Museums - Ulster Museum

The Ulster Museum was founded in 1821 as the Belfast Natural History Society and began exhibiting in 1833. The museum has included an art gallery since 1890, around which time its title was changed to the Belfast Municipal Museum and Art Gallery. In 1929 the museum moved to its present building, designed by James Cumming Wynne. The institution adopted its current title in 1962, at which time a major extension by Francis Pym was begun, which was completed in 1964. The museum closed in late 2006 for a major refurbishment program to be completed in 2009.
The Ulster Museum contains collections in Irish history and archaeology, biology, paleontology, fine art, ethnographic art, and more. The museum built its collections steadily throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, primarily through donations. Much of the seminal material for the ethnographic collection––which today comprises hundreds of works from many regions in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas––resulted from the travels of nineteenth-century traders, missionaries, military operatives, diplomats, and private citizens. Highlights of the collections include an extremely rare tapa cloth figure from Easter Island, a Solomon Islands canoe, and a number of masks from Africa and the Pacific Northwest.