Events

There’s always something exciting happening at the Museum of International Folk Art! Join us for our many programs listed below.

Canceled - Family Morning at Folk Art
Closure

Canceled - Family Morning at Folk Art

September 1, 2019

Canceled- Sepetember 1st Family Morning at Folk Art.

Look for our next Family Morning returing November 3rd!

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Special Docent-Led Tour on Girard & Mexico
Lectures and Talks

Special Docent-Led Tour on Girard & Mexico

September 15, 2019
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

HOW MEXICO INSPIRED ALEXANDER GIRARD”

Join us for a unique look into Alexander Girard’s Multiple Visions and the Vitra exhibition, A Designer’s Universe, with a specially designed FOFA tour led by MOIFA docent, Ann Murdy, a photographer, author, and frequent traveler to Mexico. The tour will focus on the influence of Mexican folk art on Alexander Girard’s designs.  FREE with admission!

Sunday, 15 September. 1:30 – 2:30pm.  Meet in the Girard Lounge area (across from the auditorium)

About the Museum of International Folk Art: http://www.internationalfolkart.org/

Founded in 1953 by Florence Dibell Bartlett, the Museum of International Folk Art’s mission is to foster understanding of the traditional arts to illuminate human creativity and shape a humane world. The museum holds the world’s largest international folk art collection of more than 150,000 objects from six continents and over 150 nations, representing a broad range of global artists whose artistic expressions make Santa Fe an international crossroads of culture. For many visitors, fascination with folk art begins upon seeing the whimsical toys and traditional objects within the Girard Collection. For others, the international textiles, ceramics, carvings and other cultural treasures in the Neutrogena Collection provide the allure.  The museum’s historic and contemporary Latino and Hispano folk art collections, spanning the Spanish Colonial period to modern-day New Mexico, reflect how artists respond to their time and place in ways both delightful and sobering. In 2010, the museum opened the Mark Naylor and Dale Gunn Gallery of Conscience, where exhibitions encourage visitors to exchange ideas on complex issues of human rights and social justice.

 706 Camino Lejo, on Museum Hill in Santa Fe, NM 87505. (505) 476-1200.

Hours: 10 am to 5 pm daily, May through October; closed Mondays November through April, closed Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. First Sunday of Every Month is free to NM Residents.

More Info

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Museum Hill Community Day
Performance Lectures and Talks Family Demonstration

Museum Hill Community Day

September 22, 2019
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Come to Museum Hill for FREE Native dances, live music, storytelling, hands‑on activities, artist demonstrations, food, and more!

Admission and all hands-on activities are FREE for New Mexico residents and guests alike. For more info and a full schedule of events, visit MuseumHill.net/CommunityDay.

Come to Museum Hill for Native dances, live music, storytelling, hands‑on activities, artist demonstrations, food, and more! Explore family-friendly events all over the hill at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, the Museum of International Folk Art, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

Admission and all hands-on activities are FREE for New Mexico residents and guests alike. For more info and a full schedule of events, visit MuseumHill.net/CommunityDay.

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Folk Art Afternoons at the Libraries
Workshop Family

Folk Art Afternoons at the Libraries

September 24, 2019
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM

At Santa Fe Southside Library:

Tuesday Sept. 24th  – Tin Frames & Ornaments

Join us for free folk art family programs! Learn about folk art and cultures around the world through hands-on art making. Children must be accompanied by an adult. Please take note of the specific dates and activities. All events take place from 3:30-4:30pm.

Upcoming Programs at Southside Library:

Oct. 29th – Calaveras/ Skeleton Puppets

Nov. 26th – Animal Masks

Dec. 17th – Peruvian Retablos

Produced In Partnership with Museum of International Folk Art and Santa Fe Public Library. For more information, please contact Kemely Gomez at 505-476-1215.

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Popular Arts As National Stand-ins: Mexico's 1968 Cultural Olympiad
Lectures and Talks Featured Event

Popular Arts As National Stand-ins: Mexico's 1968 Cultural Olympiad

September 25, 2019
5:30 PM - 6:30 PM

The Museum of International Folk Art welcomes Dr. Deborah Dorotinsky of Mexico City’s Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas to discuss folk art and dipolomacy.

This lecture explores the exhibition of folk arts prepared by the Olympic Organizing Committee for the XIX Olympic Games in Mexico in 1968, and the ways popular craft was used as a form of cultural diplomacy from 1940-1970. Nearly 50 years after the original exhibition, in 2016, a group of students and curators at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) revived the exhibition, highlighting its history and the shifting definition artisanal design, craft, folk art and arte popular

Dr. Deborah Dorotinsky is a full-time tenured researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM and a professor of historiography of art history, history of Mexican ethnographic photography and gender and visual cultures 1920-1950 in the Art History Graduate Program at the same university.

Lecture with Dr. Deborah Dorotinsky: The International Exhibition of Popular Arts was one of the events that accompanied the XIX Olympic Games in Mexico 1968 as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Crafts, folk arts and arte popular were conceived by the Olympic Organizing Committee as one of the things that united all nations.  However, the games and the cultural program were obscured in Mexico by the repression of the student movement and the Tlatelolco student massacre on October 2nd, 1968. Discourse on world peace was overshadowed by repression to civil rights movements, as was happening in many other countries that year.

Mexican cultural agents had long incorporated popular arts as part of their cultural diplomacy strategies: this exhibition was one such example. In 1969, the Olympic Committee bequeathed the popular arts collection to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) where it was stored and sporadically exhibited. In 2016 a group of curators and students of UNAM’s graduate Art History program, organized an exhibition that revised the history of the 1968 popular arts exhibition and highlighted objects from the collection to address problems of cultural diplomacy, display strategies and shifting definitions of artisanal design, craft, folk art and arte popular. This talk will address both iterations of the exhibition and propose some partial results of my ongoing research on arte popular between 1940 and 1970 in Mexico.

Prof. Deborah Dorotinsky holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley (1985) and an MA and PhD in Art History from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM (2003). She is a full-time tenured researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM and a professor of historiography of art history, history of Mexican ethnographic photography and gender and visual cultures 1920-1950 in the Art History Graduate Program at the same university. Her book, Viaje de sombras: fotografías del Desierto de la Soledad y los indios lacandones en los años cuarenta, was published by UNAM-Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas in 2003. She coordinated, with Álvaro Vázquez, Danna Levín and Antonio Zirion, Variaciones sobre cine etnográfico: entre la documentación antropológica y la experimentación estética, 2017. She has published extensively articles and book chapters both in Spanish and English in different journals and readers.

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