For most of the past year, walking Museum Hill meant walking past a wing you couldn't get into. The Girard Wing at the Museum of International Folk Art, home to more than 100,000 objects and the museum's single biggest draw, went dark for roof repair, with the closure running through this past May. If you've lived near Camino Lejo during that stretch, you already know what a museum feels like with its centerpiece gallery gated off. One visitor review from the closure period put it plainly: with Girard shut, the rest of the museum felt sparse, the remaining cases underlit and easy to walk past in ten minutes.
That's over now. The wing reopened this year, and it landed back in rotation at the same moment three other things on the hill turned over: new exhibitions, a full autumn calendar at the botanical garden, and a seasonal menu shift at the one restaurant that sits between all of it. None of these are huge headlines on their own. Together, they mean something specific: this is the first fall in over a year when every piece of Museum Hill, the museums, the garden, and the cafe in between, is open and current at the same time.
The Wing That Went Quiet
The Girard Wing houses Multiple Visions: A Common Bond, the exhibition built from designer Alexander Girard's own collection, first opened in 1982 and still showing only about ten percent of the roughly 106,000 pieces he donated. It's the wing most people mean when they say they're "going to the folk art museum." Its closure for critical roof work didn't shut the museum down, but it changed the shape of a visit. Docent tours had less to walk through. The Bartlett and Hispanic Heritage wings carried the weight of foot traffic alone.
With the repair finished, Girard is back in full rotation, and the museum's own site now lists it alongside the Bartlett, Hispanic Heritage, and Neutrogena wings without any closure notice attached. If you haven't been up since before the scaffolding went up, this is the version of the museum you remember.
Three New Shows, Landed the Same Season
The reopening isn't the only reason to go back. Two new exhibitions opened this year, and a third has been running since early summer.
| Exhibition | Where | Dates |
|---|---|---|
| The Art Underground: Fantasy Coffins of Ghana | Museum of International Folk Art | July 26, 2026 – March 31, 2027 |
| Acoma figurative pottery (Gallery of Conscience) | Museum of International Folk Art | June 7, 2026 – November 30, 2026 |
| Multiple Visions: A Common Bond | Girard Wing | Ongoing, back in rotation |
The Fantasy Coffins show brings together handcrafted figurative coffins from five artists connected to Ghana's Ga funerary tradition, among them Seth Kane Kwei, credited with originating the form, and Paa Joe, one of the tradition's best known contemporary makers. These are not somber pieces. They're built in the shape of the things the deceased loved in life, and the exhibition traces how a local funerary custom in Teshie-Nungua became recognized internationally as sculpture.
The Acoma pottery show in the Gallery of Conscience is smaller and more locally rooted. It's the museum's contribution to Handwork, a national initiative from Craft in America marking the 250th anniversary of the country's founding, and it looks at figurative pottery from Acoma Pueblo, tracing the form back through ancestral Puebloan precedent and forward through how tourism and the market for Pueblo pottery reshaped the craft around the turn of the twentieth century. It closes at the end of November, so this fall is most of what's left of its run.
The Garden Runs Its Own Calendar
The Santa Fe Botanical Garden doesn't wait on the museums' schedule, and this week is a good example. On Saturday, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum partnered with the garden for a session welcoming the change of season, alongside a guided walking tour through the garden's native plant collection. Today, a member of the Santa Fe Stargazers is set up in the garden with a solar telescope, open to anyone who wants to look at the sun without damaging their eyes doing it.
Later in the calendar, the garden has an evening event pairing live music with local food and drink, built around the piñon-juniper woodland's fall color rather than around any single flower bloom. There's also a nighttime flashlight walk on the calendar for October, campfire storytelling built into a route that winds past Kearny's Gap Bridge, the 62-foot Warren truss bridge built in 1913, moved here from the old Bibb Ranch after a highway realignment left it stranded, now the garden's most photographed crossing.
None of this requires a museum ticket. The garden sits on the same grounds as the museums but runs as its own nonprofit, with its own gate and its own reason to come up the hill even on a day you have no interest in folk art or hoop dancing.
What's on the Table at Weldon's
Between exhibitions, or instead of one, there's Weldon's Museum Hill Cafe, run by Weldon Fulton since he reopened it in 2010 after a nine month closure. The cafe has become the kind of place regulars mean when they say "up on the hill" without naming a specific museum. It seats fewer than you'd guess and books up on weekends, which is worth knowing before you drive up expecting a walk-in table.
The menu hasn't changed its core lineup in years, and that's part of the appeal. The corn custard appetizer, a savory square under a mild green sauce, still opens most people's meal. The Reuben, built on pastrami rather than corned beef for a more tender bite, remains one of the better versions in Santa Fe. Salmon comes in from Above Sea Level and gets a paprika and olive oil marinade before it hits the grill, and the duck flautas with mango sauce are close to the only place in town you'll find that specific dish. What does shift with the season are the specials, and this time of year that means beef bourguignon with mashed potatoes has returned to the board, the kind of dish that makes sense once the afternoons start cooling off. Sunday brunch still comes with a pianist, and the wine list, mostly $10 a glass and $30 a bottle, gets its own spotlight through Fulton's Wine Wednesdays series with local wine writer Jill Cashman.
A Full Day on the Hill, Again
Put those four threads together and you get something that hasn't been fully available up here in over a year. Start at the garden while the morning light is still low enough to make the woodland glow, cross Kearny's Gap Bridge, then walk over to the museums. With Girard back and two new shows running, there's enough on the walls to fill a real morning instead of a quick loop through what's left after one wing is closed. Finish at Weldon's, where a seasonal dish and a glass of wine make sense of the whole outing before you head back down the hill.
None of this is dramatic. A roof gets fixed. A gallery reopens. A restaurant swaps its cold weather special back onto the board. But taken together, this is the first season since the closure began when the hill runs at what it's actually built for, everything open, everything current, all of it walkable in a single visit.
If you've been putting off a trip up Museum Hill because half of it felt half finished, this is the season that changes that math.
If Museum Hill's rhythm, from a reopened wing to a garden calendar that runs on its own clock, is the kind of neighborhood detail you like to keep track of, the Ricky Allen-Tara Earley Group pays close attention to this corner of Santa Fe and is always glad to talk about what's next for it.
