Final Exhibit’s Oral Histories interactive

High-Tech Techniques Bring New Mexico’s Past to Life
Interactive exhibits a highlight of new Museum


Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo interactive


Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo interactive


Segesser Hides interactive

Santa Fe, NM, May 15, 2009 – Hands-on history. That’s one of the many ways the New Mexico History Museum (http://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/), opening May 24, puts visitors into the sights, sounds and actual feel of its stories.

How? Meet Second Story Interactive Studio (http://www.secondstory.com/). The Portland, Ore., firm, recipient of numerous accolades for installations at the Library of Congress, Bank of America, and Grammy Museum, has built a number of touch-screen interactive exhibits for the History Museum, 113 Lincoln Avenue, on the Santa Fe Plaza. Zoom in to observe details of the treasured Segesser Hides. Dig for nuances in bilingual versions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Watch the state’s boundaries grow, shrink and change over time.

“People learn best by employing all of their senses and by assembling knowledge from different formats,” said Dr. Frances Levine, director of the New Mexico History Museum. “For historians, that means exploring the artifacts held in museum collections, as well as the oral histories, the diaries, the maps, the paintings and the photographs of the people who lived that history.

“As teachers, it also means using all the tools available to us to touch our visitors’ minds and connect to experiences that make history tangible.”

From the casual visitor to the serious scholar, the New Mexico History Museum aims not to state “what happened,” but to instead offer a variety of viewpoints presented in a variety of ways. Reach out and touch these parts of history:

  • The core exhibition, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now, opens with a stylized cliff wall complete with petroglyph-like handprints. Actual handprints from artisans of the Palace of the Governor’s Portal Program, they include three cast-metal prints that, when you place your hands over them, trigger audio stories from Apache, Navajo and Pueblo speakers about what the land and culture mean to their communities and cultures.
  • The Segesser Hide Paintings, on display in the History Museum’s Palace of the Governors, are one of the earliest depictions of Spanish Colonial life in the United States. Interactive replicas of the paintings in Telling New Mexico include a touch screen that visitors can use to explore various details of the paintings and the people depicted within them. A media-based tour guides you through each step, or you can pan and zoom your way to hotspots containing short, interpretive bullets. Besides explaining the action shown on the hides, the exhibit explains the story of the hides themselves, which were under private, European ownership from 1758-1988, when the Palace of the Goverors acquired these treasures of New Mexico history.
  • The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the oldest agreement between Mexico and the United States, remains alive in courtrooms and households throughout New Mexico. Signed on Feb. 2, 1848, it ended the Mexican-American War, and ceded nearly half of Mexico’s territory to the United States, including what became the state of New Mexico. A wall-size, bilingual reproduction lets visitors choose a directed story with a linear overview; a free-form, self-directed exploration of every page of the treaty; and video-based interviews with scholars describing its present-day impacts.
  • New Mexico’s borders have been made and remade over the centuries. “Encounters,” a motion-graphic installation projected onto a glass wall, tells the story of those shifting borders and the events that defined the state. The exhibit includes a two-minute animation that shows how the state was shaped through various time periods, what events triggered the shifting boundaries, and how changing landscapes build upon one another.
  • To carry New Mexico’s history into today, Second Story helped collect stories from New Mexicans across the state – ranchers, oil workers, scientists, Sikhs and more – about tradition, land, language, water, lifestyle and growth. These stories, some in video, some in audio, make up the final exhibit in Telling New Mexico. After hearing the soundscape, visitors are invited to write their own story and leave it for a future exhibit.

High-tech interactives are the vanguard of museums these days, but so is the ability to stop and ponder, to leaf through an album of historic photos, to sit on the Museum’s second-story terrace and let the stories of New Mexico’s centuries sink in. We’ll pace you through the journey with a mix of the two. Get into it! Come be a part of history in the making.

Opening weekend features two free days of family events at the History Museum, as well as free admission to the three other state museums in Santa Fe – Museum of Art, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and Museum of International Folk Art. The New Mexico Rail Runner will be operating both May 24 and 25 in honor of the grand opening.

