These are my 11 must-follow art museums
Spice up your feed
Hi, I’m Hunter and I curate the Yello newsletter, Twitter, and Instagram. Subscribe to get the latest in visual politics delivered to your inbox:
There’s an art to curating the perfect art museum Instagram account.
It should be a great digital art experience in and of itself. It should educate and delight. Far from being a replacement for the in-person museum, though, it should have you hitting the save button and planning your next art adventure.
These are my 11 favorite art museums to follow on IG. All are American except one, and I’m sorry, I love my country, but the best art museum account on all of Instagram is French, and this list wouldn’t be complete without it.
1. @phxart
Phoenix Art Museum is known for its fashion design collection, with nearly 6,000 objects, plus its art of the American West. Sometimes, the two even intersect, like in Angela Ellsworth’s “Seer Bonnet VI” (2009), a pioneer bonnet by way of Chromatica made from pearl corsage pins and fabric.
2. @cooperhewitt
Cooper Hewitt is Smithsonian’s New York City design museum, and their feed is a daily dose of design history, with an emphasis on textiles, tech, and posters. They also introduced me to Climate Crisis, a 2020 typeface designed by Eino Korkala and Daniel Coull that melts as its weight decreases, based on historic data and scientific projections about ice in the Arctic Sea between 1979 and 2050.
3. @artinstitutechi
The Art Institute of Chicago is one of America’s great art museums, home to work like Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942) and Grant Woods’ “American Gothic” (1930), plus plenty of Picassos. This is the museum where Ferris and friends went in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, so for the best viewing experience, have The Dream Academy’s “Please, Please, Please (Let Me Get What I Want)” playing in your music streaming app of choice in the background while scrolling.
4. @smithsonian
The Smithsonian’s flagship account posts from across the institution’s 21 museums and the National Zoo, so you’ll get some dinosaur bones and zoo animals mixed in with art and American history. The above outfits, from the Museum of American History, were made by the Student Vote Project in 1972 to encourage young people to vote in the first presidential election following the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18.
5. @museumofneonart
Who doesn’t love some good vintage neon signage? The Museum of Neon Art in Glendale, Calif., has hundreds of neon artifacts and art, including the 1929 Brown Derby sign once located at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, and Roxy Rose’s “Lady Liberty” (2021) above.
6. @smithsoniannpg
My personal favorite Smithsonian museum is the National Portrait Gallery because of its presidential and pop star portraits. Follow to brush up on great Americans, like George Washington, Neil Armstrong, and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. A 2003 poster promoting Beyoncé’s debut album Dangerously in Love is in the museum’s collection, as is Will Cotton’s candy-flavored portrait of Katy Perry and Jeri Heiden’s 1990 photo of Madonna for “Vogue.”
7. @guggenheim
No American art museum posts more selfies than the Guggenheim. I get it, its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed bod is a work of art unto itself, designed to be a “temple of the spirit,” and described by Wright as an “archeseum.” The Guggenheim account mixes art with architecture.
8. @gettymuseum
My personal art tastes lean contemporary to ultra-contemporary, but L.A.’s Getty Museum is an exception. The Getty’s collection is oooooooooooold — their oldest object is a Neolitic standing figurine dating to the 6th or 5th millennium B.C. — and they have antiquities like this Roman statue of Venus from the 2nd century A.D.
9. @thebroadmuseum
The Broad pops with Lichtensteins, Basquiats (his 1983 “Eyes and Eggs” is above), and Jeff Koons’ “Ballon Dog (Blue),” and they have not one, but two of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. Downtown L.A.’s contemporary art gallery is fun and colorful, and “the veil,” the honeycomb-like structure on its building’s facade designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is the only Instagram backdrop you’d ever need.
10. @philamuseum
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is famous for its steps that Rocky ran up, but it’s even better inside. Their collection is solid, with current exhibitions on Jasper Johns and Emma Amos: Color Odyssey, which includes Amos’ 1982 “Equals” (above).
11. @museelouvre
The Louvre is the most visited art museum in the world, and I’m obsessed with their account. If you can’t make it to Paris, their captions are mini art history lessons written in both French and English, and their choice of photos show unique perspectives on their world-class collection, from Winged Victory and the Mona Lisa, and beyond.
What are some of your favorite art museum accounts that I missed?
I wrote in this week’s newsletter about how the U.S. government’s redacted photos of the most expensive album ever are art. You can read it here.
Yello is better with friends. Share this post:
Subscribe to Yello: