Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, Ethnographic museum in East Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Wereldmuseum Amsterdam is an ethnographic museum in the eastern part of Amsterdam, housed in the Royal Tropical Institute building. The collection includes 340,000 objects and photographs from Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
The institution was founded in 1864 as the Colonial Museum in Haarlem and moved to Amsterdam in 1926. In 2023, the museum adopted its current name.
The building holds an extensive collection of musical instruments, masks, and puppets from many regions of the world. Visitors can view over 21,000 textile objects, with a large portion of the pieces originating from Indonesia.
The museum at Linnaeusstraat 2 opens Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 to 17:00 and provides wheelchair access throughout the building. The rooms are spread across several floors, so visitors should allow some time for a full visit.
Between 2009 and 2015, the museum released 50,000 historical photographs under a Creative Commons license for public access. These images were taken between 1855 and 1940 and document life and cultures from that era.
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