Since 2003, the Güstrow City Museum has had a new location: it is located above the city archives in the hospital of a country workhouse built in 1826.
The new permanent exhibition makes visible the historical significance of the town as a center of intellectual, political and artistic debate, as well as its privileged position within the state of Mecklenburg. Special features include the 12,000-sheet collection of playbills and a large part of the artistic estate of the Güstrow-born painter, copyist and restorer Otto Vermehren (1861-1917), who was director of the restoration workshops of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence from 1900. In addition, the museum shows the medieval Güstrow as well as the representation of the history of the residence in the 16th and 17th centuries, the period of the wars of liberation in 1813/14 and a collection of German expressionists. Individual exhibitions show the life and work of Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785-1847), a German Romantic painter born in Güstrow, and the poet John Brinckman (1814-1870), co-founder of the new Low German literature.
