Located in Costa Mesa's neighboring city of Santa Ana, the Bowers Museum is a cultural art center that everyone can enjoy. The museum’s guiding philosophy is to help people study other cultures so that we can learn more about ourselves and the world in which we all live. The Bowers Museum sponsors various community events and offers many permanent art exhibitions, special art exhibitions, art classes, lectures, children’s art programs and music education programs.
The Bowers’ permanent art collection contains more than 100,000 examples of African works of art, South Pacific art, Asian art, Native American arts and crafts, pre-Columbian art, and California plein-air painting. Special exhibitions presented at the Bowers Museum have included Terra Cotta Warriors: Guardians of China’s First Emperor, Secret World of the Forbidden City, and Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt. Including its collection of objects related to the history of Orange County, the Bowers Museum now holds in its permanent collection more than 130,000 works of art. The museum is proud of the partnerships it has formed with other famous museums such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Shanghai Museum and the British Museum because these partnerships will enable the Bowers Museum to bring many more traveling art exhibitions to Southern California.
Bowers Museum was rated Best Museum in Orange County in OC Weekly’s 2011 Best of OC.
