Mexic-Arte Museum sits close to you here, Austin's official museum of Mexican and Mexican American fine art and folk art, and one of the most important cultural institutions in the Southwest. The museum was founded in 1984 by Sylvia Orozco, Sam Coronado, and Pio Pulido — three Austin artists who recognized that the city's growing Mexican American community had no dedicated cultural space in which to see itself reflected and celebrated. Starting with a single gallery and an enormous ambition, they built an institution that now occupies a permanent home on Congress Avenue and hosts an annual collection of more than 3,000 works spanning pre-Columbian artifacts, colonial Mexican art, twentieth-century modernism, and contemporary Chicano and Latino work.
The museum's Día de los Muertos celebration each November is one of Austin's most beloved public events — the Congress Avenue storefront fills with altars, marigolds, painted faces, and the photographs of the beloved dead. For a city whose mainstream cultural institutions largely ignored Mexican and Mexican American contributions for most of their histories, Mexic-Arte represents what community-driven institution building looks like: years of underfunding, volunteer labor, borrowed gallery space, and stubborn belief in the work's importance.