Museums - Vancouver Museum

The Vancouver Museum was founded in 1894 by the Art, Historical and Scientific Association under a banner that invited visitors to view “Paintings and Curios.” The museum quickly outgrew its first recorded object, a stuffed trumpeter swan. It moved to the Carnegie Library Building in 1905 and to its present purpose-built location in 1968, having become Canada’s largest civic museum.
The museum has hundreds of thousands of artifacts, specimens, and treasures. Areas of particular strength are the Pacific Northwest Coast First Nations collection and the Plains First Nations beadwork collection. There is also a small southeastern Nigerian collection, beadwork and weaponry from East and South Africa, Inuit prints, and bark cloth from Oceania.