Worcester Art Museum

How fast can you escape the Worcester Art Museum's Arms and Armor exhibit? Look and click on the different works from the medieval period to find out. Will you gain a victorious win and escape? Or, will you be a fallen hero who brings dishonor to their kingdom? Come and play to find out!

Teuffenbach Escape Room!

There are many portraits at the Worcester Art Museum. We will look at two portraits to see what we might learn from them.

Portraits

About 20 people are involved with making the design  Can take 6-12 month to make  7,000-14,0000 The price depends on the amount of work done  Most craftsman are in their 60s and 60s 

Steps to making a Kimono

Come explore the works from around the world that will be featured in the following activities. Click on the hotspots to learn more about each work and its corresponding Visual Thinking Strategy activity. 

Art World Map

With the hotpots, we can look more closely at the details of the Worcester Wedding Kimono. Click on the hotspots to learn more. 

Creating the Worcester Wedding Kimono - A New Work of Art for the Museum

Students often read about ancient times at school. It can be difficult to picture how people lived during this time period. Seeing ancient objects at a Museum can help you to picture how people lived in the past.

What Can We Learn from Ancient Art?

The Worcester Art Museum’s collection of arms and armor is the second largest in the United States. The Museum has over 1,500 works in the armor collection. Do suits of armor seem like works that an art museum would have on display? Look at these parts of the Teuffenbach armor and think of how you might think of the objects as works of art.

Armor as Art: The Teuffenbach Armor

How do labels help visitors learn about works of art?

Labels at the Worcester Art Museum

The Worcester Art Museum is located in central Massachusetts. It is a museum where people come to see works of art from all over the world and from all different time periods. 

What is an Art Museum?

The Worcester Art Museum's exhibitions tell global stories—from art made thousands of years ago to works being created today. The Museum’s collection has over 38,000 objects, collected since the Museum opened in 1898. Students will examine a sampling of artworks from different time periods and places. They will learn more about how artworks come to a Museum, how they were created, and how they can explore and learn from them.

Museum Discovery Educator Resource Doc.pdf     

Art Museum Discovery

World History

Social Studies

Visual Arts

The Arts

The Worcester Art Museum is located at 55 Salisbury Street in Worcester, Massachusetts.

By the 1890s, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia all had art museums. Worcester philanthropist Stephen Salisbury III believed his hometown deserved one too, and he worked with other community leaders to build an art museum for Worcester. These community members wanted to create a museum “for the benefit of all.” People of all ages, walks of life, and backgrounds would see and learn about art.

The Worcester Art Museum opened on May 10, 1898. This early image was created on June 13, 1898. It shows the Worcester Art Museum's Opening Exhibition with works of art hung closely together. Does this image look like a museum you have been to? Our galleries, or rooms with works of art, have more space between the works today.

Today the Museum has all different types of artwork. Here you see a group of students learning about some of the paintings one gallery. You will also see a suit of armor in this image. The Worcester Art Museum has the second largest collection of arms and armor in the United States of America. 

Some objects, like these ancient jars from China, were originally objects that were created for people to use. They are now at the Worcester Art Museum where they are on display and no longer used. They are preserved for us to see and learn about earlier times.

A special work of art at the Worcester Art Museum is the 

This was one room of a religious community in France. It is a rare example of medieval architecture, originally from the Benedictine Priory of Saint John in west central France. The room was where a group of religious men lived together in a life of prayer, study, and reflection. People can experience stepping into a room from thousands of years ago.

The galleries at the Worcester Art Museum are set up to show different time periods. The objects in the gallery here are all from the Medieval period, which is from about 476 to 1450. 

The Worcester Art Museum has a number of portraits, or works of art that show a person. Portraits often focus on the person's face and can show part or all of the person's body. Many of the portraits at the Museum are paintings. The slide here shows students looking at portraits in a gallery that has works from the early years of the United States of America. What do you think you could learn about different times in history from portraits?

The Museum does not just have old works of art. The Museum collects works from contemporary artists - these are artists working now. The slide you see shows a mural that was painted at the Worcester Art Museum in the winter of 2024 by Nevena Prijic. She is an artist from the country of Serbia who now lives in California. She worked for a few months on the scaffolding that you see here. She is the person in the picture closest to the painting. 

Resource Kits

Object Library

Museums

Art Museum Discovery

What is an Art Museum?

The Worcester Art Museum