A new museum in Santa Fe. (Current and Coming).(Brief Article)

Santa Fe is a small city in which culture looms large. In addition to its world famous opera there are ten museums and more than two hundred art galleries and antiques shops. On July 21, there will be eleven museums with the opening of the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. It is located on a hill on the outskirts of the city in a complex of other museums (Museum of International Folk Art, Laboratory of Anthropology, and Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, and the nearby Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian), making it a wonderful place to spend all or part of a day seeing objects directly related to the Southwest.

The museum building was designed as a residence for the director of the Laboratory of Anthropology in 1930 by John Gaw Meem with funds donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Meem was a leading figure in the movement to revive Spanish colonial and Pueblo architecture. The house was donated anonymously to the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1998 and has been renovated and expanded to create thirty-four hundred square feet of exhibition space, and sixty-four hundred feet of collections storage space, educational facilities, and visitor amenities. Since 1953 the important collections of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society have been in storage at the Museum of International Folk Art.

The Spanish Colonial Arts Society was founded in 1925 by the writer Mary Austin and Frank G. Applegate, a writer and artist. Its mission then as now is to preserve artifacts and works of art and to assure the continuation of the Spanish colonial art ...