Roswell is best known for its 1947 UFO incident, but the city's serious cultural asset is the Roswell Museum and Art Center - one of the finest regional art museums in the Southwest, with a remarkable permanent collection that includes the world's most significant holding of works by Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth, alongside strong collections of New Mexico modernism and Southwestern painting. The Hurd-Wyeth connection gives Roswell's art world a family depth that is unusual: Peter Hurd's tempera landscapes of the Hondo Valley, painted en plein air over decades from his ranch east of the city, defined a way of seeing southeastern New Mexico that continues to influence artists working in the region today. The Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, founded by collector Don Anderson, adds a serious contemporary program to what might otherwise seem an unlikely arts destination.
Museum Downtown Roswell · Roswell
A surprising gem in the eastern New Mexico desert: a museum showcasing work created by artists who participated in the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, with over 200 works spanning five decades of residency.
Museum Downtown Roswell · Roswell
New Mexico's oldest art museum, with a wide-ranging collection of Southwestern and American art, notable holdings of Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth paintings, and a celebrated artist-in-residence program founded in 1967.
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The Roswell Museum and Art Center holds a permanent collection that would be the pride of any small city in the American West: strong holdings in New Mexico art from the territorial period to the present, a significant collection of Peter Hurd's egg tempera paintings of the Hondo Valley, Robert Goddard memorabilia documenting the pioneering rocket scientist's work in Roswell in the 1930s and 1940s, and collections of Southwestern Indigenous art and cultural material that provide genuine historical depth. The museum's Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art holds a collection built through the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, one of the longest-running artist residency programs in the country, which has brought hundreds of artists from across the country and internationally to work in Roswell since 1967. The residents' work, donated to the museum at the end of each residency, constitutes an extraordinary survey of American contemporary art from the 1960s to the present. For serious art travelers, Roswell's museum infrastructure is a genuine and largely undiscovered resource.