Museum of Us, Anthropological museum in Balboa Park, California, US.
The Museum of Us occupies the California Building, a Spanish Colonial Revival structure designed by Bertram G. Goodhue for the 1915 Panama–California Exposition. Its facade features a tall tower with a tiled dome, a star-patterned dome over the entrance, and sculpted ornament by the Piccirilli Brothers. The museum also uses three other original 1915 buildings in the California Quadrangle.
The museum began with "The Story of Man through the Ages", the central exhibit of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, assembled by archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett with objects from the American Southwest, Guatemala, Africa, Siberia, Alaska and Peru. George Marston led the San Diego Museum Association that kept the collection as a permanent museum, with Hewett as first director. It was briefly the Palace of Science in 1935-36, became the Museum of Man in 1942, gained "San Diego" in 1978, and took the name Museum of Us in August 2020.
The museum's name comes from the Kumeyaay word Mat'taam Naka Shin, the intertribal committee that advised on the 2015 centennial exhibits. Its ethnographic holdings number over 100,000 documented items, gathered with Southern California tribes and from Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures. Seven painted wooden Egyptian coffins are kept here, among them a Ptolemaic child's coffin of which only six others are known.
The museum occupies four original 1915 exposition buildings in the California Quadrangle: the California Building with its tower, the Gill Administration Building to the west, and Evernham Hall with Saint Francis Chapel on the south side. The tower, closed for nearly 80 years, reopened for the 2015 centennial; its carillon chimes quarterly and can be heard across Balboa Park. Allow time to move between the separate buildings.
The California Tower, part of the museum complex, was closed to the public for nearly 80 years before reopening for the 2015 centennial of the Panama–California Exposition. It holds a carillon whose quarterly-hour chimes carry across Balboa Park. The tower also served as a model for Xanadu in Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.
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