Museum of International Folk Art

The Museum of International Folk Art on Museum Hill in Santa Fe, New Mexico, holds one of the world's largest collections of traditional folk art, with more than 130,000 objects from over 100 countries. The museum's signature space — the Girard Foundation Collection wing — displays more than 10,000 miniature figures, toys, textiles, masks, and folk objects in an enormous floor-to-ceiling installation across every surface of a single grand hall, creating an effect sometimes described as stepping inside a global folk art world in miniature. The collection was donated by designer Alexander Girard and his wife Susan following decades of international travel and acquisition. Other permanent galleries include a significant Hispanic heritage collection covering New Mexican santos (religious paintings on tin and wood), retablos, and bultos spanning three centuries of northern New Mexico devotional art, and a rotating international gallery presenting folk traditions from specific countries or cultural regions in depth. The museum is among the strongest repositories of New Mexico Hispanic folk traditions outside of private and Church collections. Visitors encounter objects ranging from Ukrainian Easter eggs and Oaxacan alebrije wood carvings to Peruvian retablos and Apache beadwork across permanent and temporary galleries. The museum also mounts major temporary exhibitions of contemporary craft and applied art from around the world. Museum Hill is a cultural compound 2 miles southeast of the Santa Fe Plaza, where the folk art museum sits alongside the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art — all reachable by car or the Santa Fe Trails M bus route.