MENU
Commemorating two and a half centuries since its founding and spanning nearly 4.6 billion years of history, we are pleased to present America’s First Museum: 250 Years of Collecting, Preserving, and Educating. This year-long exhibit features a wide array of objects that tells the story of this impressive institution and its remarkable collections.
Part one highlights objects from ancient Rome, a Chief’s helmet from the Sandwich Islands acquired in 1798, Colonial dress, and Japanese Samurai armor. Opening mid-year, part two will showcase a church pew made by enslaved hands measuring 20 feet in length, centuries old Archaic carved bone pins, a skull from the largest known flying bird and a couture Fortuny gown.
We hope you will join us for this extraordinary milestone!
This timeline highlights the rich history of The Charleston Museum from its beginning to the present. Selected events from the past 250 years are showcased using iconic photographs from the Museum's Archives.
buy tickets detailsThis spotlight exhibition presents the work of visiting poet and cultural ornithologist J. Drew Lanham. It is the latest body of writing from an on-going project which reconsiders with a “head and heart” approach the taxonomy and nomenclature of birds through the intersectional threads of race, place, and nature. Composed of twenty “feel notes” addressed to select Southeastern birds in John James Audubon's groundbreaking The Birds of America, each poem engages a deeply personal ornithology seeking to move avian identification from the pages of scientific field guides into a cultural “feeling guide,” where words render birds as "who's" rather than "what's."