Mingei International Museum in downtown San Diego's Balboa Park has collected, conserved, and exhibited folk art, craft, and design from 141 countries since its 1978 founding, occupying the Spanish Colonial Revival House of Charm on the Plaza de Panama. The museum's 17,500-object permanent collection spans artifacts from the 3rd century BCE to the present, interpreting the Japanese mingei philosophy of beauty in everyday objects across a global cultural scope that complements the horticultural and cultural programming at the neighboring Japanese Friendship Garden & Museum. A Dale Chihuly glass installation greets visitors in the stairwell, while rotating exhibitions on the second-floor galleries have covered subjects from indigenous basket weaving to contemporary industrial design. The ground-floor Entry Level—featuring ARTIFACT restaurant, CRAFT CAFE, Shop Mingei, and an interactive Make with Mingei art station—functions as what the museum calls the living room of Balboa Park, sharing visitor traffic with the Fleet Science Center and other El Prado institutions. The most ambitious exhibitions draw on the full depth of the permanent collection to stage multi-room surveys tracing a single craft tradition across centuries and continents.