New Museum

A museum dedicated to the life and art of the Mennonites, who fled 17th and 18th century Europe to pioneer the farm land of Pennsylvania, has opened in Harleysville, 30 miles north of Philadelphia.The Meeting House, which is set in farmland tilled by Mennonite families, is open Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Closed on holidays. No admission fee, but contributions are appreciated. Call (215) 256-3020.

Retired basketball star Chris Webber will help the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum raise funds for a $75 million replacement facility scheduled to open on Baltimore's North Avenue corridor in 2015. The museum announced that Webber, a five-time National Basketball Association All-Star who played from 1993 to 2008, will help launch an initiative next week to raise $4 million for the sports wing of a $7 million gallery of sports, recreation and athletics that will be part of the new museum.

An African-American history museum proposed for the Inner Harbor of Baltimore would benefit Annapolis' Banneker-Douglass Museum, relieving the pressure on it as the only of its kind in the state.Creation of the new museum will allow the 10-year-old Banneker-Douglass Museum on Franklin Street to focus narrowly military, professional and religious life, said Ronald Sharps, executive director of the Maryland Commission on African-American History and Culture.That's important because space at Banneker-Douglass is cramped into about 10,000 square feet in a building that once housed the Mount Moriah African Methodist Episcopal Church on Franklin Street.

After generations tucked into a small room on the first floor of Gilman Hall, The Johns Hopkins University's archaeological collection has emerged from seclusion. Ancient sculptures, pottery, jewelry, weapons and tools from the Americas to the Middle East will now get their moment in a mix of sun and cool museum light that illuminates an expanded new display space after an $85 million renovation. The collection marked its opening day Sunday with lectures, lunch and a cocktail reception, and with a new, more dignified name: The Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum.

A $15 million state-run museum devoted to black history and culture in Maryland would be built near Baltimore's Inner Harbor by 1998 under a plan endorsed by Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke.The Baltimore Development Corp. has agreed to reserve half an acre at the northeast corner of Pratt and President streets for the project, which would be funded by a combination of public and private money yet to be raised.Mr. Schmoke said he met last week with planners of the 70,000-square-foot museum and agreed to set aside the highly visible city parcel, now a parking lot for Little Italy.

NEW YORK -- For the last several years, Saturday visitors to the Museum of Broadcasting had to arrive by about 1:30 p.m., before the cramped quarters began turning people away because there just wasn't room.Starting Thursday, weekend visitors to the Museum of Television and Radio, as it has been renamed, can sleep in.The museum is opening its gleaming new 72,000-square-foot facility at 25 W. 52nd St., with nearly four times the capacity of the old building on 53rd Street, where it had been wedged in for 15 years.

From the writhing, expressive sculptures of Bessie Harvey to Thomas Jordan's exquisite creatures fashioned from leaves and thorns, a new world of art makes its debut in Baltimore today. The American Visionary Art Museum opens its doors to the public at 10 a.m. with an inaugural exhibit, "Tree of Life," that's symbolic of the new museum: ambitious and exhilarating, if not quite thoroughly defined.The brainchild of its founder and president, Baltimorean Rebecca Hoffberger, AVAM is the only major museum devoted to visionary art in the United States.

The National Museum of the American Indian, whose opening this week is expected to draw the largest number of Indians ever to visit the nation's capital, was positioned to face the rising sun, in accordance with Native American traditions. The museum also faces the U.S. Capitol, which is not in accordance with anything at all. In that old building, less than a block away, as recently as the 1950s - some might argue even later - laws were still being passed to strip Indians of their land and suppress their culture, the same culture that the new, government-supported museum has been built to preserve.

Can the subject of geography be made fun and exciting enough to draw visitors to a new museum in Baltimore's Inner Harbor?That's the issue facing a multi-disciplinary team hired to create America's first "Urban Geography" museum high above the city as part of an overhaul of the Top of the World observation lounge.Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke has approved a proposal by the city's Office of Promotion to raise $3 million to $5 million to revamp the 11,000-square-foot observation lounge and museum on the 27th floor of the World Trade Center at 401 E. Pratt St.It will be the first overhaul for the city-run attraction, which opened in 1979 and draws 175,000 visitors a year.

NEW YORK -- On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a remarkable new museum has been fashioned from the simplest of geometrical forms. Its exterior is a 12-story-high cube, with two outer walls made of colorless glass. Centered inside, as if it's floating on air, is a white aluminum sphere, 87 feet in diameter. The glass is so clear and the sphere is so large and luminous, especially at night, that it practically forces people to stop and look inside. The building is the Rose Center for Earth and Science, a $210 million exploratorium that opens tomorrow as the latest addition to the American Museum of Natural History.

