New Mexico Museum of Art

The New Mexico Museum of Art is one museum in two buildings. The Plaza building at 107 West Palace Avenue opened in 1917 and is a landmark on its own terms. Vladem Contemporary, at 404 Montezuma Avenue in the Railyard, has been open since September 2023. Almost every confusion about this museum begins with not knowing that.

The 1917 Building

It was the first building in New Mexico dedicated to art, and it is arguably the most consequential piece of architecture in Santa Fe that is neither a church nor a seat of government. Rapp, Rapp and Hendrickson designed it as an enlarged version of the New Mexico Building they had made for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, drawing its parts from six Franciscan mission churches at Acoma, San Felipe, Cochiti, Laguna, Santa Ana, and Pecos. It opened on November 24, 1917.

The walls are not adobe. They are modern construction finished to read as adobe, which is the founding compromise of the Pueblo Revival vocabulary the city has been building in ever since. Inside is the St. Francis Auditorium. Its six murals were commissioned in 1911 by Frank Springer and Edgar Lee Hewett, designed by Donald Beauregard, who died before he could paint them, and completed by Carlos Vierra and Kenneth Chapman. They are oil on canvas, set into the walls.

The Open Door

Hewett, who directed the Museum of New Mexico, opened the building with a studio and exhibition policy that was unusual then and is rare now: local and visiting artists could work there and show there. Painters came for a wall and stayed for a life. The art town Santa Fe became, Canyon Road included, is downstream of that decision more than of any dealer’s.

The collection grew around it. The museum holds the largest body of Gustave Baumann’s work anywhere, more than a thousand prints, drawings, paintings, and the marionettes he carved, along with an important group of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. That last is worth knowing if you were planning to see her work only at the O’Keeffe Museum.

Vladem Contemporary

For a century the contemporary program had to fit inside a 1917 building designed to look older than it was. In September 2023 the museum stopped asking it to. Vladem Contemporary occupies 404 Montezuma Avenue in the Railyard, in what was the state records center and before that the Charles Ilfeld mercantile warehouse, adapted by DNCA and StudioGP into roughly ten thousand square feet of exhibition space plus the Van Mabee Education Center.

The split is the point. The Plaza building is Santa Fe’s argument for preservation, made in 1917 and won so completely that the whole downtown now answers to it. Vladem is the other argument, made on ground where nothing was cleared and the rails are still in use. One museum now holds both positions at once, seven blocks apart, and does not pretend they resolve.

Seeing Both

The Plaza building stands on the northwest corner of the Santa Fe Plaza, beside the Palace of the Governors, which means you can see it and eat within a block; Plaza Café Downtown is a minute down Lincoln Avenue. Vladem sits about seven blocks southwest, twenty minutes on foot or a short drive, and lands you next to SITE Santa Fe and the farmers market, which makes a Railyard afternoon nearly self-assembling.

If the day is going to be about collections rather than architecture, note that the state’s others are elsewhere. The Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture are both on Museum Hill, southeast of downtown and not walkable from either of these two.

Common Questions

Where is the New Mexico Museum of Art?

In two places. The 1917 Plaza building is at 107 West Palace Avenue, on the northwest corner of the Santa Fe Plaza. Vladem Contemporary is at 404 Montezuma Avenue in the Railyard, about seven blocks southwest.

What is Vladem Contemporary?

The museum’s second site, open since September 2023 and given over to contemporary art. It occupies a former state records center in the Railyard that began life as the Charles Ilfeld mercantile warehouse.