Memphis, explained
No Memphis museum is free every day of the week without exception, but several offer a recurring free window — a weekly hour block, a resident discount, or participation in a national program — and a small number are free at all times. The pattern differs by museum, and it changes without notice, so this … Read more
Chucalissa is an archaeological site in southwest Memphis: an earthen mound settlement built and occupied by Mississippian-period Native American communities, with later reoccupation, on a bluff above the Mississippi River floodplain. The C.H. Nash Museum is the University of Memphis facility that manages the site, holds its collections, and interprets it to the public. What … Read more
The Memphis Belle is a B-17F Flying Fortress bomber, one of the first US Army Air Forces heavy bombers to complete 25 combat missions over Europe and return home. It is not currently in Memphis. The restored aircraft is on permanent public display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson … Read more
The Withers Collection Museum and Gallery is a small photography museum on Beale Street built around the archive of Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis photojournalist who documented the civil rights movement, Negro Leagues baseball and the Beale Street music scene from the 1940s through the 1970s. It is also, since 2010, tied to a well-documented … Read more
The Metal Museum is a Memphis institution devoted entirely to metal as an artistic medium — forged, cast, welded, and fabricated work, from tools and gates to sculpture and jewelry. It sits on a bluff south of downtown, on the grounds of a former federal hospital, and it is the only museum in the United … Read more
The Pink Palace is a mansion in Midtown Memphis built in the 1920s from pink Georgia marble by Clarence Saunders, the man who invented the self-service grocery store. The Museum of Science and History, usually shortened to MoSH, is the city institution that has occupied and expanded that mansion since 1930, adding a planetarium, an … Read more
The Cotton Museum at the Memphis Cotton Exchange is a small history museum built inside the actual second-floor trading room of the old Memphis Cotton Exchange building, at 65 Union Avenue downtown. It uses that room, and the exchange’s own records and equipment, to tell the story of how cotton built the city’s economy and … Read more
What Is Slave Haven and the Burkle Estate? Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum is a small history museum housed in the Burkle Estate, a mid-19th-century brick house on North Second Street in Memphis, just north of downtown. Local tradition holds that its owner, a German immigrant named Jacob Burkle, used the house to shelter people … Read more
The Memphis Music Hall of Fame is both an honor and a museum: an annual induction that recognizes musicians, producers and industry figures with a documented connection to Memphis, and a small dedicated gallery on Beale Street where inductees’ stories and objects are on permanent display. It covers blues, soul, rock and roll, gospel and … Read more
The Dixon Gallery and Gardens is an art museum and 17-acre garden estate in East Memphis, built around the former home and private art collection of Hugo and Margaret Oates Dixon. It combines a permanent collection strong in French and American Impressionism with formal and woodland gardens open to the public year-round. Where is the … Read more
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