Museums & Galleries in Austin

To avoid last year's embarrassment of inventing modern art 90 years after the fact, it might do you good to visit an art museum and see what art movements already exist. Marvel and muse among the aesthetically astute with today's Groupon: for $30, you'll get a yearlong household membership to both locations of the Austin Museum of Art. Benefits include:

The tale of the Austin Children's Museum begins in 1983, when a band of parents and teachers started setting up educational exhibits and children's activities throughout the city. This “museum without walls” stretched into schools, parks, and malls, delighting children and families with a sense of whimsy and a place where play was rewarded. In the years that followed, the museum shed its nomadic beginnings and found a permanent home inside the pleasant green walls of the Dell Discovery Center. Firmly rooted, its exhibits have entertained and enlightened more than 800,000 youngsters and their parents while earning praise from the writers of Little Austinite.

Today, the sprawling 12,500-square-foot facility is a kaleidoscope of color and lights, where whippersnappers play with giant building blocks, cobble recycled materials into crafts, and marvel at golf balls as they soar through loops and shoots. Others explore the miniature Global City, where they take on roles such as veterinarians in the pet clinic, cooks in the diner, or stray raccoons hiding in the grocery store.

Throughout the week, a team of educators leads Discovery Time, guiding lads and lasses through kid-friendly science experiments that launch paper helicopters and make slime. The museum also hosts Storytime, where grownups read playful stories aloud to encourage creativity and instill a love of literature in young readers.

Featured on AustinBoredKids.com, The Dinosaur Park was sparked by the passion of two tiny dinosaur enthusiasts. One 3-year-old boy’s interest in dinosaurs evolved into a passion so strong that it also took hold of his younger sister, leading their parents to hatch the plans for what would soon become The Dinosaur Park. In an outdoor museum setting, a path leads the way through exhibits that include life-size dinosaur replications donning skin and color variations that give a better idea of how these prehistoric giants lived and survived their awkward teen years. More than 15 replicas inhabit the woods, including a 28-foot triceratops, a 6-foot velociraptor, and a 40-foot T. rex. The displays also include Texas-native dinos such as the iguanodon and the coelophysis. Other activities such as a playground, a fossil dig, and a gift store await visitors after they walk the trail.

When Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels arrived in central Texas in 1845 to build an opulent home for his new fiancée, the German colonist could hardly have imagined that he would instead establish a town whose vibrant history carries on to this day. The Sophienburg Museum & Archives—named after the Princess of Salm-Salm who would never see her castle in person—now overflows with photographs, maps, and documents that chronicle the early days of New Braunfels and Comal County. The area’s cultural heritage is on full display in museum exhibits that house artifacts ranging from an antique carriage to Price Carl’s extensive collection of pickled lederhosen.

After exploring the intimate museum galleries, visitors can head to the archives to peruse one of the world’s largest repositories of information about the wave of German migration that swept over central Texas in the 19th century. A veritable forest of family trees and county records take root in a 1,200-book reference library, where visitors can hack through the genealogical fauna to trace their ancestry back to famous explorers and exiled Prussian pop stars.