The story
In downtown El Paso, close to the Mexican border, the city's art museum occupies what used to be its Greyhound bus station. Architects rebuilt the terminal in the 1990s, wrapped a tall entrance hall around the street corner and turned the old parking garage into galleries. The museum moved in in 1998, leaving its first home, the Turney House, a 1908 mansion built for the lawyer and rancher William Ward Turney.
Many visitors come for a gift from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the charity of the dime-store magnate who spread his old master paintings across American cities. El Paso received 57 works of European art from the 12th to the 18th century, and they became the museum's founding collection. Among them is Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Artemisia Gentileschi, the best-known woman painter of the Italian Baroque. Nearby hang an early portrait of a lady by Anthony van Dyck and an Ecce Homo by the Spanish painter Murillo, showing Christ crowned with thorns.
The rest of the building turns toward its own region, with Mexican colonial art and the work of artists from the American Southwest and Mexico.
