The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture is the public face of the Laboratory of Anthropology, the state of New Mexico’s research collection of Southwestern Native art and material culture. It stands at 708 Camino Lejo on Museum Hill, and it is one of the four museums in the Museum of New Mexico system.

A Collection First, a Museum Afterward

The Laboratory of Anthropology was founded in 1927 with money from John D. Rockefeller Jr., as a research institution rather than an exhibiting one, and from 1931 it occupied a building by John Gaw Meem, in the Pueblo Revival manner he did more than anyone to establish as the Santa Fe idiom. It merged with the Museum of New Mexico in 1947. Meanwhile the collection kept growing: more than 70,000 catalogued archaeological, ethnographic, and fine art objects, and, because the Laboratory is the state repository for material excavated on state land, millions of further artifacts held in bulk from thousands of sites.

For sixty years there was almost nowhere to show any of it. The exhibition building opened in 1987, next door to the Laboratory, at roughly 31,000 square feet. That sequence explains the museum. The collection came first and the galleries were built to serve it, which is the reverse of how most museums are assembled, and it is why the holdings are so much deeper than the wall space.

Here, Now and Always

The core exhibition occupies the 8,400 square foot Amy Rose Bloch Wing. It first opened in 1997, was then taken apart and rebuilt from the ground up, and reopened in July 2022. More than sixty Native advisers worked on the reinstallation, and the result shows it in the grammar: the labels are largely first person, and the organizing principle is community rather than chronology or material type. Voices from the nineteen New Mexico Pueblos and from Diné, Apache, Ysleta del Sur, Hopi, Paiute, and O’odham communities are attributed by name.

Something over six hundred objects are on view, across ceramics, basketry, jewelry, textiles, painting, and contemporary fashion. The argument running through all of it is plain, and it is one a great many collections of this kind still manage to avoid: these are living communities with a present tense, not cultures to be reported in the past.

Getting There

Museum Hill sits southeast of downtown, off Old Santa Fe Trail, about ten minutes by car and a long uphill walk otherwise. Three other museums share the same short road: the Museum of International Folk Art, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. They are close enough to walk between, and the shared plaza between them has one of the better long views west across the city.

For current work by the same communities, the Santa Fe Indian Market fills the Plaza each August, and the Whitehawk antique art shows run earlier.

Common Questions

What is the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture?

A state museum on Museum Hill in Santa Fe, and the public exhibition wing of the Laboratory of Anthropology, which is New Mexico’s research collection of Southwestern Native art and material culture.

What is Museum Hill?

A cluster of four museums on Camino Lejo, southeast of downtown Santa Fe: the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, the Museum of International Folk Art, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

What is Here, Now and Always?

The museum’s core exhibition, first opened in 1997 and rebuilt with more than sixty Native advisers before reopening in July 2022. It is organized by community rather than by chronology.