national museum of Asian art. The galleries offer one of the Western world's most refined collection's of Asian art and the finest collections of paintings by James McNeill Whistler . . . anywhere.

National Postal Museum
The National Postal Museum offers an educational experience for those who are interested in the history and facts of different aspects of the postal system. Unique collection of airmail planes, stagecoaches, rare stamps and letters, Owney the Postal Dog, Pony Express exhibit, rare postage and more.

Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Museum features paintings, sculpture, folk art, photography and graphics by American artists from the 18th century to the present.