This list contains brief summaries of small and large changing exhibitions previously presented at the New Mexico History Museum. For additional information about past exhibitions, please contact the museum.
WORDS on the Edge consists of twenty-six poetry broadsides and lyrical texts addressing themes of nature and its irresponsible destruction. Twenty-six notable poets, artists, and writers have been paired with an equal number of highly regarded letterpress printers from four countries. Included in the collection are Arthur Sze, Santa Fe’s first Poet Laureate, and Thomas Leech, curator of the Palace Press.
Come be a part of the world wide celebration of our nation’s space history and learn about the role New Mexico played in it.
On display will be the Mercury Space Capsule 12B, created as a backup for the mission and on loan from the Smithsonian Institute, which illustrates the series of one-manned exploration missions leading up to the Apollo 11 lunar 8-day mission and first moon landing.
The Palace of the Governors museum will share stories of the past-and of living communities in New Mexico at the Albuquerque Museum. This must-see exhibit will display Spanish Colonial paintings, images from the dawn of photography to contemporary digital prints, nineteenth-century retablos and bultos, turn-of-the-century clothing, rare books and maps, and many more fascinating objects. Never before in its history, as a public museum, have the Palace of the Governor’s vast collections been celebrated in a comprehensive exhibition accompanied by an overarching ...
In collaboration with the crowdsourcing sculpture collective We the Builders, the New Mexico History Museum will exhibit We the Rosies: Women at Work. This exhibit, celebrating the 1940s iconic symbol Rosie the Riveter, which has stood as an international symbol of women’s labor and empowerment, will open during this year’s women’s history month. The exhibit showcases a 3D printed sculpture of Rosie created through the joint effort of an international body of 700 persons, containing 2,625 individual parts, and will include ongoing profiles of New ...
Gustave Baumann exchanged hand printed holiday cards with artist friends who lived both in Santa Fe and other parts of the world. A selection of these cards are on display in the Chávez History Library for an intimate look into the lives of the Baumann family and their friends.
Library access by appointment only.
Santa Fe is widely recognized as a city of museums. These beloved institutions and their exhibitions have long been integral to the fabric of local culture. On Exhibit: Designs That Defined the Museum of New Mexico, presents a fascinating look back at more than a century of changing exhibition design in the historic state museum system. This “exhibit about exhibits” reveals how presentation techniques evolved and helped establish the unique character of the Santa Fe’s museums.
The Atomic Histories exhibit explores the most famous events, sometimes little known stories, and inventions born here which impact our lives, and helps to recognize the remarkable contributions of thousands of people involved in writing New Mexico’s Atomic Histories for the last 75 years.
Photo courtesy of the Los Alamos Historical Society Archives
Photographer Meridel Rubenstein’s "Oppenheimer’s Chair and The Meeting" offers a thought-provoking work that weaves together two threads of history, as a feature within the exhibition; "Atomic Histories".
Before radio and television, when making music at home was the evening’s entertainment and playing the piano was considered an essential talent among the middle class, sheet music was the music consumer’s gateway to the world.” The New Mexico History Museum celebrates this era with sheet music of popular songs about the State of New Mexico, dating from the mid-19th through the mid-20th centuries, in the new exhibition The Land That Enchants Me So. The show spotlights graphically striking sheet-music covers published from 1840s through about ...
Three hands-on workshops on creating marbled paper were led by Tom Leech, curator of the Press at the Palace of the Governors, and took place at Art Street in Albuquerque, and Santa Fe Cares and Sierra Vista in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The artists and poets created original group poems inspired by the marble paper with poets Joanne Dwyer, Gary Glazner and Michelle Otero.
From the 1880s into the early 20th century, cigar manufacturers provided an avenue for the lithographic arts to flourish. Layering up to 10 colors in a stone-lithography process and even adding gold embellishments and stamped embossings, the images sold cigars through romantic landscapes, Western adventures, and iconic representations of women. In Out of the Box: The Art of the Cigar, opening Oct. 7, 2016, Palace Press Curator Thomas Leech shares primo examples to showcase the rich breadth of artwork created during the golden age of cigar box labels.
This exhibit features Mexican prints made by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (the Peoples’ Graphic Workshop) from the collection of Senator Jeff and Anne Bingaman, along with other prints by contemporary artists working with the same commitment and passion for social justice.
