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Museo De Arte Carrillo Gil
The Carrillo Gil Art Museum has a permanent collection of works by such Mexican luminaries as Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco (including some of Orozco's grotesque, satirical early drawings and watercolors). The museum also includes engravings and prints by Klee, Rouault, Braque and Kandinsky, plus often excellent temporary exhibits. In the basement is a pleasant bookstore and café.
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Museo de Arte Moderno
The Museum of Modern Art exhibits work by Mexico's most noteworthy 20th-century artists. Four skylit rotundas house canvasses by Dr Atl, Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, Kahlo, Tamayo and O'Gorman, among others. You can also see Las Dos Fridas , possibly Frida Kahlo's most well-known painting. Temporary exhibitions feature prominent Mexican and foreign artists.
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Museo De Arte Popular
Opened in 2006, the Museo de Arte Popular is a major showcase for Mexico's folk arts and traditions. Contemporary crafts from all over Mexico are thematically displayed on the museum's three levels, including pottery from Michoacán, carnival masks from Chiapas, alebrijes (fanciful animal figures) from Oaxaca and trees of life from Puebla. There are also beaded textiles, fantastic headdresses and votive paintings, along with videos of indigenous festivities.
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Museo De Historia De Tlalpan
Half a block from the plaza, the Tlalpan history museum hosts compelling historical and art exhibits in naturally lit galleries off the courtyard.
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Museo De La Basílica De Guadalupe
The rear of the Antigua Basílica is now the basilica museum, with a fine collection of colonial art interpreting the miraculous vision. Various galleries on two floors display mostly large-scale works, including one of a procession along a causeway on Lago de Texcoco, one of the rare depictions of the lake before it was drained. The walls in the entry hall are covered with ex-votos, naive paintings on squares of metal that are done as an act of thanks for some miracle.
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Museo De La Caricatura
Mexico boasts a rich tradition of cartooning. Save for an eight-year period during the Porfirio Díaz regime when the dictator banned their publication, Mexican political cartoons have targeted the country's leaders since the early 19th century. And as a glance at La Jornada, Reforma or many other daily newspapers shows, the art of scathingly political caricatures is very much alive and well.
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Museo De La Luz
The 'museum of light' occupies the former monastery of San Pedro and San Pablo, one of the Centro's most ancient structures. Kids will enjoy the array of interactive exhibits here, including optical illusions, one-way mirrors and kaleidoscopes, designed to demonstrate various optical principles (though only readers of Spanish will be illuminated by the accompanying explanations). At the rear of the museum are all kinds of devices to test your eyesight, and an optometrist performs eye exams for just around $25 .
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Museo De La Secretaría De Hacienda Y Crédito Público
The Museum of the Finance Secretariat shows off its vast collection of Mexican art, much of it contributed by painters and sculptors in lieu of paying taxes. The former colonial archbishop's palace also hosts a full program of cultural events (many free), from puppet shows to chamber-music recitals.
Read more about Museo De La Secretaría De Hacienda Y Crédito Público
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Museo Del Caracol
A short distance down the road from the Castillo, this 'gallery of history' traces the origins of Mexico's present-day institutions, identity and values through a series of audio-enhanced dioramas re-enacting key moments in the country's struggle for liberty. The museum is shaped like a snail shell, with its 12 exhibit halls spiraling downward.
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Museo Del Estanquillo
The 'corner shop' museum contains the vast pop-culture collection amassed over the decades by DF essayist, commentator and pack rat Carlos Monsivais. Housed in a magnificent neoclassical building which was an important jewelry store in the early 20th century, the museum illustrates various phases in the capital's development through numerous photos, paintings, daguerreotypes, board games, movie posters, illustrated sheets of verse, comic strips and so on from the collection. Taken together, these objects culled from the city's flea markets, rare book stores and antique shops add up to a vivid people's history of Mexico City.
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Museo Dolores Olmedo Patiño
Possibly the most important Diego Rivera collection of all belongs to the Olmedo Patiño museum, ensconced in a peaceful 17th-century hacienda 2km west of central Xochimilco.
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Museo Franz Mayer
An oasis of calm and beauty north of the Alameda, this museum is the fruit of the efforts of Franz Mayer, born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1824. Earning the moniker Don Pancho in his adopted Mexico, Mayer amassed the collection of Mexican silver, textiles, ceramics and furniture masterpieces that is now on display at the museum.
