Top Picks for International Museum Day, Year III

By Kin Enriquez -

For this year's celebration of International Museum Day, I'll be featuring museums that I visited in Chicago, Seattle, Yokohama, Singapore, Kota Kinabalu, St Louis and Taipei, in the past 12 months. This is my third year of featuring museums to mark this day.

My previous series for Year 1 and Year 2 can be found here and here.


Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago is the second-largest art museum in the United States, second only to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The museum owned several priceless works of art, including Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, American Gothic by Grant Wood, the A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande by Georges Seurat, and several paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keefe and other masters.


Museum of Flight
The Museum of Flight is the largest private air and space museum in the world. It was established in 1965, and is located in a piece of land just adjacent to the Boeing Field, an airport. Among the notable aircraft on display are a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the original Air Force One, a British Airways Concorde, an M21 spyplane with the D21 drone, and several unmanned drones.

Chihuly Garden and Glass
Chihuly Garden and Glass is an exhibit established to showcase the genius of glass artist Dale Chihuly. The exhibition is located in Seattle Center.




Muzium Sabah
Established in 1965, the Sabah Museum is located in Kota Kinabalu. The state museum contains ethnographic and archaeological artifacts found in Sabah. The main attraction of the site is the preserved bones of a large whale that beached in Kota Kinabalu several years ago.



The museum, established in 1997, specializes in Asian cultures and civilizations. Its present location is the colonial Empress Place building, by the bank of Singapore River. Basically the museum encompases the Chinese, Malay, Indian and South Asian cultures which all, at some point of the city's history, contributed to its development.



Cup Noodles Museum
The only museum I've visited in Japan, the Cup Noodle Museum is devoted  to the invention of cup noodles and instant ramen. The museum delves on the invention's impact to culinaty culture around the world, and I guess to all college students and night workers everywhere. The Lucky Me pancit canton, the popular variant in the Philippines, is even featured.


The St. Louis Art Museum is one of the premier museums in St. Louis. Located in Forest Part, the venue of the 1904 World's Fair, the museum curates art from antiquities to the present. It has an extensive collection spanning different cultures and time periods, including artifacts from Mesoamerica, Egyptian mummies, medieval weapons, Asian art, and several Renaissance paintings by Matisse, Gaugin, Picasso and Van Gogh. I visited it again when I was in St. Louis in the fall.


National Palace Museum
The National Palace Museum in Taipei contains one of the world's largest collection of ancient Chinese artifacts, collected by the emperors themselves. Originally established in Beijing in 1925, the museum's collection was surreptitiously transferred to Taiwan by the Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-Shek, just before they were defeated by the communist forces.


Taipei Astronomical Museum
The Taipei astronomical Museum is a museum dedicated to ancient astronomy, cosmology, the celestial sphere and space technology. It is located in the Shilin district.

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