Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on Museum Hill in Santa Fe holds two institutional histories that eventually became one. Anthropologist Edgar Lee Hewett founded the Museum of New Mexico in nineteen oh nine to systematically collect Southwest Native material culture before Eastern museums stripped it away. Then in nineteen twenty-seven, John D.

Rockefeller funded the Laboratory of Anthropology next door, devoted to scientific study of the region's indigenous peoples. The two institutions merged in nineteen forty-seven, pooling what became one of the largest collections of Southwestern anthropological artifacts in the country. The legislature appropriated funds for a proper exhibition building in nineteen seventy-seven, and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture opened in nineteen eighty-seven in a thirty-one-thousand-square-foot facility designed to honor Pueblo architectural forms.

Today it is one of eight museums in the state system, and its research lab remains a working center for Native arts scholarship.