As Syria’s ongoing civil war, staggering death toll, and displacement of thousands of refugees threatens to destroy Syrian culture, the Palace of the Governors will display seven albums of photographs of historic sites in Syria taken between 1899 and 1909. Entitled Syria: Cultural Patrimony Under Threat, the exhibition will includes a multi-functional information kiosk with insights into Syrian people and culture.
At a time when concerts and gatherings on the West Coast gave birth to 1967’s infamous “Summer of Love,” New Mexico was experiencing its own social and environmental revolution depicted in Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest. On display through February 11, 2018, the exhibition spans the decades of the 60s and 70s exploring this influx of young people to New Mexico and the subsequent collision of cultures. Through archival footage, oral histories, photography, ephemera and artifacts, the exhibition examines this cultural revolution and asks how ...
There is no shortage of photographs documenting the horrors of the Vietnam War. In fact, between military photographers and the free press, millions of photographs of the Vietnam conflict were taken between 1962 and 1975. But, there are very few that document the war from the perspective of a young gay man serving in the United States Army.
Shrouded in myth, the artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004), an iconic figure in 20th-century art, was emotionally and artistically tortured, exquisitely sensitive yet socially inept. Canadian born, she started to make a name for herself in the New York art scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but in 1967, abandoned her career for a reclusive life in the New Mexico desert. She did not return to her work for nearly a decade. Several years after she began creating art again, photographer Donald Woodman met her and remained a fixture in her life from 1977 through 1984. In ...
In 1492, Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued a royal edict ordering all Jews to either leave the country or convert to Catholicism. The Spanish Inquisition (and later, the Portugese and Mexican Inquisitions) stood ready to persecute anyone who failed to abide. Violators would endure prisons, torture and death. Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities, opening May 22, 2016, leaps into the ensuing diaspora, a journey that stretches back to biblical times. For the first time, a major institution tells the ...
Take a ride into the creative reimaginings of American steel as captured in photographs, hubcaps, hood ornaments, car show banners and, yes, actual cars. Lowriders, Hoppers, and Hot Rods: Car Culture of Northern New Mexico at the New Mexico History Museum, focuses on mobile works of art and their makers—home-grown Nuevomexicanos who customize, detail, paint and upholster these favorite symbols of Hispanic culture.
In 2009, photographer Alan Pearlman set out on a quest to capture the soul of Santa Fe in a series of staged portraits. Some of the results take center stage as archival pigment prints in the New Mexico History Museum’s Mezzanine Gallery, March 13–September 18, 2016. Santa Fe Faces: Alan Pearlman Photographs features a selection from 90 portraits he took between 2009 and 2013. Included among them are images of flamenco artist Juan Siddi and Turquoise Trail rancher Archie West. Through them, Pearlman aimed to reveal a moment in the City Different’s ...
The Palace Press presents a special exhibition in collaboration with the New Mexico Museum of Art’s First Folio! The Book that Gave Us Shakespeare. The Book’s the Thing: Shakespeare from Stage to Page offers a multi-part exhibit with a hands-on twist: The printers make facsimiles of a First Folio page using a replica “Gutenberg” wooden hand press. (Lucky visitors can make their own prints for a take-home treat.) In addition, members of the Santa Fe Book Arts Group have crafted contemporary art books inspired by the works of Shakespeare. And ...
One of the staples of desert life is the presence—or scarcity—of water. Its importance can be seen across eastern New Mexico, where the Pecos River strives to quench a fragile, 926-mile riparian environment. Along the Pecos, a collage of photographs and sounds, opens June 19, 2015 on the second floor of the New Mexico History Museum. Developed by photographer Jennifer Schlesinger and the late composer Steven M. Miller, the materials were recently donated to the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, whose Photo Legacy Project collects the work of ...
Civil War battles raged across America’s northern and southern states as Texas Confederates launched a plot: Head north and west through the New Mexico Territory with hopes of seizing California’s goldfields and sea ports. In 1862, battles erupted in Mesilla, Valverde, and Glorieta. Confederate forces briefly occupied the Palace of the Governors. Despite such victories, breaks in supply chains forced the Texans to retreat. While the carnage of Shiloh, Manassas and Gettysburg roiled the nation, New Mexico’s role in the Civil War faded—like the ...
Gustave Baumann is one of the most recognized and beloved names associated with the Santa Fe art world in the 20th century. For more than five decades, beginning in 1918, the internationally renowned printmaker cultivated friendships with other artists that were full of colorful, artistic, humorous and small-town flavor—all of it brought to life in holiday greeting cards they made for one another. With guileless good humor and steady craft, the cards captured the personal lives and preoccupations that encapsulate the memories and spirit of their times. In ...
