The Newark Museum is the largest museum

Museum

A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...

 in New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

, USA. It holds fine collections of American art, decorative arts, contemporary art, and arts of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the ancient world. Its extensive collections of American art include works by Hiram Powers

Hiram Powers

Hiram Powers was an American neoclassical sculptor.-Biography:The son of a farmer, Powers was born in Woodstock, Vermont, on the July 29, 1805. In 1818 his father moved to Ohio, about six miles from Cincinnati, where the son attended school for about a year, staying meanwhile with his brother, a...

, Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole

Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century...

, John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...

, Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt

Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...

, Frederick Church

Frederic Edwin Church

Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters...

, Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam

Frederick Childe Hassam was a prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums...

, Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt

Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...

, Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper

Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...

, Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...

, Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella was an Italian-born, American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America. He is associated with the American Precisionism movement of the 1910s-1940s....

, Tony Smith

Tony Smith (sculptor)

Tony Smith was an American sculptor, visual artist, architectural designer, and a noted theorist on art. He is often cited as a pioneering figure in American Minimalist sculpture.-Education:...

 and Frank Stella

Frank Stella

Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...

.

The Newark Museum's Tibet

Tibet

Tibet is a plateau region in Asia, north-east of the Himalayas. It is the traditional homeland of the Tibetan people as well as some other ethnic groups such as Monpas, Qiang, and Lhobas, and is now also inhabited by considerable numbers of Han and Hui people...

an galleries are considered among the best in the world. The collection was purchased from Christian missionaries in the early twentieth century. The Tibetan galleries have an in-situ Buddhist altar that the Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama is a high lama in the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism. The name is a combination of the Mongolian word далай meaning "Ocean" and the Tibetan word bla-ma meaning "teacher"...

 has consecrated.

In addition to its extensive art collections, The Newark Museum is dedicated to natural science

Science

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...

. It includes the Dreyfuss Planetarium

Planetarium

A planetarium is a theatre built primarily for presenting educational and entertaining shows about astronomy and the night sky, or for training in celestial navigation...

 and the Victoria Hall of Science which highlights some of the museum's 70,000 specimen Natural Science Collection.

The Alice Ransom Dreyfuss Memorial Garden, located behind the museum, is the setting for community programs, concerts and performances. The garden is also home to a 1784 old stone schoolhouse and Fire Safety Center.

History

The museum was organized in 1909 by master Newark librarian John Cotton Dana

John Cotton Dana

John Cotton Dana was an American librarian and museum director whose main objective was to make the library relevant to the daily lives of the citizens and to promote the benefits of reading...

 "to establish in the City of Newark, New Jersey, a museum for the reception and exhibition of articles of art, science, history and technology, and for the encouragement of the study of the arts and sciences." The kernel of the museum was a collection of Japanese prints

Japanese art

Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture in wood and bronze, ink painting on silk and paper and more recently manga, cartoon, along with a myriad of other types of works of art...

, silks, and porcelains assembled by a Newark pharmacist.

Originally located on the fourth floor of the Newark Public Library

Newark Public Library

The Newark Public Library is the public library system for the city of Newark, New Jersey.-History:In 1902 John Cotton Dana became employed at the Newark Public Library in Newark, New Jersey from until his death in 1929. He established foreign language collections for immigrants and also developed...

, the museum moved into its own purpose-built structure in the 1920s after a gift by Louis Bamberger

Louis Bamberger

Louis Bamberger was Newark, New Jersey's leading citizen from the early 1900s until his death in 1944. He was a businessman and philanthropist and at his death all flags in Newark were flown at half-staff for three days, and his large department store closed for a day.Louis Bamberger was born in...

. It was designed by Jarvis Hunt

Jarvis Hunt

Jarvis Hunt was a "renowned Chicago architect" who designed a wide array of buildings, including train stations, suburban estates, industrial buildings, clubhouses and other structures....

 who also designed Bamberger's flagship Newark store. Since then, the museum has expanded several times, to the south into the former YMCA, to the north into the 1885 Ballantine House, and in 1990, to the west into an existing acquired building. At that time much of the Museum, including the new addition, was redesigned by Michael Graves

Michael Graves

Michael Graves is an American architect. Identified as one of The New York Five, Graves has become a household name with his designs for domestic products sold at Target stores in the United States....

.

The Museum had a mini-zoo with small animals for some twenty years, until August 2010.

External links

• Newark Museum
• Dreyfuss Planetarium
• Jan 11, 2009 New York Times article on Museum
• Miss Osaka - Japanese Friendship Doll at museum