New Mexico History Museum
at 113 Lincoln Avenue, just behind the Palace of the Governors on the Santa Fe Plaza
Museum Front Desk: 505-476-5200

For more information about the New Mexico History Museum, including a selection of user-ready high-resolution photographs, log onto http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/nmhm. More than 8,000 additional, high-resolution photographs illustrating the history of New Mexico are available by keyword search at www.palaceofthegovernors.org (click on “Photo Archives” then on “Digitized Collections”). Most requests for scans from this site can be delivered the same day, and usage is free for publicity purposes only.

The New Mexico Rail Runner will operate its Saturday schedule (http://www.nmrailrunner.com/schedule.asp) on May 24 and 25 to accommodate opening-weekend visitors. In addition, all four of the state’s Santa Fe-based museums will have free admission on both days: the Museum of Art (http://www.nmartmuseum.org/); the Museum of International Folk Art (http://www.internationalfolkart.org/); and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (http://www.indianartsandculture.org/).

Previous releases:
Riding the Rails… in Style

Duty, Sacrifice, Honor

Where ancient artifacts meet cutting-edge art

Fashioning New Mexico

The Tiffany Ties that Bind

The Railroad Wars

The New Face of History

The Tales that Made the American West

New Mexico History Museum’s Core Exhibits

Telling the People’s Stories: A Message from the Director

Creating a Place for Our Past, by Dr. Frances Levine, El Palacio, Summer 2006

Other Sites:

NM History Museum on Twitter

NM History Museum on Facebook

Media Contacts:
Kate Nelson
New Mexico History Museum
505 476 1141
Kate.Nelson@state.nm.us
www.nmhistorymuseum.org

Rachel Mason
Ballantines PR
Rachel@ballantinespr.com
505 216 0889
www.ballantinespr.com

Join the Stampede!

Join the Stampede


New Mexico History Museum’s Grand Opening Events
Promise Two Free Days of Family Fun

After 20 years in the planning – not to mention centuries in the making – New Mexico’s newest museum opens its doors to the public at noon on Sunday, May 24, 2009. It wouldn’t be a Santa Fe event without a Santa Fe-style party, and we’re pulling out the stops.

With events and entertainment at the Museum, in the Palace of the Governors’ shady courtyard and on the Santa Fe Plaza, there’s a little something for everyone. Lowriders, Mariachi music, flamenco dancing, Celtic pipers, Native American drummers, and Chautauqua performers are just part of what you’ll find, along with a free Ice Cream Social 1-4pm Monday, May 25, in the Palace Courtyard.

All of it’s in honor of the New Mexico History Museum, http://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/, the state’s newest museum, which includes interactive multimedia displays, hands-on exhibits, and vivid stories of real New Mexicans. As a 96,000-square-foot extension of the 400 year-old Palace of the Governors – the oldest continually occupied government building in the US – the New Mexico History Museum anchors itself on the historic Santa Fe Plaza and offers a sampling of the people and the legends to be found throughout the state. Get into it! Come be a part of history in the making!

Schedule of events:

Sunday, May 24, 2009
9am-noon:

Members-only preview and light breakfast. Find out how to become a member at www.museumfoundation.org or sign up at the event.

12-6pm:
Free admission to the History Museum and its exhibits, along with all other state museums in Santa Fe.

12-1pm:
Native American drumming in the Palace Courtyard.

1-3 pm:
Ribbon-cutting with Dr. Frances Levine, director of the Museum, and other dignitaries in the Palace Courtyard. Presentation of the Colors by La Orden Military; Pledge of Allegiance; Blessings of the Ground; ribbon-cutting and ceremonial walk over the bridge connecting the Palace Courtyard to the Museum.

3-6 pm:
Procession of lowriders and display outside the Palace. Participants includes Joseph, Matt and Bobby Chacon; Almardo and Pam Jaramillo; Victor Martinez.

3-4 pm:
Santa Fe Indian School Spoken Word Team performance (Dia de los Niños/Dia de los Libros) on the Plaza. Indigenous youth writers, the team members have received national recognition for performances of poetry that incorporate Native languages and philosophies. The school’s spoken-word program demonstrates the importance of culture, history, tradition, identity and poetry. The youths are coached by teacher and writer Tim McLaughlin.

3-5:30 pm:
Museum of New Mexico Press/University of New Mexico Press book signings in the History Museum Gathering Space.