In August 1940, talk of war swirled around Camp Luna near Las Vegas, N.M. The 1,800 men of New Mexico’s 200th Coast Artillery Regiment gathered there to train one last time on home soil before heading to the Philippines. A photographer was there, capturing images of youth and dedication, young men unaware of the ordeals they soon would face. On Sept. 16 through Oct. 12, 2014, the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives will mount a special exhibition at the Jean Cocteau Cinema featuring 10 of those images. The exhibit represents a collaboration between the ...
A 1960s’ ecclesiastical wave of urban renewal inspired mission churches throughout the Americas to undergo renovations and, all too often, cast off centuries-old artwork. Charles W. Collier, a cultural attaché to Bolivia, and his wife, Nina Perera Collier, began purchasing and obtaining pieces that eventually formed the backbone of the International Institute of Iberian Colonial Art, once based at their Los Luceros estate in northern New Mexico. In 2005, with the promised construction of spacious galleries and a state-of-the-art collections vault at the ...
Museums often focus on how we worked, how we fought, the businesses we built, and the challenges we overcame – the adult side of life. But before we became hard workers, everyone was a child, and every child shaped his or her play-world with toys. From the homemade or passed down to those bought new, toys deeply impact how we fill our childhood worlds. The History Museum collections contain a range of examples of how we played, and in observance of our fifth anniversary, we’ll display some of the most exquisite pieces in an installation in our front ...
In an age when every cell phone can take a respectable picture, cameras as low-tech as an oatmeal box still beguile a legion of practitioners, both artistic and documentarian. With roots in the ancient discovery of the camera obscura, pinhole photography has enchanted artists from the 1880s through today. Opening April 27 through Jan. 10, 2016, Poetics of Light: Pinhole Photography, in the Herzstein Gallery of the New Mexico History Museum, explores a historical art form that exemplifies thoroughly contemporary ideals: Do-it-yourself handmade technology with a dash of ...
Beginning with his early years working as a research photographer at the Sacramento Peak Solar Observatory in southern New Mexico, photographer Donald Woodman honed his photographic vision first through stars and clouds and then through sandy soil, majestic peaks and his own interior life. Donald Woodman: Transformed by New Mexico explores that journey through a series of photographs on exhibit February 23 through October 12, 2014, in the New Mexico History Museum’s Mezzanine Gallery. Transformed by New Mexico is one of the commemorations of the History ...
When America needed hard workers, the cowboy was there. The job was dirty and difficult, low-paid and lowly regarded. But when an America torn by the Civil War needed a hero to unite its soul, the unassuming cowboy was an unlikely—and ultimately lasting—pick. Since riding out of Spanish horse culture, he’s been an itinerant hired hand, an outlaw, a movie star, a rodeo athlete, a radio yodeler, and a rhinestoned disco diva. He’s been Spanish, Mexican, African American, Anglo, male, female, straight, and gay. His image has been co-opted to sell ...
The novels of German author Karl May served as trail guides to the mystique of the American West and even today are celebrated in European festivals and theme parks. His books have outsold those of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey combined and were beloved by the likes of Albert Einstein, Herman Hesse, Fritz Lang, and Franz Kafka. But there’s a hitch: May never visited the West. Nevertheless, his faith in the land of cowboys and Indians nurtured an entire continent’s love for it. From Nov. 18, 2012, to Feb. 9, 2014, the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of ...
As havens of spirit and space, shrines have long claimed hallowed ground in the vast New Mexico landscape. In Altared Spaces: The Shrines of New Mexico, from Sept. 30, 2012, through Feb. 10, 2013, Jack Parsons, Donald Woodman, and Siegfried Halus exhibit their explorations into these special places. The exhibit augments the spirits expressed in the ongoing exhibitions, Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible and Contemplative Landscape in the Herzstein Changing Exhibits Gallery. The photographers kick off the exhibit on Sunday, September 30, with a 2 pm ...
Since the Civil War, photographers have tried to capture the lives of Native American peoples, resulting in some of the most beautiful and elegant portraits in the collections of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. More than 50 of these images will be on display from May 18 through November 4, 2012, in Native American Portraits: Points of Inquiry, a salon-style exhibition in the History Museum’s Mezzanine Gallery. Together, the images document the changing perceptions of Native peoples over a span of almost 100 years. view the online exhibition »
From January 6 through November 25, 2012, the New Mexico History Museum commemorates New Mexico’s 1912 entry into the Union with 47 Stars, a collection of exhibits that includes the officially unofficial 47-star flag. 47 Stars includes long-term exhibits and a tongue-in-cheek front-window installation to help celebrate the state’s Centennial.
