El Paso's Art Museum Deserves More Attention

One Arts Festival Plaza downtown. The building looks modest from the street. Inside, it holds 700 years of art from two continents and will quietly rearrange what you think "American art" means.

The Kress Collection has the Renaissance panels and Baroque portraits, sure, but the real draw is the American and Mexican galleries. Retablos from colonial New Spain hanging beside contemporary Chicano work — the conversation between them across centuries makes the border feel like what it actually is, a line drawn through the middle of a continuous culture. Tom Lea's murals get their own wall and they earn it.

Second floor, tucked past the stairwell, there's a small gallery of pre-Columbian artifacts most people walk right past. Clay figures and jade carvings, some 2,000 years old. It's the foundation everything else in the building stands on. The room is almost always empty. Their loss.