Museums Santa Fe has a museum for just about everybody, toddlers and teens included. With more than a dozen state and private museums to choose from, you can experience the rich blend of history, arts and cultural heritages that make our city so distinctly different. The Palace of the Governors, the country’s oldest continuously occupied building. This 400-year-old structure on the Santa Fe Plaza has played a part in Spanish Colonial, Mexican, Territorial and Statehood eras of New Mexico’s history and its collections and exhibitions vividly bring the past to life. A visit to Museum Hill on Santa Fe’s southeast side takes you to two outstanding museums devoted to Native American art, culture and traditions as well as a museum housing the world’s largest collection of international folk art.
New Mexico History Museum
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
The doors of the newly created New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe opened to the public for the first time May 24, 2009. The museum’s multi-media environment explores the early history of indigenous people, 400 years of Spanish colonization, the Mexican Period, and travel and commerce on the Santa Fe Trail. The exhibition also details the flourishing of New Mexico’s worldrenowned arts communities and the coming of the Atomic Age. “The New Mexico History Museum is the starting place for the New Mexico cultural experience,” says New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. The new museum is located directly behind the Palace of the Governors; the oldest continuously occupied public building in the U.S., right on the Santa Fe Plaza. The Palace incorporates into the 96,000 square foot expansion as the signature, and most important, artifact for the History Museum. In addition to the Palace, the museum complex includes the Palace Press, and the Fray Angelico Chavez History Library and Photo Archives. Contemporary art, such as the works of Paula Castillo and Kumi Yamashita, is also a part of the museum’s permanent collection.
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, opened to the public in July 1997, eleven years after the death of the artist from whom it takes its name. Welcoming more than 2,225,000 visitors from all over the world and being the most visited art museum in the state of New Mexico, it is the only museum in the world dedicated to an internationally known woman artist. One of the most significant artists of the 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) was devoted to creating imagery that expressed what she called “the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.” She was a leading member of the Stieglitz Circle artists, headed by Alfred Stieglitz, America’s first advocate of modern art in America. These avant-garde artists began to flourish in New York in the 1910s. O’Keeffe’s images—instantly recognizable as her own —include abstractions, large-scale depictions of flowers, leaves, rocks, shells, bones, and other natural forms, New York cityscapes, and paintings of the unusual shapes and colors of architectural and landscape forms of northern New Mexico. The Museum’s collection of over 3,000 works comprises 1,149 O’Keeffe paintings,
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