Now celebrating its seventieth anniversary, the Museum of International Folk Art has always drawn a remarkable range of visitors to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Culture bearers and school groups from southwestern Pueblos and historic Hispano communities drop in often, seeking one-on-one encounters with objects that came from their communities—and in many cases from their own families. Some guests travel longer distances. Recently, a Kurdish delegation came to observe the institution’s approach to cultural preservation. The museum also raised funds to bring a group of Alaskan skin sewers to Santa Fe, where they led three workshops at the Institute of American Indian Arts—part of an expansive engagement effort that involved additional workshops in Alaska, and culminated in a 2023–2024 museum exhibition of handsewn native parkas from the nineteenth century to the present.
“Our collection includes 162,000 objects—some of stunning craftsmanship and beauty, others of great historical importance,” says museum director Charlie Lockwood. “But sometimes, the collection seems most important for the way it lets us engage with lively traditional communities where art is a tool for reclaiming and expanding on their identities. We’re as interested in the work of contemporary artists, as we are in the objects made by their ancestors.”
Lockwood pointed to the museum’s recent engagement with artists and institutions from the Pacific island of Vanuatu: “The provenance of some works in our collection wasn’t totally clear, so we entered into item-by-item discussions with the Vanuatu Cultural Centre about the potential repatriation of certain pieces. It’s a positive thing for both organizations. It strengthens our relationship and may let us bring some of their artists to Santa Fe to create a traditional sand drawing in 2025.”
The museum also excels at old-fashioned showmanship. More than three million visitors have come to gape at Multiple Visions: A Common Bond, the museum’s most popular permanent exhibition. A walk-through Wunderkammer with no distracting labels, it takes up one wing of the institution, and features about ten thousand objects from the museum’s Girard Collection: Polish paper cutouts; dolls, toys and metal amulets from multiple continents; Rajasthani marionettes; several large-scale village tableaus from Latin America; Théâtre Guignol paper dioramas from France; Day of the Dead paraphernalia from Mexico; and much more. Donated in 1978 by Alexander and Susan Girard, the collection’s jam-packed displays and busy sequences emphasize both the whimsical, obsessive aspects of folk art—and those of Alexander Girard, who installed most of the work himself, drawing on his experience as a designer for Herman Miller, Inc.
The entire Girard Collection includes about 106,000 objects. For today’s curators, it’s a source of storeroom treasures, providing inspiration for smartly conceived temporary shows. But, its unchanging public face has become cause for discussion among the institution’s staff.
“No one wants to tamper with success,” says Laura Addison, curator of North American and European Folk Art at MOIFA. “The Girard Wing is a joyful place and a great introduction to the rest of our exhibitions—but it also poses dilemmas. After forty years on display, some of the work should be rotated for conservation reasons. And curatorial practices have changed. In our temporary exhibits, we’re more focused on the outlook of individual artists and traditional communities and we solicit their active participation in the curatorial process. Things were different in the 1980s.”
For now, the museum is updating its informational, piece-by-piece guidebooks to the wing. In the future, the curators hope to add new multimedia tours, featuring traditional music and interviews with artists, each tour focusing on different elements of the Girard collection.
For an immediate taste of those fresh approaches, visit the two temporary shows scheduled to open this summer: a program about Ukrainian culture in the context of the current war; and a humanizing look at incarcerated individuals and their art. Both exhibitions make use of photographs, video interviews, and other contextualizing material to communicate the harsh experiences that often shape folk art.
Other upcoming exhibitions suggest MOIFA’s strengths as a regional museum with international reach. In November the museum will host the first major North American show of telephone wire art from South Africa. iNgqikithi yokuPhica / Weaving Meanings features historical items alongside contemporary works of art, and includes colorful vessels and sculptural assemblages.
Closer to home, the museum will gather all the existing textiles produced by New Mexico folk artist Policarpio Valencia for a show scheduled to open in February 2025. Valencia created extravagantly embroidered fabrics covered with figures, abstract designs, and dense lines of text written in a now-endangered New Mexican dialect of Spanish. MOIFA owns six of these early twentieth-century pieces, and will fill out the exhibition by borrowing from Santa Fe’s Museum of Spanish Colonial Art and the Heard Museum in Phoenix.
La Cartonería Mexicana / The Mexican Art of Paper and Paste, on view until November 3, affirms the Southwest’s organic relationship with Mexico, gathering about one hundred papier-mâché sculptures from the permanent collection. It includes many items that have never been displayed before. Look for piñatas, dolls, Day of the Dead skeletons, and fantastical animals called alebrijes.
For Lockwood, who was hired as MOIFA director in 2023, it feels natural that these shows should all be happening in Santa Fe. “This is the right place for our museum and our work,” he says. “This city and state have long cultivated an interest in traditional arts and culture. It began when people looked at the riches that existed locally, and, over the decades, it became a big part of the community’s identity, growing in a very intentional manner, with multiple institutions collaborating, with the excitement of our art markets, with the understanding that New Mexican food and architecture were also part of the picture. This is not the only place to look at folk art, but it offers a less distracted setting than one finds in big cities like New York or Chicago. In Santa Fe, folk art is not just something we have—it’s who we are.”
