Museum of Us — Attraction in San Diego

Not worth it.

Poor value for money. $19.95 for adult tickets and $16.95 for kids and seniors means a four-person family will spend almost $75 just to get in the door. What do you get for that? 10-12 small exhibits which each take up a small room's worth of space. Even you take the time to read all the placards and displays, you'll get through each one in 5-15 minutes. At most, you'll spend an hour or two in the museum before wandering off to find something better to do.

Missed opportunities. The museum has exciting collections hidden away in its archives AND plenty of space to display them. For example, it has the 6,000-item Jessop Weapons Collection, one of the largest collections of exotic weapons in the world. If you're lucky, you might see one or two objects from the collection on display. But don't worry, the Museum of Us has plenty of space for inscrutable modern art exhibits.

The Mayan statuary exhibit, the crown jewel of the museum, has been updated ... with neon-toned graffiti spray-painted on the walls around it. I suppose the attempt to include modern Mayan artists is admirable ... but nothing has been done to help guests better interpret the stunning statues and the culture which made them. No dioramas. No VR or augmented reality goggles. No displays explaining Maya society or religion. No light displays to pick out interesting features on the statues. Just the same decades-old placards.

The museum's much-diminished one-room Ancient Egyptian exhibit can only be described as a bitter disappointment. You won't learn anything meaningful about Egyptian gods and goddesses, how mummies were made, or much else about Ancient Egypt. You'll see remarkable objects like a shaduf yoke on display, but you won't learn anything about how this simple tool made agriculture possible in an arid desert. Oh, and you won't see any mummies.

Messaging. From the moment you walk into the museum, you'll be bombarded with apologies, acknowledgements, and other pablums. If you hadn't guessed from the name change, the Museum of Us has no problem making charged political statements whenever possible. Half the exhibits at the Museum are now partly or wholly about race and racism. These are topics worth learning about, but the Museum of Us does it in the most ham-handed and inept way possible. The Cannibals exhibit, for instance, dedicates a quarter of its space to lambasting Columbus. It barely mentions the Aztecs, who are the subject of an intense academic debate about cannibalism. Were they industrial-scale human slaughterers who treated prisoners as "marching meat," as Marvin Harris argued? Or were those trumped-up charges that overplay the limited, religious nature of Aztec cannibalism? For a museum supposedly interested in centering itself on indigenous stories, giving more space to conquistadors than the Aztecs is pretty damning move.

The effort to "decolonize" the museum has also caused many of its best exhibits to vanish, never to be seen again. One of the best parts of the Museum of Man was the mummy displays. Visitors could see Peruvian mummies and learn about how their high-altitude ritual burials had naturally preserved their remains. And visitors could learn about how these remains revealed secrets about ancient diets, healthcare, and much more. But it's all gone forever now, victims of the Museum's policy not to show human remains. You'd never knew they even existed. There aren't even mock-ups or images or the remains to take their places in the exhibits. The whole exhibits are just gone. In trying to decolonize, the Museum's gormless curators have managed to eliminate one of the few places Western audiences could learn about the Inca mummies and the Inca people they came from.

The Museum of Man was one of the best anthropology museums in the world. I suppose the Museum of Us...

Quick Facts: Size: Medium (2 Floors) Price: $13 Est. Time in Museum: 1.5 - 2 hours. Recommended for: Adults, Teenagers Best Feature(s): California Tower, Exhibit Designs.

The most thought-provoking museum in Balboa Park, most of the exhibits at Museum of Man focuses on historical and current social issues that affect people today. Though they do have permanent cultural exhibits that such as the Mayan and Egyptian exhibits. But this isn't a museum where all you do is look at pretty paintings or cool arts and crafts from ancient cultures. You learn alot from these exhibits and there is alot of information in video, text and other media that is conveyed here.

The strength of this museum is definitely the creativity in which they employ mixed multi-media elements and turning the exhibits into immersive environments that makes them fun and interesting to walk through. For example, the exhibit entitled 'Living with Animals' (Aug 2019), they built a fake living room because it went hand-in-hand with the theme of the domestication of animals. They also built an actual diner setting because the exhibit was discussing how food would go from the slaughterhouse to our plates. In the exhibit entitled Monsters (Aug 2019), they built a children's bedroom because of the common trope of monsters hiding under the bed. No two exhibits are designed the same, and no two displays in the same exhibit are designed the same. They really give alot of thought into designing these exhibits so that its just not text and pictures you're looking at. They throw the entire kitchen sink at you!

Going up the California Tower is a MUST! You get unparalleled views of Balboa Park and views stretching all the way to Downtown and the bay. A really good way to end your visit.

Although they usually have at least one exhibit aimed at kids, there isn't enough here for little children to enjoy for the whole visit for me to recommend this place for the entire family (for a better family oriented museum I'd recommend the Natural History Museum). However, Museum of Man is definitely in my Top 3 museums at Balboa Park. A great visit for sparking a discussion and conveying important ideas through fun and...

Sadly, I left the Museum of Us with a bad taste in my mouth. I was under the impression that this was supposed to be a museum of anthropology. I had come here hoping to celebrate and embrace culture and history, but their crown jewel, the Maya exhibit, seems more interested in making sure we know the Europeans we're really, really bad people. Don't get me wrong, I curse the Spaniards as much as the next guy for what they did to Latin America, the Philippines, etc., but this museum's displays and placards spend ALL of their time apologizing for how evil the Europeans were and NO time teaching me about Maya culture. I learned very little about the people from which these artifacts came. They make a big deal about how most museums are profiting off of stolen artifacts, how the Maya people were destroyed. I don't think there's anything wrong with acknowledging that the Spanish did a lot of terrible things, but infusing every single part of the exhibit with this negative energy just leaves me in a bad mood. Ironically, their pathetically small Egyptian exhibit doesn't involve itself in any of this hand-wringing over stolen artifacts and conquered peoples. I'm pretty sure that the ancient Egyptian civilization from which these artifacts were taken was also destroyed, yet the museum doesn't feel the need to apologize about that.

The museum is in a fairly large building, yet the exhibits are small, lacking detail, and sparsely populated. I was the only person in there on a bright Saturday morning. Many areas were blocked off and several of their interactive parts were broken. Unfortunately, this place just screams lack of maintenance and attention.

There are some truly interesting pieces of history in this museum, but the curators have chosen to focus purely on negativity instead of embracing the joy of learning about cultures, which is quite sad. Acknowledge wrongdoings, but don't dwell to the point where it...