Museum Hill

The CRIZMAC group visited Museum Hill.  It is so beautiful up there, that there is so much to look at before you even enter the museums.  We visited two of the museums up on the hill: the Museum of Indian Art and Culture and the Wheelwright Museum.  The International Folk Art Museum is up there too and I will get to visit it next week.

The Museum of Indian Art and Culture is fantastic and worked directly with Native peoples to curate the museum.  It is set up to mimic the 4 sacred mountains or directions.  We had a docent lead tour of the Here, Now, and Always exhibit which has a multitude of items from various Pueblos as well as Navajo and Apache.  There are installations to show what living spaces would look like and archaeological treasures galore.  

One of my favorite things were the  mugs that were found at Mesa Verde in Colorado.  The look so much what you would think about finding in your kitchen cabinet.  

Setting up for the Inernational Folk Art Market coming this weekend!

The Wheelwright Museum was a collaborative effort between Mary Cabot Wheelwright and Hosteen Klah, an Apache man very adept at performing healing ceremonial songs and dry (or sand) paintings.

Assistant to the director giving us a little background on the history of the museum.  Mary Cabot Wheelwright fought a lot of scrutiny when she was planning the museum; some because she was a woman, some because she went against others suggestions by picking Henderson to be the architect. When the Rockefeller boys founded the Laboratory of Anthropology it made the front page news of the Santa Few New Mexican newspaper; yet when the Wheelwright Museum opened it only made it to the society page.