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Museum of Man
Rating Details »
Neighborhood: Balboa Park
1350 El Prado
Balboa Park
(between Plaza De Panama & State Highway 163)
San Diego, CA 92101
(619) 239-2001
1350 El Prado
Balboa Park
(between Plaza De Panama & State Highway 163)
San Diego, CA 92101
(619) 239-2001
- Hours:
Mon-Sun. 10:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
- Good for Kids:
- Yes
23 reviews for Museum of Man
I love this place I was a docent (I love that word!) here for a semester so ,much fun! in the Egyptian area where the kids dress up you will see a wall puzzle.
I totally drew half of the lion on that! They would not let me do any more because, I was/ am clumsy and I kept saying "I can't draw, I don't want mess it up, etc... I ended up crating and painting the walls the rest of my time.
Still one of my favorite museums. The new rain Forrest area is my new favorite and the silver back is now second. The embryos/fetus models are still cool also.
Small, but entertaining!
We went and saw an exhibit on Aztec Gold, Trepanation and Mumification. The gardens are incredible! Overall a good way to spend an afternoon.
I think this is a good museum for an elementary school aged crowd... Any older than that, you aren't really going to learn anything or see anything that you probably haven't seen before.
Okay, I will just start this off by saying I am a huge geek who loves this museum for all the reasons that trigger complaints made by people expecting some sort of exciting Space Mountain of Anthropology Museum experience.
I was there on a Monday when many museums in the park were not open, waiting in line at the gift shop behind someone who had been "forced" to visit the MoM as a last resort, bitching about there not being art museums open. I asked if he enjoyed the two stories of displays with/of art in the MoM and he tried to kill me with the power of his mind and a catty little sneer.
It is small, intimate even. Not romantic-intimate but cozy antique tiny space intimate, with too small stairs on the steps.
It has no huge glossy space aged displays to capture the attention of the Nintendo Generation, well except for one part of the human evolution/technological advancement area, and is otherwise unsuited to people who stop reading after reaching the third syllable in a 'big word' on display placards and stamp the place boring. The Museum of Man is a time capsule to how museums used to operate. Spooky mummies with facts posted, not some hyped up CGI displaying LCD screen replaying half-assed History Channel hyped bad science. The hominin evolution statues are hilariously outdated, probably installed when Ringo Star was shooting Caveman, but get the point across nicely for people who might be totally unfamiliar with the progression.
That's the Museum of Man, love it or leave it. It has great displays which come through, is well maintained and totally unapproachable to people fixated on bright flashing displays or marinating in urban ennui.
If the Museum of Man is too small, outdated and unfun for you then petition to have it gutted and all the historic architectural and artistic elements removed and "updated". Create enough local interest to throw tax dollars into new multimillion dollar archaeology and anthropology museums (haha woo good luck) with the same curative support capabilities, rename the Museum of Man Mummyplex 5000, dumb down the displays so apathetic yuppies don't feel like idiots around their kids when failing to explaining history and science they never learned in their MBA program, and run loud themepark style commercial spots between network sitcoms to attract customers. Or just suck it up and enjoy the mummies and simple exhibits.
I give this museum an average rating. There are much better museums in the park, but this one is ok to visit. Maybe go on the Tuesday of the month that it has free admission...??? I like museums in general and don't find this museum a complete waste of time, but it was much more interesting during my 5th grade field trip than the last time I visited it.
If you want to see a video of the outside go to http://www.youtube.com...
Im not sure who acted more childlike today.
Was it the actually kids or the grown ups?
You decide.
The Museum of Man is a wonderful place to learn about who we are and where we came from. It's a large anthropology museum that couldn't have done better at summing up my college degree. I was pleased to find that it covers all four fields of anthropology: Cultural, physical, linguistic, and archaeology. The museum is very colorful and uses models, artifacts, skeletal material, and hands-on activities as learning tools. There were lots of fascinating exhibits, including mummies, skulls that featured all forms of trauma, shrunken heads, and genetics. I'd recommend this museum to anyone who is interested in the origins and diversity of our species.
Came here to look at the exhibits about evolution. Pretty interesting exhibits here.
So me and my brother land in San Diego and based on friends recommendations head to Balboa Park to check out some museums (oh why didn't we write the names of the museums down?). As we strolled into Balboa Park we came across the first museum (Museum of Man) and automatically assumed it was the one our friends were talking about. Little did we know (and maybe we should've done our research) that the whole park is filled with museums!! Given the look of the architecture from the outside, you'd think this would be a pretty decent museum. Oh were we so wrong; it was quite possibly one of the most uninteresting and most boring museums we've been to.
Turns out our friends were talking about the San Diego Museum of Art but it was a little too late after we spent 2 hours trying to find the greatness our friends were talking about in the Museum of Man (and in the process spending $20+ on admission to this place!)
