Blasts from the past

Deep in the bowels of the Conservation Laboratory on Museum Hill in Santa Fe, Rebecca Tinkham uses a thin bamboo skewer to remove more than 20,000 flyspecks from one of the oldest textiles in New Mexico: a devotional medallion that arrived in the late 16th century with Juan de Onate, the explorer, conquistador and colonial governor.

On a nearby table, Conor McMahon polishes a 56-piece Tiffany silver set made in 1917 for the USS New Mexico. One dessert plate is adorned with an image of Kit Carson and a wagon train; a humidor depicts the Taos Pueblo so realistically that cracks in the adobe walls appear in the silver.

Then McMahon inspects a rare, brown yucca fiber sock from 800 AD; it’s the only one ever found in Chaco Canyon, part of the homeland of the Pueblo, Hopi and Navajo peoples.

Tinkham, a textile conservator, meticulously puts the final green patch on a little boy’s wool suit from the 19th century; the backside and knees were worn through by the little tyke, and one can almost feel his presence in the clothes.

The conservators were finishing work on artifacts that will be part of the core exhibit in the New Mexico History Museum that opens today in downtown Santa Fe, an expansion of its next-door neighbor, the Palace of the Governors.

The museum has a history of its own: The 96,000-square-foot facility has been 20 years in the making, carries a price tag of $44 million that was funded by federal, state and private donations and draws on thousands of years of human occupation in New Mexico.

Frances Levine, the museum director, saw her task as figuring out how to tell the countless tales from people who inhabited the land. Her expert team conducted more than 30 town hall meetings all over the state to get input from residents about which stories and artifacts they deemed important.

Through diaries, letters, maps, eyewitness accounts, oral histories and artifacts, museum visitors will learn the perspectives of the Native Americans, Mexicans, Spaniards, Easterners, outlaws, scientists, artists, railroad workers and legions of others who created the unique culture of New Mexico.

Levine does not shy away from controversy or history’s darker incidents. The story of the World War II Japanese internment camp in Santa Fe is told through the drawings of a guard named Harold West and the words of Japanese internees and Justice Department officials.

The reasons for the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 against the Spanish colonizers are dealt with. The U.S. government’s brutal forced marches of Apaches and Navajos from their homelands to reservations is front and center. Visitors can listen to audiotapes of people who are involved in ongoing land and water disputes and can then form their own opinions.

Guests can “spend a whole day here or do 400 years in 40 minutes,” says Kate Nelson, the museum’s marketing manager. Levine adds that “the museum is for streakers, strollers and scholars.”

The interactive experience includes petroglyph hand prints; you place your hand on one and it triggers audio vignettes about the Hopi emergence, the San Juan Cloud Dance or the Navajo Bird and Sheep Songs. As you walk through history, you are accompanied by Depression-era tunes, mid-19th century banjo and piano music, sound clips about J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi at Los Alamos (where the atomic bomb was developed), video and audio clips about the New Mexico National Guard and the Bataan Death March in the Philippines, the observations of the late Taos artist Helen Blumenschein and the stories of ranchers and miners.

For more low-tech, hands-on experiences, you can flip through albums with images culled from the 800,000 photographs in the archives. Or you can write your own New Mexico experiences for posterity. If you get tired of the exhibits, there’s a patio where you can have a snack, relax and look out over the courtyard of the Palace of the Governors and the rooftops of historic downtown Santa Fe.

Besides the core exhibit, a temporary show called “Fashioning New Mexico” will run for 11 months. It’s all about the clothes that people wore to go to war, seduce the opposite sex, attend baptisms, proms or native ceremonies. The exhibit includes items from underwear to flapper dresses and is enhanced by furniture, portraits, weaponry and other props that correspond to the sartorial era depicted.

Fashionistas can drool over wedding dresses, ball gowns with bustles, evening apparel and jewelry that the women of New Mexico wore to the opera, theater or parties. Then, if they wish, visitors can “dress up” in period clothes via computer.

“There’s something for everyone in the museum,” director Levine says. “I think of it as a gateway to experiencing New Mexico. It should inspire you to visit other museums, buy books, visit national parks.”

travel@latimes.com

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Take in New Mexico history at your own pace

NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM

Where: 113 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe, N.M., 87501

Summer hours: Open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily, through Labor Day.

Ticket prices: $6 for New Mexico residents, $9 for out-of-state visitors. Children 16 and under free. Free, 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday evening. Good for admission to both the museum and Palace of the Governors.

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Contact: (505) 476-5200; www.nmhistorymuseum.org.