El Paso Museum of Art

El Paso, Texas
My first visit to this city and its museum was an unhappy one: I was killing time waiting for a plane to San Francisco after having (I hope!) picked up a Spanish-language divorce in Juarez across the Rio Grande.

Never has architecture been so welcome an anodyne to pain. A certain Henry P. Trost put up a lot of buildings there between the world wars, including the stately old home of the late State Senator W.W. Turney which is the museum's current home.

El Pasoans know what a hidden treasure their Trost is. They've prepared an exemplary walking tour of his innovative buildings, especially in downtown El Paso--precast concrete department stores, decorative elements that would make Louis Sullivan do a double take.

In fact, I urge visitors to begin at the tourist information center in the architecturally fine new civic center just across from an equally impressive Greyhound terminal. Get the museum's Trost Street guide. Wander around and savor it before taking a bus at the Center Square out to the museum.

Unless my name is Walt Disney, you are going to notice one remarkable art-deco dime store down among the Trosts: the S.H. Kress store, a bursting rocket of polychrome ceramic. Yes, that's the same Samuel H. Kress, one of our nation's great art benefactors.

And Kress had a thing about his benefactions that I find very praiseworthy: he gave his best markets the best collection. And his El Paso is a choice array of classic European paintings, mainly Renaissance and baroque. There's Americana also--Remington and Inness, some pre-Columbian, and Mexican colonial. But the cream is their Kress.

Final hint: Cross the Rio Grande by foot. The Mexican government has set up in each of the border towns of any size--Matamoros, Juarez, Tijuana--shop/museums where the highest-quality folk crafts are sold. Many refined people are so put off by stories of the scrofulous side of these sailor service centers that they miss the incredibly rich (and relatively inexpensive) folk-art centers.

Note: The museum is closed until 1982 because of an expansion program. The one in Juarez is the best of the four I have visited along the border from East Texas to Baja, California.

It begins as a museum leading you through several areas of Mexican crafts, beginning with pre-Columbian and ending with a shop where you can purchase contemporary work. That place is one of my very favorite places in the world--a paradigm of how to blend commerce with culture to the disservice of neither.

--from 20 Museums You've Never Heard Of/Horizon Magazine 1981