Maryland has museums devoted to African Americans, artists, war veterans and sports legends. Starting this spring, it will have a center devoted to more than half the state's adult population: women. When the Maryland Women's Heritage Center and Museum opens in downtown Baltimore, planners say, it will be the first of its kind in the nation - a community forum that will recognize stories of achievement by Maryland women - from Harriet Tubman to Rachel Carson to Marin Alsop.

B altimore, long a center of African-American culture on the East Coast, is a natural home for the region's first Negro League baseball museum, and from a historical perspective, the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor is the perfect place to put it. The area was the center of a lively black arts and entertainment scene in Baltimore for decades, and a $4.1 million plan moving forward with the city's blessing calls for the museum to be built next to a...

History is often a word that people associate with textbooks and professors speaking in monotones. But with the Naval Academy Museum's complete renovation and redesign, the history of the U.S. Navy has become something real and vibrant to academy visitors and midshipmen. The museum reopened two weeks ago after undergoing an $11.6 million head-to-toe makeover. "We completely gutted this building," said Scott Harmon, the museum director. The only things left standing at one point, he said, were "the outside walls and the concrete floors."

N ight at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian takes a great idea - what if the inhabitants of a museum came to life at night? - and milks it for every drop of fun it's worth. Happily, it's worth plenty. Rodin's The Thinker stops thinking and starts talking. A Roy Lichtenstein pop-art woman cries. A balloon dog scampers about. Albert Einstein bobbleheads simplify complex equations - even though, with all that nodding, it's tough to figure whether they're signaling yes or no. This sequel to 2006's Night at the Museum, in which an ancient Egyptian tablet brought to life the figures inside New York's American Museum of Natural History, ups both the energy and the laugh quotient.

Watching the brilliant yellow-to-scarlet-to-purple sundowns or the Cape May-Lewes Ferry peacefully plying the Delaware Bay from Cape May's Sunset Beach, it's hard to imagine the turbulent times when this beautiful location was heavily fortified and played a vital role in the nation's homeland defense system. But the grand opening Saturday of the newly restored World War II Lookout Tower (Fire Control Tower No. 23) Museum and Memorial brings a very different time into focus. "The fire tower, constructed in 1942, is our centerpiece in recent efforts to emphasize Cape May's largely underappreciated and under-publicized role during World War II," says Robert Heinly, museum coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts in Cape May, which has spent the last seven years restoring the stark concrete tower.

GETTYSBURG -- Two days after the last shots of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War were fired here, a 16-year-old neighborhood boy named John H. Rosensteel walked onto the battlefield to help bury the dead. There he found the body of a Confederate soldier, a boy about his own age, and picked up a rifle lying near him. The rifle was the first item in what would become the largest private collection of Gettysburg relics, as well as a family legacy. Since that day in July 1863, Rosensteel's descendants have acquired and preserved tens of thousands of battle artifacts and shared them with the public.

At the end of most years, one can look back on the local art scene with some satisfaction. In addition to the outstanding shows to be remembered, there's usually the opening of a new museum building or of a local gallery, or some other advance to be noted. That's true this year, too. But it's also true that in 1995 the major pluses were balanced to an unusual degree, unfortunately, by major minuses.A grand opening. On the plus side, the opening on Nov. 24 of the American Visionary Art Museum at the Inner Harbor gave Baltimore a significant new museum, a great step for the city.

Welcome to Washington's newest collection of oddly appealing things -- the National Postal Museum, which opens July 30. It's the one place in the country where you can see, in the very same building:* George Washington's postage bill and Cliff Clavin's mailman's uniform,* An authentic stagecoach and a Pony Express Bible,* Charles Lindbergh's airmail-pilot application and a six-fingered Franklin Roosevelt.The National Postal Museum, located in (naturally) a restored post office on Capitol Hill across the street from Union Station, is the latest link in the capital's popular Smithsonian chain.

Museums are changing. Gone are the days of wealthy connoisseurs opening exhibits with private collections of rare treasures. Now, it's about an idea, a niche, fundraising and marketing. Uniqueness is no longer the ultimate goal; it's the everyday, a narrative woven through unremarkable relics to tell the story of a specific group's experience. The number of heritage museums dedicated to portraying the history and culture of a given group of people has surged in the last 30 years, according to Schroeder Cherry, counselor to the director of the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides grants for African-American and American Indian heritage museums.