Founded in 1959, the El Paso Museum of Art faces you right here in downtown El Paso. Founded in 1959 and first accredited in 1972, this is the only accredited art museum within a 250-mile radius. It serves approximately 100,000 visitors per year and a regional audience that stretches across West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
A new building was completed in 1998, and inside that building you’ll find not only a permanent collection and changing special exhibitions but a full program of art classes, film series, lectures, concerts and storytelling sessions. The museum is best known for its 57-piece Samuel H. Kress collection of 12th–18th-century European art, with works by artists you may recognize on a label: Canaletto, Artemisia Gentileschi, Filippino Lippi, Lorenzo Lotto, Lavinia Fontana, Carlo Crivelli and others from that span of centuries. As you stand here, imagine the reach of those old canvases meeting a community across borders and deserts, classrooms and concert evenings alike.
Let Canaletto and Gentileschi linger in your mind as you go.