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Museo Frida Kahlo
Iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was born, lived and died in the 'Blue House,' six blocks north of Plaza Hidalgo. Almost every visitor to Mexico City makes a pilgrimage there to gain a deeper understanding of the painter (and maybe to pick up a Frida handbag).
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Museo Interactivo De Economía
Housed in the former hospital of the Bethlehemites (the only religious order to be established in the Americas), this sprawling 18th-century structure has since 2006 been the unlikely home of a museum devoted to economics. A slew of hands-on exhibits are aimed at breaking down economic concepts and demonstrating how every Mexican affects and is affected by these principles. Visitors can start a corporation, chart their investments or design their own currency.
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Museo José Luis Cuevas
A haven for Mexico's fringe art scene, the museum showcases the works of Cuevas, a leader of the 1950s Ruptura movement which broke with the politicized art of the post-revolutionary regime. Cuevas' La Giganta, an 8m-high bronze figure with male and female features, dominates the central patio, while the Sala de Arte Erótico is an intriguing gallery of the artist's sexual themes.
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Museo Léon Trotsky
Having come second to Stalin in the power struggle in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled in 1929 and condemned to death in absentia. In 1937 he found refuge in Mexico. At first Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, lived in Frida Kahlo's Blue House, but after falling out with Kahlo and Rivera they moved a few streets northeast, to Viena 45.
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Museo Mural Diego Rivera
Among Diego Rivera's most famous works is Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda), painted in 1947. In the 15m-long by 4m-high mural, the artist imagined many of the figures who walked in the city from colonial times onward, among them Cortés, Juárez, Emperor Maximilian, Porfirio Díaz, and Francisco Madero and his nemesis, General Victoriano Huerta.
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Museo Nacional De Antropología
The National Museum of Anthropology, among the finest of its kind, stands in an extension of the Bosque de Chapultepec.
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Museo Nacional de Arte
Built around 1900 in the style of an Italian Renaissance palace, the National Art Museum holds collections representing every school of Mexican art up to the early 20th century. A highlight is the work of José María Velasco, depicting the Valley of Mexico in the late 19th century - with Guadalupe and Chapultepec far outside the city.
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Museo Nacional De Culturas Populares
Half a block east of Plaza Hidalgo is the National Museum of Popular Culture, which has good temporary exhibitions on popular culture, indigenous crafts and celebrations in its various courtyards and galleries. Past exhibits have covered lucha libre, (nativity models) and circuses.
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Museo Nacional De La Estampa
Adjacent to the Iglesia de Santa Veracruz is the National Print Museum. Devoted to the graphic arts, it stages compelling thematic exhibits from the National Fine Arts Institute's collection of over 10,000 prints, lithographs and engravings, as well as the tools of these techniques.
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Museo Nacional De La Revolución
Underlying the monument, the National Museum of the Revolution covers an 80-year period, from the implementation of the constitution guaranteeing human rights in 1857 to the installation of the postrevolutionary government in 1920. Despite the compelling subject matter, explanatory text remains untranslated. Enter from the northeast quarter of the plaza.
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Museo Nacional De Las Culturas
Constructed in 1567 as the colonial mint, the museum features ethnographic displays on the dress and handicrafts of the world's cultures. At least as interesting is the Rufino Tamayo mural in the entryway, entitled La Revolución . An atypically realistic canvas for the artist, it depicts the downfall of the Porfirio Diáz regime.
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Museo Nacional De San Carlos
The museum exhibits a formidable collection of European art from the 16th century to the early 20th century, including works by Rubens, Van Dyck and Goya. Occupying the former mansion of the Conde de Buenavista, the unusual rotunda structure was designed by Manuel Tolsá in the late 18th century. It later became home to Alamo victor Santa Anna, and subsequently served as a cigar factory, a lottery headquarters and a school before being reborn as a museum in 1968.
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Museo Rufino Tamayo
A multilevel concrete and glass structure east of the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the Tamayo Museum was built to house international modern art donated by Oaxaca-born Rufino Tamayo and his wife, Olga, to the people of Mexico. Exhibitions of cutting-edge modern art from around the globe alternate with thematically arranged shows from the Tamayo collection.
