Three Museum Treats Waiting for You

If you plan on visiting California, New Mexico, or Oklahoma in the near future, three of the West’s great museums – the Autry National Center, the New Mexico History Museum, and the National Cowboy Museum – are presenting outstanding exhibits that you really should try to go see.

Here’s a quick overview of each to tantalize you into traveling.

The Autry National Center in Los Angeles is offering The Art of Native American Basketry: A Living Tradition, running through May 30, 2010. More than 250 hand-crafted baskets from more than 100 cultures, arranged in 11 geographic regions, are on display, offering a unique view of how Native Americans designed and used baskets in their daily lives.

On view are a variety of sizes and shapes, ranging from small Pomo feather baskets crafted for sale to tourists, to enormous Apache olla baskets that were used for storing large quantities of seeds.

The exhibit’s objects are selected from the nearly 14,000 baskets found in the Southwest Museum of the American Indian’s unique collection, which many experts judge to be one of the world’s premier holdings of Native American baskets To the right is a photo of a Pomo-feathered basket from the early 20th century, from the Edwin Greble Collection. Photo by Susan Einstein.

The exhibition can be seen at the Autry’s Museum of the American West in Griffith Park.

Both the Southwest Museum and the Museum of the American West are part of the Autry National Center, an intercultural organization dedicated to expanding the public’s understanding of the many diverse peoples of the American West.

For museum hours of operation, admission prices and directions, visit the Web site at http://www.autrynationalcenter.org/.

The New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe, N.M. is presenting Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time: The archaeological and historic roots of America’s oldest capital city; this exhibit runs through May 21, 2011, so you have more time to plug it into your travel plans than the other two exhibits I have for you.

The exhibit presents more than 160 artifacts from the 17th-century, selected from roughly 90,000 objects that were unearthed from four historic sites during a two-year dig at 113 Lincoln Ave., the location of the New Mexico History Museum, which opened in May 2009.

“This exhibition [gives] visitors a broad perspective of the settling of Santa Fe and the web of cultural influences the Spanish brought with them,” Josef Diaz co-curator of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors, said in a press release. “The founding of Santa Fe is a big and complex story to tell, and this show will offer a glimpse of different aspects of Spanish colonial life, from the domestic to the economic to the political and religious." To the right is a photo of a gold earring that was recovered from a 17th-century deposit found below the north wall of the Palace Print Shop during excavation. Photo by Blair Clark, N.M. Department of Cultural Affairs.

According to the museum, the exhibit includes “…Spanish majolica, blue-and-white Mexican pottery modeled on examples from the Ming Dynasty in China, colorful Mexican pottery and Pueblo pottery. Also found were tobacco pipes, gold earrings, gunflints and arrowheads.”

Most amazing to me, you’ll even see a few small pieces of delicate Ming vases, most likely that reached Spain’s colony of Santa Fe after leaving China on board a Spanish galleon, arriving at Mexico after months at sea, then traveling across the frontier by caravan up El Camino Real. The bumpy journey north would have taken at least six months.

For museum hours of operation, admission prices and directions, visit the Web site at http://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/.

The National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City, Okla. Is showcasing The Guitar: Art, Artists and Artisans, now through May 9, 2010.

According to the museum’s release, “Included in the exhibition are approximately 50 guitars worth millions, from top entertainers – recording artists whose image and career is tied closely to this instrument. These notable artists include Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, Toby Keith, Lynn Anderson, Brooks & Dunn, Eddy Arnold and Marty Robbins.”

The guitars also span more than 150 years of history. There’s even a C.F. Martin, circa 1845, which had been lavishly ornamented and presented to Benito Pablo Juárez, President of Mexico.

Also on display for guitar music fans is a collection of 12 guitars covered with Swarovski crystals that make up a guitar chandelier designed by Dallas, Texas artist Amanda Dunbar of Dunbar Studios. To the right is a photo of the Elvis Presley King of Rock J-200 Signature Artist Series made by Gibson in honor of 'The King of Rock and Roll.' Photo courtesy of the Dickinson Research Center.

For museum hours of operation, admission prices and directions, visit the Web site at http://www.nationalcowboymuseum.org/.

I love today’s American West museums because they are so far removed from the stogy, static museums I remember visiting as a boy. Today’s museums are geared to delivering a unique experience for visitors. Curators and boards of directors are really beginning to understand that the public wants more, and better exhibits deliver more.

If you haven’t been to a museum that focuses on the American West, do yourself a favor and go visit one. Drop me an email after you do. Tell me where you went, what you liked, and what you didn’t like. I’ll include some of them in a future report.

And if you want to discover places in the West to visit, explore, go camping, hiking or sightseeing, visit OldWestNewWest.com Travel & History Magazine at http://www.oldwestnewwest.com/ for some ideas.