National Museum of Mexican Art

National Museum of Mexican Art Review

Formerly the Mexican Fine Arts Museum Center, this is the largest Latino museum in the country, half art museum, half cultural exploration center. After the big downtown museums, this is the one you shouldn't miss. Galleries house impressive collections of contemporary, traditional, and meso-American art from both sides of the border, as well as vivid exhibits that trace immigration woes and political fights. In 2001, the museum tripled in size to accommodate state-of-the-art storage vaults for its 5,500-object permanent collection that spans pre-Cuauhtemoc artifacts, textiles, paintings, prints and drawings, and folk art. Every fall the giant Day of the Dead exhibit stuns Chicagoans with its altars from artists across the country.