From a Spanish government that never quite knew where to draw its northern colony’s borders to a Mexican government that disagreed with where the lines eventually were drawn to a Texas Republic that wanted to claim the Rio Grande, Santa Fe, and much of eastern New Mexico, the U.S. government eventually managed to carve out the trusty rectangle we now know as New Mexico. Between the Lines: Culture and Cartography on the Road to Statehood opens Thursday, January 5 and will be on view through May 4, 2012, in the Governor’s Gallery on the fourth floor of the ...
Set on our mezzanine level, The Letter, the Word & the Book is a small exhibition that complements Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible by highlighting other 20th- and 21st-century practitioners of a centuries-old craft. Using calligraphy, engravings, enameling and more, the artists featured put a contemporary twist on documents ranging from handbills to Bibles.
New: Exhibition’s run extended to December 30, 2012. Considered the Sistine Chapel of the modern era and overseen by the Benedictine monks at Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota, Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible features portions of the first modern-day Bible entirely handwritten and illuminated in 500 years. World-renowned calligrapher Donald Jackson, senior scribe to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Crown Office at the House of Lords, serves as the project’s artistic director from his scriptorium in Wales. Also on exhibit will be ...
Contemplative Landscape is a photographic exploration of how people have responded to and interacted with New Mexico’s landscape through art, architecture and sacred rituals. Drawing on works from the Photo Archives at the Palace of the Governors and contemporary photographers, the exhibition prominently features the work of Tony O’Brien, whose 1994-95 sojourn at a New Mexico monastery forms the heart of his new book, Light in the Desert: Photographs from the Monastery of Christ in the Desert (Museum of New Mexico Press), debuting with the ...
Blending an eclectic mix of Eastern and Western poetry and printing techniques, From a Distant Road features hand-colored Japanese albumen prints and original haiga by Santa Fe poet John Brandi. The exhibit runs Sept. 16-March 4, 2012, in the John Gaw Meem Room. The exhibit includes: Eighteen of Brandi’s contemporary haiga (haiku poems accompanied by brush art work) that find their source in the poet-painters of 17th-century Japan. The haiga will be displayed on papers marbled by Palace Press Curator Tom Leech in the Japanese technique of suminagashi (black ink ...
The storybook history of the American West is a male-dominated narrative of drifters, dreamers, hucksters, and heroes—a tale that relegates women, assuming they appear at all, to the distant background. Home Lands: How Women Made the West upends this view to remember the West as a place of homes and habitations brought into being by the women who lived there. From ancient pueblos to modern suburbs, women have shaped the Western landscape through choices about how to sustain home, family, and community. Home Lands, organized by the Autry National Center of Los ...
The kitchen has long been called the heart of the home. From cooking one-pot meals over an open fire to microwaving a pre-packaged dinner, the kitchen is the focal point for family gatherings. Heart of the Home, an installation in the front window of the History Museum features the hearth’s importance in our daily lives over time, using kitchen-related items from our collections. The exhibit joins the museum’s Women of the West summer celebration, highlighted by the exhibit Home Lands: How Women Made the West in the second-floor Albert and Ethel ...
Since the 1860s, African Americans have been a significant presence in our state. The exhibition, New Mexico’s African American Legacy: Visible, Vital and Valuable, highlights the contributions of African Americans to New Mexico. Focused on Albuquerque, Las Cruces, and the brief, 19th-century community known as Blackdom, the exhibit reveals the iridescent threads African Americans have woven into this state’s cultural quilt. Curated by Clarence Fielder and Terry Moody, along with Brenda Ballon Dabney and Rita Powdrell, with graphics by Charlie Kenneson, ...
In conjunction with Home Lands: How Women Made the West, the museum’s Mezzanine Gallery will feature the work of Albuquerque photographer Ann Bromberg and Raton author Sharon Niederman, who have documented the lives of 11 ranch women who have "cow-girled" or owned ranches in the state over the past 50 years. Through black-and-white photographs and essays, the often-underestimated role of women in the West comes to life through the women’s dynamic contributions to the environment, their multicultural families, and their economic survival in a "boots on the ...
