Off the beaten track, Albuquerque’s art and history museum educates and uplifts with a first-class collection, high standards, and a timeless Southwest vibe.

G reetings from Albuquerque. I was here once, in the mid-’80s, when I worked for the General Assembly in Connecticut. I managed to snag a junket visiting Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and why not go? New Mexico, called the Land of Enchantment, was known then to this Connecticut Yankee as one of a kind for its sublime, otherworldly landscape — rose-colored mesas, white-gypsum sand dunes, luminous, baroque limestone caverns, the Turquoise Trail, salt beds, tent rocks, and alpine meadows. I knew, as abstractions, about New Mexico’s unusual Spanish, Anglo, and Native triple culture, sometimes a melting pot, sometimes a salad bowl, sometimes stoutly separate, sometimes at loggerheads. Then there’s Billy the Kid, notorious massacres of Franciscan missionaries, Kit Carson, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, precious-metals mischief, and, though I couldn’t have predicted it, Albuquerque’s “Breaking Bad” subculture. Today I’ll write about the splendid Albuquerque Museum, the city’s temple to art and history.

The first-rate museum treats both art and history for this handsome city and its region, together having about a million people. The city was founded in 1706 and named after the duke of Alburquerque, New Spain’s viceroy. Very early, it was a cathedral town and on Camino Real, which linked Mexico City with the boonies. The Rio Grande runs through town. Petroglyphs, old Native towns and the early missions, Route 66, and the Atomic Age figure as well. New Mexico might be off the beaten track for Acela Corridor types, but it’s a fascinating, unique place. Newer license plates tout New Mexico as “the chile capital of the world,” true but on the trite side. “Land of Enchantment” suits it well in its invitation to us to look and dream.

The museum opened in 1967 in an old airport building, with mostly archives and material culture from the local historical society. In the late ’70s, it got a Pueblo-inspired building designed by Antoine Predock, the New Mexico architect whose look evokes the geology of the Southwest. It’s in Old Town, the city’s historic core, so the approach is atmospheric.

Pueblo architecture — based on sun-dried mud bricks, stone, and flat roofs supported by wooden beams — plays well with angular modern architecture heavy on glass and steel. A 2005 addition, expertly done by a local firm, added a spacious atrium, a café, a shop, conference space, and new exhibition galleries. The atrium feels like a living room, as do many of the museum’s spaces, with comfy seating and spacious hallways linking galleries. The museum prides itself, and should, as a community hub. Its business is art and history, but one of its draws is attractive, airy space. There’s lots of local travertine inside and out. The place is big, but the feeling is comfortable. We’re in the Southwest, so even museums have an easygoing look.

It’s a municipal museum and owned by the City of Albuquerque, on city land, with a collection owned by the city. It gets around 130,000 visitors a year. About 85 percent of its $4.8 million budget comes from the city. Over close to 60 years now, its collection has vastly expanded to the point that its work by New Mexican artists is encyclopedic. That they value high culture is a great credit to Albuquerque taxpayers.

Enough about money and infrastructure. There are two core, more-or-less permanent exhibitions at the museum. Only in Albuquerque, the history show, is the best place to start given New Mexico’s grand, operatic past. It’s four galleries called Spirited, Courageous, Resourceful, and Innovative, each connecting to a central gallery called Our Land. Not bad — they have to call them something — and focusing on New Mexico’s landscape is a good idea given not only its resplendence but the centrality of farming, ranching, mining, oil and gas, and tourism to the state’s economy. Here, navigating, absorbing, taming, and worshipping a landscape that’s this rough and tough has been humanity’s task for thousands of years.

Our Land immediately engages visitors with a vast floor mural drawn from an aerial photograph of Albuquerque. Mountains, the railroad, the Rio Grande, Route 66, Sandia Labs — located on Kirtland Air Force Base — mountains, and forests teach us how topography and geology inform if not dictate past, present, and future. Only in Albuquerque is a very rich, complex exhibition, in a good way. We’re dealing with lots of history.

