Museums - The Mexican Museum/El Museo Mexicano

The Mexican Museum, initially located in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, was founded in 1975 by San Francisco resident and artist Peter Rodríguez. The museum was the realization of his vision that an institution be created in the United States to exhibit the aesthetic expression of the Mexican and Mexican-American people.
Presently located in Fort Mason near the Golden Gate Bridge, the Mexican Museum is poised at the brink of one of the most exciting phases in its twenty-six-year history. It is constructing a new building in the downtown Yerba Buena Arts Center. When it is completed, it will provide space in which to expand the museum’s education and public programs. This new facility will house a unique collection of over 12,000 objects representing thousands of years of Mexican history and culture within the Americas.
The museum’s permanent collection includes pre-Conquest and colonial period artifacts as well as modern and contemporary Mexican, Latino, and Chicano art. The pre-Conquest collection spans thousands of years prior to the sixteenth century. It features examples of ceramic figures, beads and bowls from Mexican regions and cultures such as Chupícuaro, Colima, Huastec, Jalisco, Nayarit, Remojadas, Toltec, Maya, Zapotec, Aztec, Veracruz, and Yucatán. It also includes dramatic vessels, tools and mythological figures from the Inca, Nazca, Moche and Chancay civilizations of Peru.