On March 5, 2007, a car bomb exploded on Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad, Iraq, killing 30 people and wounding over 100 others. Al-Mutanabbi Street was for centuries the center of Baghdad bookselling, the heart and soul of Baghdad’s literary and intellectual community. The Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition, formed in April 2007, sent out a call to letterpress printers to craft a visual response to this attack. The response was immediate, and over 40 printers, including three from New Mexico, enthusiastically answered that first call with a powerful edition of ...
A Passionate Light: The Polaroids of H. Joe Waldrum is a special exhibition shared by two museums – The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History and the New Mexico History Museum. On view at The Albuquerque Museum and in the Mezzanine Gallery at the New Mexico History Museum from January 30 through April 10, 2011, the exhibition explores Waldrum’s own exploration of SX-70 Polaroid monoprints, including his studies of northern New Mexico’s adobe churches.
The proud history of the USS New Mexico stands front and center in La Ventana Gallery through May 9, with A Noble Legacy: The USS “New Mexico.” The special exhibition includes a hand-crafted model of the New Mexico (BB-40), a battleship that saw significant action in World War II; items related to the new USS New Mexico (SSN-779), a nuclear submarine; photographs from both ships; and a short documentary by KNME-TV telling BB-40’s dramatic story.
The New Mexico History Museum and Department of Cultural Affairs proudly announce that El Archivo General de Indias (the General Archive of the Indies) in Seville, Spain, has chosen Santa Fe for the American debut of El Hilo de la Memoria (“The Threads of Memory”) an exhibit of rare documents, illustrations and maps detailing Spain’s early presence in North America. The exhibit – nearly 140 documents spanning Ponce de León’s first contact in Florida through New Mexico’s incorporation as a U.S. Territory – will ...
In 1519, Hernán Cortés and a small group of Spanish soldiers made first contact with the Aztecs. The stories they sent back to Europe detailing the wealth and sophistication of the Aztec empire astonished their countrymen – and fed 300 years of efforts to write and re-write the story of the Mexican Conquest. From Oct. 1 through Jan. 23, 2011, the History Museum’s Triangle Gallery will present Imagining Mexico: From the Aztec Empire to Colonial New Spain, an original exhibit featuring books, prints and maps from the Fray Angélico ...
Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Seton dedicates itself to telling the often overlooked story of the conservationist, author, artist, lecturer and co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Ernest Thompson Seton’s impact on America’s conservation movement was immeasurable but, today is largely forgotten. Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Seton sets out to change that.
A yearlong set of workshops and lectures supports the exhibit.
Now 400 years old, Santa Fe was once an infant city on the remote frontier. Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time, on long-term exhibit in the Palace of the Governors, explores the archaeological evidence and historical documentation of the City Different before the Spanish arrived, as well as at the settling of the first colony in San Gabriel del Yungue, the founding of Santa Fe and its first 100 years as New Mexico’s first capital. Co-curated by Josef Diaz of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors and Stephen Post of the DCA/Office of ...
"Fashioning New Mexico," the inaugural exhibition in the New Mexico History Museum’s Changing Gallery, explores the clothes we wore over nearly two centuries of life’s milestones -- christenings, weddings, military service, opera openings and more. A variety of interactive stations challenge visitors to tie a corset or check out a virtual image of themselves in one of the collection’s outfits. The clothing and accessories have been collected for the last century. This exhibition marks the first time they have been on display.
The Palace of the Governors is partnering with Santa Fe Community College on the exhibition, Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe, as their contribution to Santa Fe’s celebration of its 400th anniversary.
Treasures of Devotion/Tesoros de Devoción contains bultos, retablos, and crucifijos dating from the late 1700s to 1900 which illustrate the distinctive tradition of santo making in New Mexico introduced by settlers from Mexico.
The Old Spanish Trail was primarily a horse and mule pack route linking the village of Santa Fe to the Pueblo of Los Angeles. The trail evolved from a network of indigenous trade routes and exploratory routes that crossed the modern states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California.
Though the source of the Segesser Hide Paintings is obscure, their significance cannot be clearer: the hides are rare examples of the earliest known depictions of colonial life in the United States. Moreover, the tanned and smoothed hides carry the very faces of men whose descendants live in New Mexico today...
Divine intercession, miracles, blessings, and gestures of appreciation: retablos and ex-votos were a main form of devotion to saints and the Holy Family for nineteenth-century Mexican families.