4-4:30 pm:
Kenpo Po Karate Karate School demonstration on the Plaza. Like the History Museum, the Kenpo School believes the next generation – our future history-makers – will be more successful with a confident and well-rounded childhood. Participants: D’Kota Potter, 5; Carlos Garcia, 5; Markus Vigil, 10; Evan Watkins, 7; Fernanda Carranza, 9; Maria Lozova, 12; Tommy Dearing, 14; Maria Najarro.

4:30-5 pm:
Mariachi Sonidos del Monte (Sounds of the Mountain) on the Plaza. With a variety of violins, trumpets, guitars, a guitarron, vihuela and a range of harmonic voices, this group is quickly becoming a Northern New Mexico favorite. The group plays traditional Mexican favorites with its own unique sound. Musicians include Raul Duran, violin; Sean Trujillo, violin; Anthony Ortiz, violin; Santiago Romero, guitar; Fernando Romero, guitarron; Rachel Miller, vihuela; Christina Gomez, guitar; Brandie Duran, violin; Eric Ortiz, trumpet; Nikki Brancha, trumpet.

5-6pm:
Institute for Spanish Arts and Maria Benítez’s La Generación performance on the Plaza. World-renowned flamenco dancer Maria Benítez, with the Institute for Spanish Arts, formed this company of young New Mexicans to preserve and strengthen our rich and diverse artistic heritage. Since 2003, the company has fostered new generations of artists and audiences by stimulating public awareness of Hispanic and Spanish art and culture – bolstering the Museum’s desire to carry a legacy of history and identity to the next generation. The company, consisting of children ages 10-18, has performed throughout the state. Maria Benítez, with her husband, Cecilio, founded and direct Maria Benítez Teatro Flamenco, long known for its commitment to excellence.

6-6:30pm:
Order of the Thistle pipes and drums on the Plaza. Besides performing throughout New Mexico, this band attended the Pipefest ’05 in Edinburgh, Scotland, marching with more than 400 bands from around the world. They show that New Mexico has more than three cultures comprising its varied heritage. The band, wearing the muted MacDonald tartan, range from 10-year-olds to seniors. Members include Ron Crawford, pipe major; Lisa Lashley, pipe sergeant; Gwyneth Duncan, drum sergeant; Ed Hansen, piper; Cullen Dwyer, drummer, bass; Paulette Keeney, piper; Louis Jacobs, drummer, tenor.

Monday, May 25:
10am-5pm:

Free admission to the History Museum and its exhibits, along with all other state museums in Santa Fe.

10am:
Interfaith service at St. Francis Cathedral.

11am:
Processional parade from the Cathedral to the Museum with Los Caballeros, the Santa Fe Fiesta Council, representatives of Native American groups and New Mexico Historical societies, and others.

11:30am:
Lion Dancers from the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of New Mexico perform outside the Museum. (Feed the lion dollar bills for good luck!)

12-5pm:
Live music and dance on the Santa Fe Plaza from various periods and cultures of New Mexico, including Andrew Tomas on Native American flute; Barbershop Sounds; Santa Fe Community Band; National Dance Institute; Not-So-Andrews Sisters; Alamogordo Ballet Folklorica Dancers; Call of the Drums.

Throughout the Plaza, characters from the past, dressed in the costumes of their time, reappear, ready to tell their stories, answer questions and pose for pictures.

12-4pm: The Santa Fe Vintage Car Club roars into the Plaza to display shining examples of the vehicles that once carried Americans across the Southwest.

1-2:30pm: Members of Sociedad Folklorica join members of New Mexico’s tribes and pueblos to model historical clothing, complementing the Museum’s premiere rotating exhibition, “Fashioning New Mexico.” Come to the Museum’s upstairs Gathering Space to enjoy the show.

1-4 pm: The Route 66 Ice Cream Parlor sets up shop in the Palace Courtyard, offering free scoops served by members of Kenpo 5.0 Team Silva. Live music and historical photo boards to pose yourself into (bring a camera!).

Team Silva – professional cage-fighter Paul Silva and his father/mentor/cornerman Gilbert H. Silva – along with fighting colleagues Paul Tapia, Tony Potter, Ricky Salas and Leroy Ortega, are taking off the gloves and picking up the scoops as part of their shared goal with the Museum to promote family, values, self-realization and nurturing for the next generation.

