Boston has many eclectic museums, from the interactive Boston Children’s Museum to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, with its collection of 50,000 works.

Boston

You’ll also find the New England Aquarium, with a large, four-story tank that recreates the aquatic environment of the ocean and allows visitors to touch a live ray.

Visitors can see sharks, Beluga whales, and a recreated Caribbean reef at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. Fans of basketball and baseball won't miss the Chicago Sports Museum.

Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago, open since 1879, showcases art from all around the world and across eras. The Field Museum covers topics from climate change to dinosaurs to fossils.

Originally built as a home in the early 1800s, the Taft Museum of Art is now a national landmark with a compact collection of art from masters like Goya and Sargent.

Cincinnati

The nostalgic American Sign Museum celebrates over a century of signs across America and the work that goes into making them with a functioning neon workshop.

The Cincinnati Art Museum traces more than 6,000 years of humans making things, and its collection numbers an impressive 67,000 pieces of art.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has exhibits with stills, memorabilia, videos, and interactive booths. In The Garage, musicians can jam with instruments.

Cleveland

Perhaps the most eye-popping spectacle in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is the recreation of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” used in a seminal performance in Berlin in 1990.

Elsewhere, visitors will also enjoy the Cleveland Museum of Art (with a stunning atrium) and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Architects Tadao Ando, Philip Johnson, and Louis I. Kahn each designed museums in Fort Worth. Johnson designed the modernist Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Fort Worth

The Kimbell Art Museum, drafted by Kahn, is an iconic Museum with a swooping form, vaulted rooflines, skylights, and interior courtyards that let the spaces breathe.

The minimalist Modern Art Museum, designed by Ando, seems to hover on top of the water. The buildings almost look like lit lanterns floating on a lake at night.