Museum of New Mexico

If I could found a graduate school of tourism administration dedicated to taking the tacky t out of tourism, I'd found it in Santa Fe. It's not a poor man's town, but there are clean hotels near the bus station for less than two figures a night, off season. Still, it doesn't cost anything to look at great art in its museums or ogle first-class crafts in the shops, for that matter.
I almost landed myself in debtor's prison there when I impulsed for a $200 Navajo rug--black-and-white stripes--still the premier throw in my international rug collection. And I met Laura Gilpin's work for the first time in Santa Fe; that age and soul mate of Georgia O'Keeffe was a one-person crusade against geriatric despair. She took up where Edward T. Curtis left off with the local Indians.

The Museum of Fine Arts, part of the complex that makes up the Museum of New Mexico (the 1610 Palace of Governors, the Museum of International Folk Art, the State Monuments, and the Laboratory of Anthropology), was created in 1907 primarily to save the palace. But the Taos connection (D.H. Lawrence, the ash canners like Henri, Sloan, and Bellows, et al.) ensured that art activities would be massive and first class in the area.

The Museum of Fine Arts is currently undergoing a massive renovation, and will reopen in early 1982. But open and lively is the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, just a few miles from the Museum of New Mexico complex. The Wheelwright's collection--like that of its cross-town neighbor--is strong in Native American art. Along with archives of unpublished Indian myths, see the sandpaintings and textile collections.

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