2:30-4 pm: Telling New Mexico, the book accompanying the Museum’s core exhibition, will be unveiled at a book signing and panel discussion among authors who contributed to the collection of historical essays. Enjoy your first event in the Museum’s brand-new auditorium and get a copy of what’s sure to become a must-have historical resource.

New Mexico History Museum
at 113 Lincoln Avenue, just behind the Palace of the Governors on the Santa Fe Plaza

For more information about the New Mexico History Museum, including a selection of user-ready high-resolution photographs, log onto http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/nmhm. More than 8,000 additional, high-resolution photographs illustrating the history of New Mexico are available by keyword search at www.palaceofthegovernors.org (click on “Photo Archives” then on “Digitized Collections”). Most requests for scans from this site can be delivered the same day, and usage is free for publicity purposes only.

Previous releases:
Four Centuries of History: the Fiestas de Santa Fe

Where ancient artifacts meet cutting-edge art

Fashioning New Mexico

The Tiffany Ties that Bind

The Railroad Wars

The New Face of History

The Tales that Made the American West

New Mexico History Museum’s Core Exhibits

Telling the People’s Stories: A Message from the Director

Creating a Place for Our Past, by Dr. Frances Levine, El Palacio, Summer 2006

Other Sites:
NM History Museum on Twitter
NM History Museum on Facebook

Media Contacts:
Kate Nelson
New Mexico History Museum
505 476 1141
Kate.Nelson@state.nm.us
www.nmhistorymuseum.org

Rachel Mason
Ballantines PR
Rachel@ballantinespr.com
505 216 0889
www.ballantinespr.com

SCHEDULE SUMMARY

Saturday, May 23rd
6:30 – 9pm
New Mexico History Museum Grand Opening Gala
$200 per person
e-mail heather@museumfoundation.org or
call 505-982-6366 x116 to RSVP

Sunday, May 24
9am – Noon
New Mexico History Museum
Members-Only Preview
Reserve at membership@museumfoundation.org

Noon – 6pm
New Mexico History Museum Public Opening
Free

Noon – 6:00 pm
New Mexico Creates Shop Opens
Members receive 10% discount
http://www.newmexicocreates.org/

Noon-1pm
Native American drumming in the Palace Courtyard

1-3pm
Official ribbon-cutting ceremony in the Palace Courtyard

3-6pm
Low-rider exhibition outside the Palace

3-4pm
Santa Fe Indian School Spoken Word Team performance on the Plaza

3-5:30pm
Museum of New Mexico Press/University of New Mexico Press book signings in the History Museum’s Gathering Space

4-4:30pm
Kenpo Po Karate School demonstration on the Plaza

4:30-5pm
Mariachi Sonidos del Monte (Sounds of the Mountain) on the Plaza

5-6pm
Institute for Spanish Arts and Maria Benitez’ La Nueva Generación flamenco performance on the Plaza

6-6:30pm
Order of the Thistle pipes and drums on the Plaza

Monday, May 25
10:00 am – 5:00 pm
New Mexico History Museum Family Day
Free

10am
Interfaith Service at St. Francis Cathedral

11am
Procession from the Cathedral to the History Museum

11:30am
Lion Dancers from the Chinese American Citizens Alliance of New Mexico perform outside the Museum (feed the lions dollar bills for good luck!)

Noon-5pm
Music and dance on the Plaza Gazebo.

Noon-4pm
Santa Fe Vintage Car Club exposition

1-4pm
Route 66 Ice Cream Parlor’s Ice Cream Social in the Palace Courtyard

1-2:30pm
Sociedad Folklorico complement to the exhibition: Fashioning New Mexico

2:30-4pm:
Book signing and panel discussion of Telling New Mexico in the Museum Auditorium

Where ancient artifacts meet cutting-edge art

Where ancient artifacts meet cutting-edge art

Welcome to the latest installment of our media-release series, “Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now.” See the links below for previous releases, along with information about obtaining photographs to accompany your coverage.


“Green Fragment” – Kumi Yamashita


Fragments, 40 Resin Casts
Kumi Yamashita



Kumi Yamashita At Her Studio


“Rio Grende Colcha” – Paula Castillo

Santa Fe, NM – A 20-foot metal sculpture crawls along an exterior wall, mimicking the life-giving Rio Grande. Inside, a magical mix of sculpted resin and strategic spotlights turns apparently mundane objects into an amazing array of shadows.

