After a fulfilling museum visit, always be sure to exit through the gift shop. Filled with books, prints, posters, arty swag, and goodies of all kinds, these stores allow museum-goers to bring a bit of their experiences in the galleries home. Importantly, they also help sustain museums and make it possible for art to be publicly available to their communities. We’ve gathered just a few of our favorite museum stores, some carefully curated, for you to support below on Museum Store Sunday. To find more shops in your area, visit museumstoresunday.org.

The Underground Museum

Los Angeles, California

Founded by the artists Noah and Karon Davis, The Underground Museum was born out of four converted storefronts in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles and offers free classes to the local community, as well as food distribution and events for adults, children, and families in its space and garden. The Museum’s bookstore offerings reflect their radical ethos, with a tightly-edited selection of art catalogues and books on activism, histories of incarceration, the Black experience in America, and much more.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Bentonville, Arkansas

Distinctly attuned to its local community and environment, Crystal Bridges’s museum store boasts hand-crafted objects by regional artisans, ranging from woodwork to hand-thrown pottery as well as the standard fare: art prints, books, home décor, jewelry, etc. The museum store also hosts workshops by these artisans, with an upcoming event on instrument-making. Designed by the Arkansan architect Marlon Blackwell, the shop’s Cherrywood ribs are meant to resemble the underside of a mushroom.

Hong Kong Museum of Art

Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Museum of Art’s bookshop reflects the city’s unique cultural heritage: It offers visitors (in person and online) semi-traditional Chinese wares, books about Chinese art, architecture, and visual culture, original artwork by local artists, and books and objects that reflect on the idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong.

Image above: Photo by Lie Fhung

Royal Academy of Arts

London, United Kingdom

An independent charity led by practicing artists and architects, the Royal Academy of Arts’s shop includes wares for both appreciating art and creating it. Their RA Editions program allows shoppers to collect works from new and important artists working today, as part of the Royal Academy or as invited guests. The Royal Academy also publishes limited-edition books for sale at the shop, and includes edits of the store by their member artists.

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

Amherst, Massachusetts

A delight off the beaten path: co-founded by The Very Hungry Caterpillar author Eric Carle and his wife Barbara, the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art’s bookshop curates a wide selection of picture books alongside cheery classroom accessories for educators, children’s clothing, and Very Hungry Caterpillar merch (including handsome baseball hats and drawstring bags). Their picture books include many titles about the lives of artists, from Ruth Asawa to Jean Michel-Basquiat.

Image above: Courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

Studio Museum in Harlem

New York, New York

Despite its temporary closure for the construction of its new David Adjaye-designed building, The Studio Museum in Harlem’s online store continues to provide prints, publications, apparel, and home goods aligned with its mission to foster connections between the museum’s community and its collections and programming. Notable offerings include a Chris Ofili tea towel, a literary gift set by Julie Mehretu, and their Studio Museum gift set, discounted for the holidays.

Jeu de Paume

Paris, France

Located in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris, Jeu de Paume exhibits “all forms of mechanical and electronic imagery”—anything ranging from photography, cinema, video, internet art, etc. The institution’s interests are reflected in the bookstore, which sells Jeu de Paume’s beautifully designed exhibition catalogues, books about the photographers in their collection, photography-related merch, and basic film cameras. The shop also supplies informative, programming-related titles (for example: screenings of Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick’s work comes with an edit of books including Irish Cinema: A Postcolonial European Expression and Between Truth and Fiction: The Films of Vivienne Dick).

Image above: © Jeu de Paume. Photo by Adrien Chevrot

Nasher Sculpture Center

Dallas, Texas

For the holiday season, the Nasher Sculpture Center’s museum store opened a holiday pop-up presented with the design distributor AMEICO through January 9, 2022. Some notable items include incense matches from Kobe Match Co., a Bauhaus-era Christmas Ornament set, and classic Braun analogue alarm clocks. Beyond that, the shop also stocks well-designed home goods, books and exhibition catalogues, and, not insignificantly, an extensive selection of reading glasses. If you visit in person, do be sure to check out the Carol Bove exhibition, on view until January 9, 2022.

Image above: Courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

San Francisco, California

One of the most important art institutions on the west coast, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s museum store stocks anything from Finnish designer Alvar Aalto’s infamous stools to Diego Rivera weekenders. With their retrospective of Joan Mitchell’s career currently on view, the store’s inventory now includes books on Mitchell’s life and work (such as Ninth Street Women and Joan Mitchell: I Carry My Landscapes Around With Me) as well as journals, totes, and note cards decorated with Mitchell’s complex abstract paintings. ●

Cover image: A photograph of Jeu de Paume’s bookshop, Paris. © Jeu de Paume. Photo by Adrien Chevrot