Johannesburg's museums

Map of 6 locations in Johannesburg, South Africa

Johannesburg's museum map is being rearranged while you look at it. The University of the Witwatersrand announced in September 2026 that it would pull its art museum, origins centre, planetarium and music hall into a single Braamfontein precinct, and in the same months the City of Johannesburg's plan to empty the 1910 Johannesburg Art Gallery into Museum Africa drew formal objections from the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and Friends of JAG. Here is what each institution actually holds, who keeps it, and when the doors are open.

Places in this collection

  • Fietas Museum — A two-storey house on 14th Street, the old commercial spine of the neighbourhood Johannesburgers called Fietas, now run as a museum of the…
  • Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre — A member institution of the International Alliance to End Genocide, working under the line it gives as its own purpose: memory, education,…
  • Johannesburg Art Gallery — Established in 1910 in Joubert Park and designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, this is the city's principal public art collection. A plan by the Jo…
  • Hector Pieterson Museum — The museum documents the events leading up to the Soweto uprising, and stands in Orlando West within sight of where the 16 June 1976 shooti…
  • Apartheid Museum — Catalogued as a specialised museum on apartheid, at the edge of the Gold Reef City site in southern Johannesburg. Its closures and reopenin…
  • Origins Centre — One of five Wits-run public attractions, built around the long record of human presence in southern Africa and tracing, in the university's…

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