A collection with a reason for being.

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 and offers visitors a uniquely personal mad inspiring experience.

After I rang the bell at the first-floor apartment, the door was opened by a maid who beckoned me to wait in the dining room, where the white walls were covered floor to ceiling with hundreds of masks. Peeking into the next rooms, I saw that Lechuga's collection is separated into categories and spread out in every nook and cranny of her apartment--the floor, the wails, the closets, and on every conceivable surface.

In a few minutes Lechuga entered, a flail woman with white hair and a kind smile. For the next two hours she graciously gave me a tour of each amazing room. As she spoke, the burning passion site still has for these objects seemed to energize her. Whenever I commented on a specific piece--a bird crown from Sonora, a beaded Huichol mask, a Michoacan wood tray painted with images of conquistadors--Lechuga would respond with a world of stories about that one artifact. Housing ten thousand items, the apartment became an enchanted place in which the most humble object revealed a multifaceted tale of both artistic individuality and communal values.

Lechuga says that she has never bought an item without insisting on meeting its maker and learning its purpose. When buying a mask, she also wanted to meet the dancer who had worn it in the sacred ceremony. Once, she recalls, she had to wear the mask herself and dance with it as a condition of purchase. She remembers that the mask was smelly with sweat front the previous dancer, but putting it on and dancing with it made her understand hi a visceral way that the mask was not merely a work of art but an instrument for expressing aspect s of the human spirit.

"There is," she explains, "a whole cultural context that produces each object, and that is what lies behind lily collection: a history and a reason for being."

As the tour progresses, Lechuga's emotional relationship to each of the objects seems to enhance her academic understanding of the work--and it is exactly this relationship that makes a visit to her museum so powerful for the visitor. Lechuga's tour is not a set one: She is spontaneously guided by the enthusiasm and curiosity of her guests. For example, I was intrigued by a display ease that holds a wide variety of tiny folk objects, including a colorful collection of the most charming, intricate replicas of houses and flowers and people fashioned from gum! Just as intriguing was her collection of nativity scenes, complete with sheep and angels, yet each scene created by a different village and from a different material: corn husk, sugar, paper, wax, pine wood, leaves, lead, glass, dried flowers, and bone.

"People use with great creativity what ever they have that's plentiful in their region," she explains, adding how the folk crafts of Mexico have changed dramatically in the last fifty years with the introduction of chemical dyes, plastic components, synthetic fabrics, and the discouragement of native dress. Most significantly, though, has been the influence of tourism.

"Before, a village was a self-sufficient community, making and growing everything it needed to live. If they fashioned beautiful pottery bowls, the bowls were put to a practical use for themselves, such as to hold beans or water. Then a tourist comes and buys a bowl and says she will use it as a flower pot. Gradually, the village turns to making flower pots rather than bowls to generate money, and eventually they find themselves in a cash economy where they are dependent on money to buy things such as electricity or gas."

Lechuga does not see this change as bad. In fact, she views adaptation to change as the way that folk culture remains alive. She firmly believes the human spirit is endlessly creative, whatever the situation.

As I walked from room to room, I marveled at each dazzling sight--a wall of horn hair combs in whimsical designs, one shaped like a mermaid playing the banjo, another as a stork carrying a baby, and yet another as a leopard eating a man. Colorful pottery tree-of-life candelabras balancing birds, goats, and people, a large sparkling peacock fashioned from multicolored tin, an entire room of miniature people in papier-mache, and another of lacquer boxes from Patzcuaro shimmering with gold leaf. The living room housed a diverse collection of pottery from every state in Mexico, including the giant pulque jars that are made to leak so as to create a wet exterior that keeps the beverage cool, and an alcove in which narrow drawers hold more than two thousand vintage embroideries and weavings.

Lechuga has always insisted on buying the very best of the objects that site would find. For decades she has been the judge of the folk-craft competition sponsored by the Museum of Popular Aria and Industries. As judge she encouraged unknown as well as famous artisans to compete, and over the years the competition has greatly increased Mexico's appreciation of its own cultural heritage. The competition also not only helped Lechuga to buy the best, but it provided opportunities for her to meet new artisans as well, and meeting the artisans is what Lechuga cares most about. "Folk art is never anonymous," slip says, "but rather always made by an artist, simply one whose name we do not know."

Ironically, though Lechuga has devoted her life to encouraging appreciation of Mexico's unsung artisans, she herself was long unsung. Her spare, honest photographs were disparaged because her often-shocking images of poverty and pagan rituals upset the vision of an idyllic Mexico portrayed by many photographers in the 1940s and 1950s. And her love of folk craft was considered low brow and eccentric even by her friends.

"I don't gloat over the collection like a Scrooge McDuck," says Lechuga, "hoarding all the objects I have been able to acquire as if they were trophies whose sole value lies in their uniqueness or in the fact that they are not made anymore. I'm attracted to well-crafted pieces because I know how much work has gone into them I want the collection to be useful, to demonstrate this country's many roots. This is the real Mexico. As more people are able to see the collection and take part in the adventure of learning about the country, I can say it was put to good use and I didn't waste my life."

Visiting the Ruth Lechuga Museum is like visiting a toy store filled with bright colors, humor, and fantasy. For fans of Frida Kahlo, the museum offers valuable insight into the native, popular art that became Kahlo's major inspiration. The bold colors, regional dress, death symbols, organic design, and indigenous interpretation of Catholic ritual all informed Kahlo's work in her desire, as she said, to "Mexicanize my art."

After an hour and a half, my mind reeling from the overload of beautiful and fantastic images, nothing prepared me for the tour's grand finale. "Now, you must come see the bedroom," Lechuga announces. While it may seem odd to visit a personal bedroom on a museum tour, this last room is not to be missed. After walking down a short, dim corridor, I emerged into another dimension. Here, amid walls of vivid, deep rose, I found myself surrounded with several hundred artifacts from the Day of the Dead. The rose walls sprouted white skulls and skeletons, some dressed in finery: Marilyn Monroe dresses, tuxedos, evening gowns, and 1950s petticoats. From a distance all the sketchy white figures appeared as merely lace on feminine pink walls. Even up close the vision was not macabre but humorous. Certainly Lechuga was amused. She called me over to a glass cabinet set along one wall that held a collection of tiny skeletons in scenes showing numerous, melodramatic ways that they had met their death. She reached in and withdrew her latest acquisition: a tiny box showing a minutely detailed diorama in which a skeleton is shot at an ATM window. "It's very imaginative, isn't it?" she smiles.

Maxine Rose Schur is an award-winning travel journalist. Her forthcoming travel memoir is The Visible Mysteries of the World. All images courtesy Artes de Mexico.