The Museo Rufino Tamayo houses the collection of pre-Hispanic art assembled over several decades by the Oaxacan painter Rufino Tamayo and donated by him to his home city. Unlike the national anthropology museums in Mexico City, this collection was selected entirely on aesthetic criteria — Tamayo bought what he thought was beautiful and surprising — which makes it unusual and rewarding to spend time with.
The collection spans roughly 3,000 years of Mesoamerican art: Olmec figurines, Zapotec funerary urns, Teotihuacan masks, Aztec vessels, and pieces from dozens of smaller cultures. The building itself, a restored colonial house on García Vigil, is appropriately handsome. Allow an hour; the collection is not enormous but rewards slow looking. The museum is often overlooked by visitors rushing to Santo Domingo and Monte Albán — a mistake.