Cutting-edge contemporary art in the nation’s newest history museum? It could only happen in New Mexico, where artistic traditions have had millennia to grow deep roots and produce the sweetest of fruit.

Besides honoring more than 400 years of cultural interactions, the New Mexico History Museum, opening May 24, is delighted to include works by Kumi Yamashita and Paula Castillo in its permanent collection and on public display. Their intriguing creations come courtesy of the 1% for the Arts initiative, also called the Art in Public Places Program.

The artists began installing their works this week and are available for interviews and photographs.

Started in 1986 as a way to keep the arts alive and present, the Art in Public Places Program requires a 1 percent set-aside in every public building budget of more than $100,000 for cities, counties and the state. The money is used to acquire public art to display in, on, or around the building.

At a time when public funding for cultural endeavors is at risk, the program provides a stream of revenue that helps enrich our citizens’ lives while supporting artists and craftspeople. It echoes the WPA initiatives of the Depression era, when artists’ and craftspeople’s paintings, furniture and architecture achieved a pinnacle that stands today. The New Mexico History Museum is proud to continue in that tradition by working with artists who are crafting their own interpretations of what it means to be in New Mexico.

Kumi Yamashita works heavily with light and shadow in ways that defy description. (A video of her displaying a few of her pieces on a Japanese TV show, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulzyrV8IjE0, has been a regular You Tube sensation.) She’s crafting two pieces for the Museum’s second-floor interior:

  • Fragments consists of 40 cast-resin tiles arrayed in an oval shape. Though they appear to simply be colored blocks, when lit, they reveal the shadows of human faces – actual New Mexicans, whose photographs she took on a statewide tour.
  • Untitled begins with a simple frame in the shape of New Mexico. When lit, it casts the shadow of a man sitting on the southern border while gazing at the stars.

“One of the issues I focus on is the boundary we create within ourselves by categorizing the world,” Yamashita says. “Through my work, I wish to remind ourselves of how we preconceive what is around and inside us. Knowledge, ideas, and values are too often accepted without questioning. Can we find a way to evaporate ourselves from a pond and condensate over an ocean? Can we see a common thread that connects all things?”

Yamashita has been a visiting artist and guest lecturer at universities and academies in the United States, Turkey, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Japan, and has received residencies such as the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Millay Colony, the Aomori International Art Center and the Border Art Residency in New Mexico. Her work is on permanent display in public spaces in Seattle, Osaka, Hokkaido, and Tokyo and is a part of museum collections in Boise, Idaho and Shimane.

Paula Castillo is a well-known, native New Mexican artist, based in Cordova. She frequently works with discarded pieces from industrial metal fabrication processes and is preparing four works for the Museum’s exterior:

  • A set of benches sculpted to resemble the mountains of New Mexico, will be placed to the left of the Museum’s main entrance at 113 Lincoln Ave.
  • On the west face of the Museum, Dos Arboles, Dos Hermanas (Two Trees, Two Sisters) will begin at ground level, then climb 32 feet high, cresting the roofline of the Museum.
  • Rio Grande Colcha, an image of the Rio Grande and all of her tributaries in a colcha, or traditional Spanish embroidery, design, will span 20 feet across the west face of the museum.
  • On the wall of Museum’s second-story patio terrace, Castillo will craft an excerpt from the Nambe Pueblo Tewa poem, “My home over there, Now I remember it.”

Collectively, the pieces reference mountains, trees, rivers and homes – a simple yet profound way to understand the connection between the natural world and the cultural history of New Mexico. Castillo says she intends to introduce visitors to the always contingent, personal and human-scaled history of New Mexico.

“For me, form is complex and adaptable with all of its hundreds of fluid and solid systems: regional watersheds, train sounds, star flows, off the interstate, waving at someone,” she says. ”Like hydrogen attaching to oxygen in a flowing hexagonal movement or a group of people laughing at an absent minded gesture, I see form as alive and emerging from itself in an easy flash.”

Using art to help tell the story of the people who were and are the fabric of New Mexico was only natural. Dr. Frances Levine, director of the New Mexico History Museum, notes that art has been, and continues to be, a vital part of the state’s culture.