I focused on the spaces on courage, which, of course, takes many forms. Boom-and-bust cycles, rebellions, and lots of wars, among them a Confederate invasion — each challenged body and soul in different, unexpected ways. Spanish armor — including a chain mail shirt, a helmet, and brigandine — and Spanish guns show us that the conquistadors meant business, and fiercely so. There’s a kiosk on the Navajo code talkers and a film on Chester Nez, a code talker who fought as a Marine in the Pacific while sending and receiving secrets in Diné, the Navajo tongue. His on-the-spot transmissions often led, minutes later, to direct hits on Japanese positions.

A repostero, which can mean “pastry chef” in Spanish but also a heraldic tapestry, dominates a gallery on New Mexican spirit. It was originally commissioned by Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, 8th Duke of Alburquerque — note the extra “r,” dropped from the city’s name possibly because it’s too hard for Anglos to roll the letter. Other theories abound. The textile is packed with implements of war. At the center is the family’s coat of arms. It’s from 1665 and made of silk, velvet, linen, jute, and gold and silver thread. At 12 by 12 feet, it makes a statement. New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest were thought by the conquistadors to be the home of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold, leading to the first wave of Europeans to explore, ducats in their eyes.

Common Ground is the core art exhibition covering mostly art from New Mexico. It’s gorgeous and filled with new names, at least to me, and lots of surprises. It’s about 5,800 square feet — spacious — with lots of freestanding walls and covering art from the 1800s to today. Cityscapes and landscapes by Anglo artists begin the feast. We gringos like topographical accuracy and, coming from English and German stock, psychologically if not genetically, we want to define.

That’s all well and good, but painting buildings, railroad tracks, mountains, and rivers on a canvas isn’t the only way to convey landscape. A formidable Native American pot can depict rain or a mesa using abstract forms or symbols that are hundreds of years old. These define, too, not exactly as we see things but conveying the spirit of them. Or Paul Pletka, who isn’t Native American but lives in Santa Fe and sees himself as an interpreter of Native culture, can depict a church not as serene architecture but as, literally, the body of Jesus. Raymond Jonson’s triptych of a view from Carlsbad Caverns in the southeastern corner of New Mexico isn’t literally religious, but the caverns are bizarre enough to persuade us that only a divine hand and man could have conceived them.

The museum liberally and intelligently mixes Native and Anglo art in Common Ground, which shouldn’t be rocket science, but other museums that have tried to do the same have failed, and abysmally so. Last year I reviewed the Peabody Essex’s permanent-collection redo in which its Native art and its Hudson River School and maritime collections were mixed. It’s dreadful, mostly because the curators there, inspired by Howard Zinn, of all people, went the route of victim ideology: the tired oppressors-subduing-the-oppressed theme. I think they wrote the labels first and then looked for art that matched their narrative. At the Albuquerque Museum, the curators treated the art as art and started and finished with the art. That’s one reason Common Ground works so well.

Some of the figure paintings, many painted by Anglo artists who worked in New Mexico but weren’t from New Mexico, verge on the touristical, with pretty Natives surrounded by the trappings we expect Natives to possess. Then there’s Fritz Scholder, a Native American artist, whose figures can be abstract, sometimes wildly so, and definitely not romantic, archaic, or cliché. Painting, of course, is mostly a European rather than a Native phenomenon. Luis Tapia’s Chima Altar III, from 1992, depicts a car dashboard and view, part painted and part carved and then accessorized with beads, nails, metal, and string.

I’d never heard of Elmer Schooley, whose Hot Country, from 1983 or so, is one of the most startlingly good landscapes I’ve seen in a long time.  It seems abstract but it’s not. It shows us dot patterns of dry vegetation that everyone who travels through New Mexico sees. Here, the rich salmon soil, not simply warm but hot, contrasts with the cool green and sage shrubs. It’s beautiful but tense, as the hot earth and foliage look as if they’re balanced but also in a state of push and pull.

