The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, through close collaboration with Native Communities, commits to respect Indigenous traditions and to inspire appreciation of the unique cultures of the Southwest.
The museum pursues collection development and preservation; conducts public education and outreach; facilitates research; and creates interpretive exhibitions of the arts, cultures, and histories of the American Southwest.

In response to unsystematic collecting by Eastern museums, anthropologist Edgar Lee Hewett founded the Museum of New Mexico in 1909 with a mission to collect and preserve Southwestern Native American material culture. Several years later, in 1927, John D. Rockefeller founded the renowned Laboratory of Anthropology with a mission to study the Southwest's indigenous cultures. In 1947 the two institutions merged, bringing together the most inclusive and systematically acquired collection of New Mexican and Southwestern anthropological artifacts in the country.

The Laboratory's collection continued to expand but was largely unavailable to the general public for lack of adequate exhibition facilities. In 1977, the New Mexico legislature appropriated $2.7 million for the design of a new Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. The MIAC opened ten years later in 1987, immediately adjacent to the Laboratory, as the exhibition facility for the Lab's extensive collections.

In the following years, planning began for additional exhibition and collections storage space in the Amy Rose Bloch Wing and the revolutionary new exhibition Here, Now & Always, which opened in August, 1997. This groundbreaking permanent exhibition, developed by a core curatorial team composed of Southwest Indian peoples and museum professionals, incorporates the voices of more than 75 Native Americans. Here, Now & Always tells the rich, complex and diverse stories of Native Americans in the Southwest through their own words and some 1,300 objects drawn from the Museum's collections.