“Artistic expression has played an important role in New Mexico’s culture from its earliest days,” Dr. Levine says. “From Native American pottery and weavings through Spanish devotional objects of colonial life, to the Taos Artists and WPA craftspeople. Our collections at the New Mexico History Museum celebrate those traditions, and their roots continue to bear fruit today. The works of Paula and Kumi help us connect the Museum to this longer artistic history. We are pleased that these works relate to our history and to the present.”

Loie Fecteau, executive director of New Mexico Arts, the agency that oversees the 1 Percent for the Arts program, calls public art “the most democratic of all the art forms because it really does belong to all of us.”

“New Mexico has long been recognized as having one of the strongest and most innovative public art programs in the country, which I think is really fitting given the historical importance of the arts in our state and the way the arts are treasured and embedded in our many diverse cultures,” Fecteau says. “Our Legislature is really to be commended for having the foresight to create our state 1 percent for public art program more than 40 years ago,” Fecteau said.

Fecteau notes that the program has placed more than 2,200 pieces across New Mexico in each of the state’s 33 counties.

Art is a subjective media; it allows the viewer to take what they will from it, to draw their own conclusions. In the same way, the New Mexico History Museum sets out to allow visitors the opportunity to decide for themselves what “really” happened. Create your own place in history. Get into it! Join us at the grand opening of the New Mexico History Museum, www.nmhistorymuseum.org/, on May 24, 2009.

For more information about the New Mexico History Museum, including a selection of user-ready high-resolution photographs, log onto http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/nmhm. More than 8,000 additional, high-resolution photographs illustrating the history of New Mexico are available by keyword search at www.palaceofthegovernors.org (click on “Photo Archives” then on “Digitized Collections”). Most requests for scans from this site can be delivered the same day, and usage is free for publicity purposes only.

Previous releases:

The Tiffany Ties that Bind

The Railroad Wars

The New Face of History

The Tales that Made the American West

New Mexico History Museum’s Core Exhibits

Telling the People’s Stories: A Message from the Director

Creating a Place for Our Past, by Dr. Frances Levine, El Palacio, Summer 2006

Other Sites:

NM History Museum on Twitter

NM History Museum on Facebook

For media inquiries, please contact:
Kate Nelson
New Mexico History Museum
505 476 1141
Kate.Nelson@state.nm.us
www.nmhistorymuseum.org

Rachel Mason
Ballantines PR
Rachel@ballantinespr.com
505 216 0889
www.ballantinespr.com

“Fashioning New Mexico”

“Fashioning New Mexico”
New museum’s premiere exhibition reveals
the history of the clothes we wore

Welcome to the latest installment of our media-release series, “Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now.” See the links below for previous releases, along with information about obtaining photographs to accompany your coverage.

Flamenco
Flamenco Dress


Estella Bestero (Moore) with her mother,
Florence (Wreford) Bestero, undated

Wedding Dress
Wedding Dress


Unidentified boy in a cowboy
outfit, undated

Flappers
Flapper Dresses

San Juan Pueblo Child
San Juan Pueblo child
in ceremonial dress, undated

Santa Fe – Life’s passages carry layers of meaning and memory – the foods we eat, the songs we sing, the clothes we wear. The ways in which our predecessors chose to clothe themselves – for a baptism, a prom, a war, or an opera opening – have been collected by the New Mexico History Museum for 100 years. As part of the Museum’s grand opening May 24, many of those outfits are, shall we say, coming out of the closet.

Fashioning New Mexico, the premiere exhibition in the Museum’s Changing Gallery, explores what our clothes say about us and what they mean to us. Some of the celebratory events depicted in it are singular to New Mexico, such as fiestas and Native American ceremonies. Others are the classic passages that form the basis of our lives and of the tales we have told since the earliest campfire was lit: a child’s birth, coming of age, marriage, anniversaries, ascents to power and going to war.

The Museum’s collection of nearly 4,000 costumes and accessories, with many pieces dating from the 1830s to the 1970s, has long lacked the space it takes for a proper exhibit. The opening of the Museum’s second-floor, 5,700-square-foot Changing Gallery finally makes it possible.

To senior curator Louise Stiver, it’s both a celebration and a swan song, as she unveils her final exhibition.