I don’t often visit museums that are as focused as the Albuquerque Museum is on using the permanent collection. I also looked at its past and upcoming exhibitions and was impressed by their depth and breadth. Opening later this month is Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910-1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, a show surely packed with the art of angst and disquiet. It’s a treasures show but with chops. Albuquerque also took the exhibition of highlights from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a dream show of American art, and a show on Indigenous art from Canada organized by Toronto’s McMichael Museum, which owns the best of the best. These choices tell me that the museum is well networked.

The museum does its own shows, too, curated by what seems to be a smart, discerning staff. Indelible Blue was a recent exhibition on the use of indigo blue in what was mostly contemporary art, but the natural dye has a New Mexico history. Last year’s Nuclear Communities in the Southwest might seem obvious, since New Mexico has place in the history of the atomic bomb, but the story is far more than Oppenheimer. Locals had a huge, untold role in nuclear New Mexico. I’m impressed with the careful, savvy balance among history and art shows, living and long-ago artists, and subjects. New Mexico isn’t called the Land of Enchantment for nothing. Its panoramas and up-close terrain, its light and color, are unique. I’m not surprised the museum does so many landscape shows.

The Albuquerque Museum’s strategic plan runs from 2020 to 2030, far too long a span. It’s best to limit museum strategic plans to no more than five years. Ten years puts solid accomplishments on a mañana schedule. This strategic plan is comprehensive and shows a striving museum attentive to its collection, infrastructure, and community. It’s planning a new and needed education center, mostly for classroom space.

There’s a DEI component — the downside of being a municipally owned institution — but it’s not aimed at quotas or race discrimination in hiring, all illegal. Rather, it’s looking for aesthetic merit in a very heterogeneous place. New Mexico’s Native population is really close to 20 tribes, all different and some very different from others. The museum has a sprawling collection, too. Mixing things up, which means swapping art out every few months, keeps the galleries alive and intriguing. I don’t get the sense that the curators engage in the tiresome, useless work of ensuring that all are represented or heard. I think they want good but unheralded things in the collection to get their place in the sun.

There’s so much happening at the Albuquerque Museum. There’s an artist-in-residence program, with artists’ works on the walls of the museum atrium. There’s a sculpture garden and an amphitheater, too. I loved an exhibition on abstraction in Southwest art, reminding me that Agnes Martin and Richard Diebenkorn lived in New Mexico. This explains more about Diebenkorn than does his debt to Matisse. Many of the artists in the show aren’t known outside the state. The production values throughout the museum are superb. Graphics and wall colors are pitch-perfect. Gallery interpretation has meaning and verve. All of this takes an immense amount of work and vision.

I would suggest a new website. The current website looks like it’s a City Hall project. It has the same format, and that includes not only typefaces but also tone, for the museum as it does for a program called “cannabis equity,” an adopt-a-pet program, and becoming a firefighter. Cannabis equity, I learned, means that neighborhoods over-affected by the War on Drugs get preferential treatment for retail licenses, I assume, to hook more locals on what is a gateway drug. New Mexico might be like Vermont, with a libertarian streak with potheads aplenty, but I’m off-topic. For a museum, the website is too bare-bones. Lots of the collection is online, but the database isn’t very user-friendly.

Museum websites are informational, but they’re also marketing engines, and they require customer-friendly content, a bit of glitz, good events photography, and punchy pages for exhibitions. They need to grab and entice, and this museum’s site doesn’t. It’s got the stamp of bureaucrats. Aside from the DEI component of the strategic plan, this is the only quibble I have with the Albuquerque Museum. The place, far from the Acela Corridor, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, has smarts, confidence, and flair. It’s not only a local treasure trove. It tends to its core mission to educate and to inspire. It’s in the Land of Enchantment, after all. I was charmed and captivated by my visit.