If I was in second or third grade the Museum of Man would probably be cool to me. Since I am not, I found it lacking in good exhibits. My first exhibit I noticed when I walked in the museum was the red Craftsman style tool box. Cool idea in theory of putting the early "tools" of man in here (rocks, etc) but a poor way to display anything to more than one person at a time. It seems that the museum's star exhibit may be the Lemon Grove mummy. Hmmmm not really impressed with that display. I think it's a sad excuse for a museum. At least my fellow yelpers made it a fun day.
This museum is way tiny, and not particularly worth the already low admission price...but I have to admit that I've paid it at least twice just to take my sister to see the mummy room when she was in town. It's not just mummies, but shrunken heads and a petrified man among other preserved body parts. Fascinating!
There's also a lady in a little room downstairs who makes handmade tortillas which you can buy for a couple bucks. They're really good!
History was my best subject in high school, but the Museum of Man was not as impressive as I had envisioned it. I think my expectations of it were too high, because people kept telling me how awesome it was, and one of the UCSD semi-formals was even held here (resulting in thousands of dollars of damages...go figure).
I liked a few of the exhibits, but was overall unimpressed by most of them.
I would've much rather had gone to the Science Museum...but then again, I AM a science nerd. =P
Not a bad museum, by any means ...
but nothing thrilling either.
Lot's of great information though.
(I got in for free!) Thanks to Bank of America,
members just flash their little ATM cards and they're in.
How special.
But, it's only $6.00 for students, and $8.00 for adults anyways.
Uhmm, considering all that I saw
I guess I'm kinda happy I didn't have to pay.
Stars though!
For the beautiful buildings
and the serene beauty of Balboa Park!
The evolution exhibit includes a case of man-ape mockups which were produced as set pieces for the movie "the Naked Ape" (Playboy Enterprises, 1973), in which they appear as exhibits in a museum. Yes, they're not exhibits, they just play them on the silver screen, adding a bit of possibly misinformative levity to an otherwise poorly organized collection of skull casts from the great archaelogy finds.
They get 2 stars instead of 1 for a mildly interesting mummy collection including actual mummies and sarcophogi.
Man, this place needs some lovin'. With a $6 admission, I won't bitch so much, but I must say I was pretty let down by this place, as well as nearly every other museum on the row in Balboa Park.
But I gotta give props to a place that has the cojones to maintain a core exhibit focusing on human evolutionary history in a regional social climate that's getting increasingly conservative. However, even that exhibit was so confusingly laid out (despite foot print cues to follow from one section to the next) and so lacking in ... zing. It was -- in a word -- BORING. How sad.
Perhaps the most interesting thing on display when I last visited was a mostly-photograph exhibit of cross-cultural examples of body ornamentation.
I would have wanted to see the exhibit on Guatemalan weaving, but the whole exhibit was closed for a TV show filming -- bastards.
I'd seen this museum in the park for years, but never explored it due to the other much more alluring museums. At December nights (a fantastic winter event in the Park), my boyfriend and I decided to check it out. At first I made an attempt to be forgiving and stay interested. But soon after I was "underwhelmed" (thank you 10 things I hate about you) by the cheesy exhibits and simplistic approach. It presented the monkey to man evolution with life-size hairy mannequins that actually had flies stuck in the hair (not in a theatrical way, but in an old-and-negelected kind of way). The sex ed section wasn't much better. I understand the exhibits were probably designed to educate children and thus must be very visual and straightforward, but kids aren't stupid. Now that they have iphones and ipods, this isn't going to cut it.
$6 for adults and $0.50 for a freshly made corn tortilla in the Mayan history section - not a bad deal for a well-laid out, just-the-right-size museum.
I admit it, I felt guilty basking in the warm sun, right near the musuem district of SD, and felt culturally deprived just walking BY all of the museums. Turns out, the MoM assuaged that guilt in an educational way, in under an hour - enough time to make it back to the glorious sun.
Definitely a cool place to take the kids. I like the evolution exhibit, and the 'Experience an Archaeological Dig' exhibit outside. Go, and then walk around the park on yet another nice day...
*boring monkey man crickets*
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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should be free
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I also went to this museum free as a Bank of America member, but I probably wouldn't go there again. It had some interesting exhibits about the evolution of primates and of man - cro magnons, homo erectus, things like that. It would probably be a good place to bring a kid if the local public schools start banning teaching evolution or watering down their teaching of evolution.
A greatly educational evolution exhibit path is the distinctive feature of this museum. I fancy the permanent Egyptian gallery, as well. The temporary exhibits are usually as stimulating, i.e., "body ornamentation" that is showcased right now traces back the history of body adornment and its contextual significance, which is ramified to nowadays' widespread tattooing and piercing practices. This museum does a great job at showcasing relevant exhibitions.
I don't understand why I'd visit this place again.
Got to go in for free during December Nights where some of the museums offered no admission fees. Interesting walking through time, viewing the history of man, triggered some memories of things from my childhood.
