MUSEUMS

The Las Cruces Museum System aims to provide a welcoming environment for the curious so they can gain new insights and experience personal and community enrichment. The museums showcase exhibitions on local, national, and global themes to educate and inspire visitors from near and far. Admission is FREE.

Click here to download our printable Calendar of Events for January-March, 2023.

For programs and activities that do not have a cost associated with them, you may now sign up online here.

Aerial landscape photo of the Branigan Cultural Center building

BRANIGAN CULTURAL CENTER

The Branigan Cultural Center is dedicated to engaging visitors in the rich heritage of the Southwest and the world-at-large through artistic, cultural and historical exhibitions and programs. Housed in a 1935 Pueblo Revival- style building, it was the first library in Las Cruces.


Vale la Pena/It's Worth It Exhibit

Vale la Pena/It's Worth It

January 14-March 25, 2023

Multi-media artist Gina Gwen Palacios draws upon her family history and Mexican American identity to create portraits of her family’s lived experiences, using colors and materials that emphasize the long cultural heritage she and they have in the south Texas/Mexico borderland. Palacios uses traditional and non-traditional materials, including cardboard, cotton, sandpaper, and paint, to highlight an often underrepresented geographic and cultural narrative. Her parents’ stories about migrant farm work, picking cotton, and racial discrimination are found in Palacios’ work. She uses cardboard because of its brown color, availability, and strength. However, it is also cheap and disposable; and in using it Palacios makes it symbolic of the Mexican American labor force and the disposable treatment many workers receive from their employers.


City of Hope: Resurrection City and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign

City of Hope: Resurrection City and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign

January 20 - April 1, 2023

For forty-three days during the early summer of 1968, a tent city covered sixteen acres of land on the National Mall where some 3,000 people from across America gathered to advocate for economic opportunities, racial equality, and justice. A year earlier, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, declared poverty a national human rights issue. SCLC made plans for a Poor People’s Campaign - a grassroots, multiracial movement - that would draw thousands of people to Washington, D.C. They decided to proceed with the gathering despite the assassination of Dr. King on April 4, 1968. Between May and June, demonstrators demanded social reforms while living in a tent city known as Resurrection City. Dr. Abernathy declared it a “City of Hope” in honor of Dr. King.


Woodworker

Honesty of Construction: The WPA and Spanish Colonial Style Furniture

Nov 29, 2022-Summer 2023

This exhibit examines the Works Progress Administration-era vocational training program in New Mexico that drew upon Spanish Colonial furniture to teach young men and women a marketable trade in woodworking. Drawings from the University Museum collection at New Mexico State University, the exhibit features fifteen furniture pieces made through a 1930s community vocational program that was established in Las Cruces at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (now New Mexico State University).


Museum of Art

MUSEUM OF ART

The Museum of Art features juried, invitational, and traveling exhibitions with artwork by nationally and internationally known artists. Through the Studio Program, the Museum offers professional art instruction for youth and adults in drawing, painting, ceramics, and other media.


Gaspar Enriquez Exhibit

Gaspar Enríquez: Chicano Pride, Chicano Soul

February 3 - May 6, 2023

Gaspar Enríquez has long defined the Chicano art scene. He paints with an airbrush and creates hyper-realistic portraits of people who interest him and whom he finds compelling. His early Harmony en la Esquina series captures the internal conflicts and defensiveness of his young subjects through their eyes or in their body stance. Enríquez’s more recent De Puro Corazónseries features intimate portraits of men and women who have deep meaning to him. It is because of Enríquez’s compassionate nature that his portraits end up capturing the viewer’s curiosity and forcing them to look deeply at his subjects to see their dignity and humanity.

Museum of Nature and Science Sign

MUSEUM OF NATURE & SCIENCE

The Las Cruces Museum of Nature and Science, or MoNaS, inspires curiosity about the sciences, facilitates life-long learning, and promotes stewardship of the natural environment of the Chihuahuan Desert and southern New Mexico.

Railroad Museum

RAILROAD MUSEUM

The mission of the Railroad Museum is to preserve the heritage of railroading through a series of miniature representations of New Mexico railroads, as well as research and preserve the history of model railroading.