Qualla: Millicent Rogers Museum

Millicent Rogers Museum: Introduction

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jay Cross from Berkeley, California, US, CC BY 2.0. Millicent Rogers had everything Manhattan high society could offer -- wealth inherited from her grandfather, one of the original founders of Standard Oil, a career as a fashion designer, and the admiration of some of the most famous men in mid-century America. Then, in 1947, she arrived in Taos, New Mexico, and none of it mattered anymore. What captivated her was something no amount of money could manufacture: the turquoise-and-silver jewelry of Pueblo artisans, the geometric precision of Navajo chief blankets, the ancient glow of micaceous clay pottery shaped by hands that carried two thousand years of tradition. Rogers threw herself into collecting with the same intensity she had brought to everything else in her life, acquiring more than 1,200 pieces of Native American and Hispanic jewelry and over 50 textiles in just five years. She would not live to see what her passion became.

Read more: Millicent Rogers Museum on Qualla

Image: Jay Cross from Berkeley, California, US | CC BY 2.0

Millicent Rogers Museum: The Collector Who Changed the Rules

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter D. Tillman, CC BY-SA 2.0. Rogers did not simply buy beautiful things. She understood that Native American art occupied a precarious position in mid-20th-century America, admired as craft but denied the status afforded to European fine art. Leveraging her considerable social connections, she campaigned to ...

Read more: Millicent Rogers Museum on Qualla

Image: Peter D. Tillman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Millicent Rogers Museum: Two Thousand Years on the Shelves

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kyle Magnuson from Los Angeles, United States, CC BY 2.0. The museum's Native American holdings span an extraordinary timeline. Baskets and pottery in the collection represent craft traditions dating back roughly two thousand years. Mimbres pottery depicting fish dates to between 1000 and 1150 AD. Moving forward through the centuries, t...

Read more: Millicent Rogers Museum on Qualla

Image: Kyle Magnuson from Los Angeles, United States | CC BY 2.0

Millicent Rogers Museum: Santos, Tinware, and Self-Reliance

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter D. Tillman, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 1980s, the Millicent Rogers Museum became the first cultural organization in New Mexico to offer a comprehensive collection of Hispanic art, broadening its mission beyond Rogers's original Native American focus. The Hispanic holdings tell a story of resourcefulness and dev...

Read more: Millicent Rogers Museum on Qualla

Image: Peter D. Tillman | CC BY-SA 2.0

Millicent Rogers Museum: Where Taos Keeps Its Memory

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kyle Magnuson from Los Angeles, United States, CC BY 2.0. The museum sits just north of Taos proper, sharing the high desert landscape with the Taos Pueblo community that inspired so much of its collection. Inside, a polychrome plate by the legendary potter Maria Martinez and her son Popovi Da, created in 1969 and depicting the Avanyu w...

Read more: Millicent Rogers Museum on Qualla

Image: Kyle Magnuson from Los Angeles, United States | CC BY 2.0