El Paso Museum of Art - El Paso, Texas - Fine Arts Museum and Cultural Center

The Museum is located at One Arts Festival Plaza in El Paso, Texas. The El Paso Museum of Art (EPMA) was founded in 1959. It is the fine arts Museum of El Paso and is considered a main cultural and educational center catering to West Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico.

The Museum has over 5,000 works of art in its permanent collection of American, European and Mexican art.

The European collection is mainly comprised of the Samuel H. Kress Collection, which is housed in the 3,300 sq ft Kress Collection Gallery. This permanent collection consists of 57 paintings, 2 sculptures, and the Museum's Western European works of art from the 13th to the 18th century.

There is also the Spanish Viceroyal Collection that depicts the Spanish Empire in the New World. A number of works belonging to this collection are permanently exhibited in the Roderick Gallery. This collection is comprised of paintings on different mediums, such as canvas, panel, copper, and tin. The collections date back from the 17th through the 19th centuries.

The Works on Paper Collection rotates between the Peter and Margaret de Wetter Gallery and other galleries in the Museum. It consists of over 2,500 works and range from prints, to drawings, to watercolors, to posters, to artists books and photographs between the 16th and 20th centuries. This Collection is extremely diverse as it includes Old Master prints, 19th century reproductive engravings, and American Scene prints.

The focal point of the Contemporary Collection is art from the southwest region, such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico.

The Museum's American Collection is an extensive collection consisting of art from the 19th to the 20th centuries and focuses on southwestern art from Taos, Santa Fe, and El Paso areas.

In addition to its permanent collection, the Museum has temporary exhibitions, films, lectures, concerts, art classes, and other education activities and programs available to the general public.

The Museum was most recently accredited in 2001 and caters to around 100,000 visitors per year.

The Museum provides free tours in English and in Spanish of the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions. To reserve a tour, all calls are to be made at least three weeks in advance to the Museum's Education Department at (915) 532-1707. The tours can accommodate between 10 to 50 people and are geared to visitors above the 3rd grade level.

Besides the guided tours, there is also the "Look and Do Tours,'' which is a hands-on related approach to art. The tour is geared towards focusing on a particular type of media, theory, or art technique, which is then followed by actually applying a hands-on activity of the subject of focus. This tour targets K-8th grade levels and accommodates groups between 12-35 visitors. The fee for this tour is $15/visitor and school groups are offered this tour at a discounted rate of $10 per student.

There are also self guided tours, in which groups are able to walk around the galleries and learn about their areas of interest and specific art works thanks to the educational and informative labels on all the works of art in the Museum.

The Museum is open from Tuesday to Saturday between the hours of 9am and 5pm. On Thursdays, it has extended hours from 9am to 9pm. On Sundays, the Museum opens from 12pm to 5pm. The Museum is closed on Monday. The Museum store has the same hours as the Museum. The Museum can be reached by calling (915) 32-1707. Currently, there are no admission charges to the Museum.