The UNM Art Museum reopened in September after a year with its galleries closed. Its largest exhibition, Abundance: New Acquisitions from 2016 to 2026, closes on December 5. Six weeks sounds like plenty of time. The museum keeps the university's calendar, though, and once you take out Sundays, Mondays and Thanksgiving week, the show has about 25 open days left as of this Thursday.
Those days fall between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. If you live in Silver Hill, Spruce Park or University Heights, you can walk over on a lunch break. If you have to drive across town, it takes more planning. The rest of this guide is about using the short walk to your advantage.
What a Year Behind Closed Doors Produced
The museum called the closure Collections Year. Staff and student assistants turned the gallery spaces into workrooms and spent the year caring for and preserving the permanent collection. Most of the work in Abundance went through those procedures during that year.
The UNM Newsroom's reopening story says Abundance fills the Main and Van Deren Coke galleries with work by 44 artists from nine countries. It includes paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture made between 1810 and 2024. Senior curator Mary Statzer told the Newsroom that the show "honors the visitor, especially our students, who bring their own experience and interpretations to this exhibition."
The second exhibition, Tamarind Goes Global (1985-2020), is in the Clinton Adams Gallery. It follows Tamarind Institute's lithography collaborations with artists around the world and draws on archives held at UNM. It runs through March 12, 2027, so it will outlast Abundance by more than three months.
Admission is free, and you don't need a ticket. The museum is at 203 Cornell Dr. NE, in the lobby of the Center for the Arts, the same building as Popejoy Hall. Bags, backpacks, food and drinks have to be left at the front desk, so a coffee from the walk over will wait for you there. The museum's visit page also says it can't offer guided tours right now, so you'll be walking the galleries on your own.
Counting the Days Left for Abundance
The museum is closed Sundays, Mondays, major holidays and UNM breaks. It lists Thanksgiving weekend, November 26 through 30, as a closure. Here is what that leaves, counting from this post's publication on Thursday, October 29:
| Week | Open days | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Oct. 29 to 31 | Thursday, Friday, Saturday | 3 |
| Nov. 3 to 7 | Tuesday to Saturday | 5 |
| Nov. 10 to 14 | Tuesday to Saturday | 5 |
| Nov. 17 to 21 | Tuesday to Saturday | 5 |
| Nov. 24 to 28 | Tuesday and Wednesday only | 2 |
| Dec. 1 to 5 | Tuesday to Saturday, closing day | 5 |
That comes to 25 days at most, and fewer if any other holiday closure falls in that stretch. Five of them are Saturdays, because Saturday, November 28 falls inside the Thanksgiving closure. Winter break starts December 13 and runs through January 18, 2027. Anyone who was planning to show Abundance to holiday guests should know the show will already be gone by then.
The Show Next Door Can Wait
A short walk north, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology runs on a much longer clock. Coiling Kin: The Life of Pueblo Pottery opened in June and stays up until May 27, 2028. It took three years to put together. It shows more than 60 pots from the Maxwell's collection, along with pottery-making tools, photographs, and audio and video interviews with the co-curators.
The co-curators are what make it unusual. Lead curator Lea McChesney began the project after a friend asked her where the follow-up was to the museum's 1974 exhibition Seven Families in Pueblo Pottery. Twenty-five Native American potters agreed to take part, and with McChesney and exhibits curator Toni Gentili that makes 27 curators. In a UNM Newsroom feature, Julián Estrada, who leads education and public programs at the Maxwell, said the show "needed to show more than just objects in cases."
The Maxwell is at 500 University Blvd. NE and keeps the same hours as the art museum, Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free, donations are welcome, and the entrance is along the south side of the building. Since Coiling Kin runs through spring 2028, it's the better pick for a slow afternoon in March. This fall, a visit to Abundance matters more.
Where the Evenings Are
Both museums close at 4 p.m., so the Maxwell's free evening programs are the only after-work way in this fall. The first one is the evening this post publishes.
- Thursday, October 29, 5 to 8 p.m.: Plática y Celebración de Día de Muertos, in Room 105 and the Atrium of the Hibben Center for Archaeological Research. Free and open to all.
- Thursday, November 5, 5 to 6:30 p.m.: Evolutionary Perspectives on Fermented Food Consumption, a lecture in Hibben Center Room 105 that is also streamed on Zoom.
- Friday, December 4, 5 to 7 p.m.: Holiday Open House: Hanging of the Greens, at the museum and in its courtyard. Free and open to all.
November 5 also has a second event at the same time. Tamarind Institute is holding a curator's talk with Scout Hutchinson and Angel Jiang, the art museum's curator of prints and drawings and a co-curator of Tamarind Goes Global, at 5:30 p.m. in its gallery. The talk is RSVP-only by email, and the two programs overlap, so you'll need to pick one to attend in person. The Maxwell lecture is also offered on Zoom.
Tamarind Keeps a Different Week
Tamarind opened Against the Plane: Experimental Lithography at Tamarind on October 22, and its listing gives no closing date. Its gallery page lists public hours of Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The entrance is on the Stanford side of the building, and parking is free while you visit. That page was last updated in 2024, so check Tamarind's site for current hours before you go.
The schedules don't line up. On a Saturday, the art museum and the Maxwell are open and Tamarind is not. From Tuesday through Friday all three are open, and Tamarind stays open an hour later. If you want to see all three in one trip, which works well because Tamarind Goes Global and Against the Plane tell parts of the same lithography story, go on a Tuesday through Friday.
The First Weekend of December
December 4 and 5 bring the season together. On Friday evening the Maxwell holds its Hanging of the Greens open house. On Saturday morning, from 10 a.m. to noon, it hosts a ticketed Holiday Ornament Workshop featuring Lorraine Gala Lewis in the Hibben Center Atrium, with registration opening closer to the date. That Saturday is also the last day of Abundance. The workshop ends at noon and the art museum is open until 4 p.m., so a morning at the Maxwell and an afternoon at the Center for the Arts fit easily into one day.
A week later, on December 11 at 7:30 p.m., Popejoy Hall stages A Christmas Carol in the same building. By then Abundance will have closed, and winter break starts two days later.
Getting There Without Paying for the Privilege
The art museum's own visit page says "Parking around here can be tricky!" UNM Parking and Transportation Services puts it more directly in its parking FAQ: "There is no free parking on campus." For drivers, the visitor parking rates for the 2026-27 academic year work out like this:
- The Cornell Structure on Redondo Drive, east of Popejoy Hall, is the one the art museum recommends.
- Hourly parking costs $1.75 per half hour, up to $28 for eight hours. From 3 p.m. to midnight there's a $10 flat rate, which applies to all three Maxwell evening events.
- On weekends you can use any open surface-lot space. Pay-station spaces, including the structures, are still enforced.
- The Maxwell has a small strip lot just west of the building, and you can get permits for it at the front desk or museum store.
Neighbors who live closest don't need any of this. The art museum notes it is a couple of blocks from the Central Avenue bus lines and has bike racks outside the Center for the Arts. For lunch on the way, Seemo's Slices Pizzeria & Market lists its address as 2300 Central Ave. SE. An October review on Gil's Thrilling (And Filling) Blog says it soft-opened in mid-January 2026 and notes that its storefront actually faces Harvard.
Laura Fitzpatrick likes to know which free campus galleries are open on a Saturday, which evening talks are worth a weeknight, and when the museums close for winter break. If you're thinking about a home within walking distance of these galleries, or about what that walkability means for a home you already own near UNM, This House Fitz is glad to talk it through. Schedule Your Free Consultation, and bring your questions about the neighborhood along with your questions about the house.
