Gallup opens Route 66 exhibit, blending history and downtown tourism

Gallup is leaning on Route 66 to pull people downtown, with a free traveling exhibit opening at the Rex Museum and staying in place through the end of the year. City leaders are pairing the launch with the monthly Arts Crawl, hoping the centennial celebration becomes more than nostalgia and turns into a real draw for nearby businesses.

The Route 66 Centennial Traveling Exhibit will open with a kickoff event Saturday, May 9, from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Rex Museum, 300 W. Historic Hwy. 66. The timing lines up with the Gallup Arts Crawl, the downtown block party Visit Gallup says runs from 7 to 9 p.m. on the second Saturday of each month. The overlap gives the city a built-in crowd for galleries, merchants, food vendors and other downtown stops.

The exhibit will remain at the Rex Museum through Dec. 31, 2026, giving Gallup a long runway during the Route 66 centennial year and America’s 250th anniversary. New Mexico tourism officials say the state’s stretch of Route 66 runs about 535 miles, and the traveling exhibit is making four New Mexico stops: Grants, Albuquerque, Gallup and special programming in Santa Fe. In Gallup, the display is being promoted as part of both the centennial and the broader effort to bring visitors into the historic downtown corridor.

The installation will include nearly two dozen large-scale interpretive panels, audiovisual mini-documentaries and educational material built around Route 66: The Untold Story of Women on the Mother Road. Public project materials identify Katrina Parks as the filmmaker and project director and Kari Kussmann as the curriculum and educational content developer. The Gallup presentation is expected to tie Route 66 to Indigenous, Hispanic and Anglo histories in New Mexico, while also covering Indigenous communities, women’s suffrage, economic opportunity, the Church Rock nuclear disaster, Indian detours and the rise of lowrider culture.

That framing fits the Rex Museum itself, which Gallup’s museum page describes as a building with a layered past of its own. The site has been used as a brothel and later as a grocery store, and the museum now focuses on Gallup’s earliest inhabitants, mining and railroad history. By placing the Route 66 exhibit there, the city is connecting one of downtown’s best-known landmarks to a longer story about how Gallup markets itself, remembers itself and tries to keep people on Historic Route 66 longer.