The Reading Public Museum is a

museum A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make thes ...

West Reading, Pennsylvania West Reading is a borough in Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 4,212 at the 2010 census. It contains a vibrant main street (Penn Avenue) and the large Reading Hospital and Medical Center. It was also the site of the V ...

. The museum's permanent collection mainly focuses on

art Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...

science Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...

, and

civilization A civilization (or civilisation) is any complex society characterized by the development of a state, social stratification, urbanization, and symbolic systems of communication beyond natural spoken language (namely, a writing system). ...

. It also has a planetarium and a arboretum.

Collection

Charles Webster Hawthorne, A Study in White

The museum's art collection contains works from many cultures but mainly focuses on European and American

painting Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...

s and

woodcut Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas tha ...

s. Its fine art collection includes more than seven hundred oil paintings by American and international artists. Works by Dale Chihuly and Abraham P. Hankins are in the museum's Modern and

Contemporary Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. Contemporary history is either a subset of the late modern period, or it is o ...

holdings. The museum's collection includes Nefrina, a mummy from the Ptolemaic period in ancient Egypt. The museum has a large collection of Pennsylvania German objects.

References

External links

Official websiteReading Public Museum
within Google Arts & Culture * {{Authority control Museums in Reading, Pennsylvania Natural history museums in Pennsylvania Art museums and galleries in Pennsylvania Arboreta in Pennsylvania Planetaria in the United States Museums established in 1907 1907 establishments in Pennsylvania Paleontology in Pennsylvania

Collection

See also

References

External links