Today's Sunday Globe features The Peabody Essex Museum

What a treat to be able to report yet another feature in The Boston Globe about a Salem destination. Today's Sunday Globe featured an article about the incredible Peabody Essex Museum.

I highly recommend a visit to the PEM - whether it will be your first or fiftieth. You may be intrigued by the special exhibits, which currently include Wedded Bliss, The Marriage of Art and Ceremony; Body Politics, Maori Tattoo Today; Stage Idols, Japanese Kabuki Theater; and Gateway Bombay. These exhibits will take you on an exploration of art and cultures around the globe as you wander between galleries.

Or, perhaps you are interested in the incredible Yin Yu Tang house. The house was originally a late Qing Dynasty merchants' house located in southeastern China. It was moved - piece by piece -and assembled at PEM where it is now open to visitors.

You may be captivated by the Asian Export Art, the Maritime Art Collections, the galleries of American Decorative Arts, and the Native American Collections (to name just a few - the museum is truly extensive in its collections).

And perhaps you are like my family, which visits the PEM with no intention to stick together - each heading off to the galleries that interest us individually, and planning to rendezvous in the Atrium for lunch at a specified time. If you are visiting with children, fear not - PEM was voted one of the Best Art Museums for Children by Child Magazine. The Art & Nature Center has interactive activities for kids, and the museum regularly schedules events and programs for families.

Finally, PEM is the oldest continually operating museum in the United States. Its collections, which include 854,000 works of art, architecture, and culture, are singular among American museums. Many of the museum’s collections are considered to be among the finest in the nation, yet several have never been publicly displayed at any time since the Museum’s founding in 1799. (This data is taken from the PEM's Collections page on the pem.org web site.)

It is not possible to discover all of the magic in Salem without visiting the PEM, an institution and destination that has been at the core of Salem for more than 200 years.

Here is the link to the article that appeared in The Boston Globe:

Well supported, well attended

Five years after expansion, PEM hasn't slowed down
By Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff July 27, 2008