158 Museums to Explore in California

This is a private museum where the company Hewlett-Packard was founded. It is located at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California. It is considered to be the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley". In the 1930s, Stanford University and its Dean of Engineering Frederick Terman began encouraging faculty and graduates to stay in the area instead of leaving California, and develop a high-tech region.

The Hiller Aviation Museum is an aircraft history museum founded by Stanley Hiller in June 1998. It specializes in Northern California aircraft history and helicopter history. The museum is also an affiliate within the Smithsonian Affiliations program. This museum has more than 50 aerospace vehicles along with companion descriptive displays concerning the history of flight.

Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park is a California State Park, preserving an outcropping of marbleized limestone with some 1,185 mortar holes This is the largest collection of bedrock mortars in North America. The park is nestled in a little valley. This museum within the park grounds features a variety of exhibits and a vast collection of Sierra Nevada Indian artifacts.

The Intel Museum introduces students to the world of micro-miniature computer chips, where millions of electronic components are packed onto quarter-inch squares of silicon, and time is measured in billionths of seconds. The museum is open weekdays and Saturdays except holidays. It is open to the public with free admission. The museum was started in the early 1980s as an internal project at Intel to record its history.

Art museum on the campus of Stanford University. The museum first opened in 1894 and now consists of over 130,000 square feet of exhibition space, including sculpture gardens. The museum is open to the public and charges no admission.

The Janet Turner Print Museum at California State University, Chico advances the art of printmaking by making its international collection accessible to the people of Northern California and beyond. We engage a diverse public through stimulating exhibitions, programming, and study to inspire reflection, collaboration, and action.

The Japanese American Museum of San Jose showcases a unique collection of permanent and rotating exhibits chronicling more than a century of Japanese American history. The farming project collected family histories, historical photographs, private memoirs and other unpublished documents and led to the development of a curriculum package on Japanese American history, which was adopted for use by the San Jose Unified and East Side Union High School Districts.

This is the largest museum in the United States dedicated to sharing the experience of Americans of Japanese ancestry as an integral part of U.S. history.The museum covers more than 130 years of Japanese-American history, dating to the first Issei generation of immigrants. It also contains artifacts, textiles, art, photographs, and oral histories of Japanese Americans. There are s o many other things to see and study here. It will be a worth visit.

The Junípero Serra Museum, in Presidio Park, is one of the most familiar landmarks in San Diego. The Museum exhibits archeological finds, historic objects, and reference materials related to Spanish colonization and the early history of California and provides educational programs about the Spanish, Mexican and indigenous heritage of the San Diego region.

Kidspace Children's Museum is a children's museum in Pasadena, California. It offers more than 40 hands-on exhibits, in addition to outdoor spaces, programs, and activities, which are designed to encourage a child's growth and development through exploration of the environment, investigation in science, and artistic expression.

A wonderful museum located in Laguna Beach, California, which collects, cares for, and exhibits works of art that were created by California artists or represent the life and history of the state. The museum's collection ranges across all periods and styles since the nineteenth-century, maintaining a dynamic balance between the historical and the contemporary.

The Laws Railroad Museum and Historic Site includes static displays of a train consisting of an oil-fired steam locomotive, Southern Pacific 9, and several freight cars from the Southern Pacific Railroad's 3 ft narrow gauge lines. There are also operating locomotives that run on the narrow gauge tracks in the museum's grounds. The museum's display explains that the railroad was relied on by many Eastern Sierra communities before modern roads were built during the 1950s and 1960s.

This is an art museum in San Francisco, California. Located in Lincoln Park, the Legion of Honor is a component of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. It displays a collection spanning more than 6,000 years of ancient and European art and houses the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts.

The Lincoln Memorial Shrine is a museum and research facility dedicated to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. It focused on America’s 16th president and the war waged under his tenure to preserve our Union. The original building was a one-room octagon with a limestone exterior inscribed with quotes from Lincoln. It was gifted to the city in 1932 by Robert and Alma Watchorn, whose own story—and that of the shrine itself—is rather remarkable.

The Long Beach Museum of Art stands for democracy, for the lawful freedom of a sovereign country.The museum features exhibitions of American decorative arts, early 2Oth Century European art, California Modernism and contemporary art, including video. It includes over 4,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, works on paper, and decorative arts objects. Particular strengths include American decorative arts objects, early 20th century European art, California Modernism.

A majestic museum, that showcases the history of Los Altos and surrounding areas, including the transformation of the agricultural paradise once known as the "Valley of Heart's Delight" into the high-tech Silicon Valley. The museum features both a permanent exhibit as well as temporary exhibits.

Largest art museum in the western United States. It attracts nearly a million visitors annually. It holds more than 150,000 works spanning the history of art from ancient times to the present.

A majestic wax museum, that contains numerous wax figures of famous celebrities. If you're looking to see incredibly lifelike reproductions of some of the world's most popular people. Each wax figure has its own placard placed on a wall in close physical proximity to it, containing information about the portrayed figureThe figures here have delighted all sorts of audiences with their lifelike appearances. It takes about an hour or 2 to get through all 125 figures in this museum.

Madame Tussauds San Francisco is a wax museum located in Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco in California. The attraction opened on June 26, 2014 and became the 17th Madame Tussauds museum to open worldwide. The attraction features wax figures of famous figures from movies, music, politics, popular culture and sport. It also celebrates “The Spirit of San Francisco” with wax figures of local artists, musicians and activists from the city's past.

World War II American concentration camp where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated.