Museum of International Folk Art

It is called the Museum of International Folk Art, not the International Folk Art Museum, and the distinction is worth getting right because the subject is not Santa Fe. It holds the largest collection of international folk art in the world, at 706 Camino Lejo on Museum Hill, and most of what is in it came from somewhere else entirely.

One Woman’s Sentence

Florence Dibell Bartlett, a Chicagoan who began coming to New Mexico in the 1920s, founded the museum and gave it its first collection: more than 2,500 objects, textiles, dress, ceramics, wood carving, painting, and jewelry. She hired John Gaw Meem, the architect who did more than anyone to fix what Santa Fe would look like, and handed the finished building to the state. It opened on September 5, 1953.

Her reason has aged better than most museum mission statements. “The art of the craftsman is a bond between the peoples of the world.” Everything the museum has done since is a test of that sentence, and it has mostly held.

The Girard Wing

Alexander Girard ran Herman Miller’s textile division from 1951 and designed the Braniff International identity, and in 1953, the year the museum opened, he moved to Santa Fe. He and his wife Susan collected folk art wherever they traveled, on a scale that stopped being private long before either of them admitted it. In 1978 they gave the museum 106,000 objects, roughly quintupling its holdings, on the condition that a wing be built to hold them.

Girard then spent two years curating and designing the installation himself. Multiple Visions: A Common Bond opened in 1982 with about ten thousand pieces arranged into villages, processions, markets, and crowds, set at every height and lit as theater rather than as evidence. It has been on view ever since. It is the strongest argument in this city that display is itself an art, and it was made by a designer of international modernism who spent the end of his working life demonstrating that the anonymous maker and the named one are doing the same job.

The Other Three Wings

The Bartlett Wing holds the founding gift. The Hispanic Heritage Wing, opened in 1989, covers the Spanish colonial and New Mexican traditions that the museum’s global sweep would otherwise leave out, and it is the part of the building that speaks directly to the city outside it. The Neutrogena Wing opened in 1998 around more than 3,000 works given by Lloyd E. Cotsen in 1994, and it includes Lloyd’s Treasure Chest, a working storage room the public is allowed to walk into, which is rarer than it sounds.

The state counts the collection at more than 135,000 objects from over 100 countries. Textiles and dress are the deepest holdings, and they are the reason this museum rewards a second visit more than a first.

On the Hill

The museum sits southeast of downtown and is not walkable from the Plaza. Its neighbors on Camino Lejo are the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. Of the four it is the only one not principally about the Southwest, which is exactly why it belongs up there: the others give you where you are, and this one gives you everywhere else. Downtown collections, the New Mexico Museum of Art among them, are a separate errand and a separate day.

One thing to keep straight. The International Folk Art Market is a different organization and a different event. It runs four days in July and now takes place in the Railyard Park, not on Museum Hill.

Common Questions

What is the museum actually called?

The Museum of International Folk Art. It is frequently written as the International Folk Art Museum, and that is not its name. It is a New Mexico state museum at 706 Camino Lejo on Museum Hill.

What is Multiple Visions: A Common Bond?

The long-term exhibition in the Girard Wing, on view since 1982. Alexander Girard designed the installation himself from the 106,000 objects he and Susan Girard gave the museum in 1978. About ten thousand pieces are shown.