Museums - Peabody Essex Museum

The Peabody Essex Museum is America’s oldest continuously operating museum. It was founded in 1799, sixteen years after the establishment of the United States. The museum’s founders were among America’s first global entrepreneurs, who traveled the world in search of trade. The collections they amassed are exceptional today for their provenance, age, quality, and significance.
The PEM is a hidden treasure, with collections—many ranking among the finest of their kind—that exceed 2.4 million works of art and culture. PEM collections also encompass twenty-four historic buildings, including four National Historic Landmarks, five National Register buildings, and its most recent architecture acquisition, Yin Yu Tang, the only complete Qing Dynasty house located outside China.
PEM’s new wing was designed by eminent architect Moshe Safdie. This addition was part of a near-decade-long campaign to conceptually and physically integrate, interpret, and exhibit the full breadth of museum collections for the first time in its 200-year history. This process culminated with its reopening in 2003 as one of the twenty-five largest art museums in the United States.
The museum’s African art collection includes early and significant works from coastal East and West Africa, and an important body of Zulu arts. The PEM also houses one of the world’s finest collections of Ethiopian Christian art, consisting of sixteenth- to twentieth-century icons and metalwork. The Oceanic art and culture collection is internationally recognized, and has its origins in the first objects donated to the museum in 1799. The collection is well-known to specialists for its many early provenanced objects as well as its size and breadth. It includes more than 20,000 objects from more than thirty-six island groups in Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. Many of the works are recognized as masterpieces throughout the world.
The Native American art collection includes thousands of historic works dating from the seventeenth century to the present, as well as archaeological works dating back as far as 10,000 years. Today, the department actively works with contemporary artists throughout the Americas.