A collection with a reason for being.

• Author: Schur, Maxine Rose
• Position: Gallery Place

Deutsch arrived in Mexico City in 1939 with her family, political refugees from Nazi Austria. She had no knowledge of Mexico nor the Spanish language but soon after her arrival, she saw a mural by the great Jose Clemente Orozco in the city's Palace of Fine Arts. The mural sparked a lifelong curiosity about Mexican culture:

"It was not so much the subject matter as the colors. That night I dreamt in yellows and reds. Such an intense emotion made me realize that this was a completely different culture that could not he understood through European eyes."

This insight would eventually draw the young woman deep into Mexico's artistic heritage: the richest continuous artistic heritage on the continent, reaching back twenty centuries. Her journey began the day she visited the Indian village of Nahuzontla, where she bought herself a blouse embroidered with vivid flowers Gazing at the embroidery, she asked herself two questions: Who made it? Why did that person make it?

The purchase of that blouse propelled her on a sixty-year quest to discover Mexico's finest folk art and to understand line Indian cultures that produced it. Early on, she realized what many others did not, that it is through indigenous crafts that the artistic richness of Mexico is most apparent.

Deutsch trained as a professional photographer, and in 1950 she married the equally adventurous Carl Lechuga. With camera slung over her shoulder, she and her husband ventured into the most remote regions of Mexico, seeking the authentic culture. It was not an easy life. She would sometimes traipse through jungles for days, frequently enduring deprivation and discomfort in her attempts to reach isolated settlements where Spanish had never been heard and no foreigner ever seen. Wherever she went site bought handicrafts and recorded with her camera the daily life and sacred ceremonies of the people.

Today, Dr. Ruth Lechuga is a world renowned authority on Mexican folk art and the author of several books on the subject and the creator of an important anthropological archive of twenty thousand photographs. Just as impressive is the result of her six decades of shopping: ten thousand folk-art objects--all housed in her own apartment--now a museum.

The Ruth D. Lechuga Museum is situated on a tree-lined street in the charming residential neighborhood of Condesa. Compared to the city's many, well-attended museums, this little gem is less known; yet it is one of the loveliest museums in Mexico City...