“This is the first time for the Museum to focus on our collection of costumes and accessories,” she said. “A number of the items in the collection represent celebrations that occurred here in New Mexico – from weddings to going to the opera to entering military service. There’s a little bit of everything for people to see.”

But, she cautions, “this is not a fashion show.”

“Rather, it will focus on how people fashioned their lives. Some clothing might stand alone, while others will be part of a vignette that might include furniture, portraits, weaponry, accessories, historical documents and other props to tell the story.”

Other features include a high-seated “penny farthing” bicycle, and interactive features where a visitor can practice tying a corset, using the secret language of fans or virtually “trying on” some of the outfits in the exhibit. Student-interns from New Mexico Highlands University are preparing a station that uses computerized images on a mirror that let visitors virtually “try on” some of the outfits in the exhibition.

What’s coming out of the closet? Plenty – about 350 items, including a dozen 19th– and 20th-century wedding gowns, flapper dresses, flamenco outfits, WWI uniforms, inaugural ballgowns and an assortment of underwear through the centuries. Thirty of the Museum’s classic fans will reveal a time when delicate painting and embroidery turned a utilitarian item into art.

Donors through the years have included the heirs of the Harroun, Manderfield and Armijo families of Santa Fe, the McMillans of Socorro, the Jaramillos from northern New Mexico, and the McDonalds of Carrizozo, to name a few.

The pieces cover modern history as well, including a turquoise outfit recalling the grandeur of Dangerous Liaisons-era France. The outfit, worn by Santa Fe artist Paul Stephen Valdez to the Equality New Mexico Gala in 2008, was loaned by him for this special exhibition.

Conservator Rebecca Tinkham has worked on every costume in the exhibition, painstakingly repairing the rips and frays of time, a task that prior to now also made displaying the items problematic. With the Museum’s climate-controlled galleries, fragile fabrics can withstand the rigors of exhibition.

Besides mending seams, Tinkham has found herself working on corsets, hoops, bustles, pantaloons and petticoats.

“These days, the clothes fit the body,” she said. “But for a good part of history, the body was made to fit the clothes with bustles, hoops, metal bust improvers.”

One of the things that most impressed her about the collection was how well New Mexicans dressed.

“A lot of the clothes are just so pretty to look at,” Tinkham said. “There were a lot of people in New Mexico who did dress to style. They were definitely stylish for the period.”

Those period-specific styles are also revealed in the Museum’s archival photos accompanying the exhibit, which buttress the notion of these being the clothes New Mexicans lived, worked and played in.

As they have for the last century, the collection of artifacts and photographs detailing our stylish ways would have continued. But without the new exhibition gallery, the wait to see them would have been even longer.

“The New Mexico History Museum opens a new chapter in the life of the Palace of the Governors,” Stiver said. “This new gallery allows us to expand our Museum’s mission and display exceptional examples from the Palace’s collections never before seen by the public.”

The New Mexico History Museum includes interactive multimedia displays, hands-on exhibits, and vivid stories of real New Mexicans. As a 96,000-square-foot extension of the Palace of the Governors – itself a story of New Mexico’s past and present in a 400-year-old building – the New Mexico History Museum anchors itself in the historic Santa Fe Plaza and offers a sampling of the people and the legends to be found throughout the state. Get into it – define your place in history and in fashion.

For more information about the New Mexico History Museum, including a selection of user-ready high-resolution photographs, log onto http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/nmhm. More than 8,000 additional, high-resolution photographs illustrating the history of New Mexico are available by keyword search at www.palaceofthegovernors.org (click on “Photo Archives” then on “Digitized Collections”). Most requests for scans from this site can be delivered the same day, and usage is free for publicity purposes only.

Grand Opening: May 24, 2009!

Some people say that “history is written by the winners.” The New Mexico History Museum, opening May 24, 2009, sets out to challenge that notion by taking a new approach, engaging visitors in the craft of history. Rather than staidly reporting what “happened,” the New Mexico History Museum presents a theatrical environment and the powerful stories of the many cultures that have called the Land of Enchantment home. Sometimes those cultures blended. Sometimes they clashed. Always, they added new stitches to a tapestry of life that’s among the oldest in the nation. Whether those stitches were for good or ill is up to visitors to decide. The museum allows them to reach their own conclusions about what “really” happened.


Kit Carson