Library and Archives

The New Mexico Museum of Art library dates back to the founding of the museum in 1917. Since that time, the library has continued to grow and expand guided by the mission to collect, preserve, and make available research materials that meet the information needs of the museum’s staff and visitors.  The library is a special, non-circulating  collection that includes monographs, periodicals, exhibition catalogs, catalogue raisonnes, artist biographical files, slides, videos, and other reference material available to students and the general public, and utilized by researchers around the state and beyond.

The focus of the library collection is American art of the 20th and 21st centuries with an emphasis on artists who have lived or worked in New Mexico, as well as the connection between art of this region and the art of Europe, Latin America, Asia, and other international styles that have influenced the art of New Mexico.

To further support the research needs of our community and preserve the unique history of the arts in New Mexico, the archives of the New Mexico Museum of Art  contain organizational records and manuscript collections that document how the museum came to be, what it has done, and how it has impacted the community. These materials provide information about the museum’s history of exhibitions, architecture, and community engagement since the establishment of the Museum of New Mexico in 1909. It includes the non-current records of the museum preserved because of their continuing institutional value as well as materials about professionals who worked with the museum such as artists, gallery owners, critics and scholars.

The archival collections consist of primary source material including correspondence, audiovisual recordings, typescripts, reports, photographs, financial records, scrapbooks, diaries, sketches, press clippings, architectural drawings and printed ephemera.

Currently, the bulk of the materials are in English and are from the United States.

The archives do not contain the museum’s personnel or financial records that are property of the State Records Center and Archives or Museum of New Mexico Foundation.

Archives Finding Aids

Finding aids can be used to find information in specific record groups or series of archival materials and contain inventories and container lists associated with each collection. These documents are invaluable for discovering and connecting with the records held in the New Mexico Museum of Art archives.

Paper finding aids for most collections are available in the museum library.

A limited number of finding aids can be found at New Mexico Archives Online.

The following finding aids can also be downloaded and searched for keywords using control F: