Former name | Autry National Center |
---|---|
Established | 2003 |
Location | 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park Los Angeles, California |
Coordinates | 34°08′55″N118°16′53″W / 34.1487°N 118.2813°W |
Type | Western and American Indian |
President | Stephen Aron, President and CEO |
Website |
The Autry Museum of the American West (Autry National Center) is a museum in Los Angeles, California, dedicated to exploring an inclusive history of the American West. Founded in 1988, the museum presents a wide range of exhibitions and public programs, including lectures, film, theater, festivals, family events, and music, and performs scholarship, research, and educational outreach. It attracts about 150,000 visitors annually. [1]
In 2013, it extensively redesigned and renovated the Irene Helen Jones Parks Gallery of Art and the Gamble Firearms Gallery in its main building. In its related opening exhibit for the Parks Gallery, Art of the West, the new organization enabled material to be presented in relation to themes rather than chronology, and paintings were shown next to crafts, photography, video and other elements in new relationships. [1]
The Autry Museum of the American West has two sites, about 8 miles (13 km) apart:
In 2022, the museum opened a storage facility in Burbank, California to store its and the Southwest Museum of the American Indian's collections. The facility includes a ritual space for indigenous people to use items in the collection in ceremonies. [3]
The Autry was established in 1988 by actor and businessman Gene Autry as "Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum," dedicated to exploring and sharing the comprehensive story of the American West and its multiple cultures, as well as further interpreting the West's significance. [4] Its Griffith Park collection includes 21,000 paintings, sculptures, costumes, textiles, firearms, tools, toys, musical instruments, and other objects. [5] The museum contains contemporary and historical exhibitions, year-round programs for children, intellectual forums, and the Native Voices at the Autry performing arts series.
In 2003, the Autry acquired the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. [3]
The museum is located in Griffith Park directly across from the Los Angeles Zoo. The 4,000-square foot Parks Gallery was renovated in 2013 and has been organized into three theme areas: Religion and Ritual, Land and Landscape, Migration and Movement. The main location also contains two mini galleries with revolving exhibits. [1]
The Gamble Firearms Gallery also was renovated in 2013. It now shows more of the context and place of firearms in the Old West; curators grouped firearms by themes: "hunting and trapping, the impact of technology on firearms, the conservation movement and the West in popular culture." [1] The Firearms Gallery is part of the larger Western Frontiers: Stories of Fact and Fiction Gallery. [1]
From 2004 to 2015, it was known as the "Autry National Center of the American West”. However, in October 2015, the museum began using the name "Autry Museum of the American West" to emphasize its "principal activities as a museum." [7]
Since 1995, Native Voices at the Autry has been the only existing equity theater solely focused on producing new works by Native American, Alaska Native, and First Nation playwrights. [8] Randy Reinholz, a member of Oklahoma's Choctaw Nation, and his wife Jean Bruce Scott have run the program for 20 years. Native Voices has produced over 34 full productions, gone on over 20 tours, with 23 new play festivals and 13 Native playwrights. [9] This program is a crucial part of the Autry's mission to promote art history and cultures of the American West. [8]
The Tongva are an Indigenous people of California from the Los Angeles Basin and the Southern Channel Islands, an area covering approximately 4,000 square miles (10,000 km2). In the precolonial era, the people lived in as many as 100 villages and primarily identified by their village rather than by a pan-tribal name. During colonization, the Spanish referred to these people as Gabrieleño and Fernandeño, names derived from the Spanish missions built on their land: Mission San Gabriel Arcángel and Mission San Fernando Rey de España. Tongva is the most widely circulated endonym among the people, used by Narcisa Higuera in 1905 to refer to inhabitants in the vicinity of Mission San Gabriel. Some people who identify as direct lineal descendants of the people advocate the use of their ancestral name Kizh as an endonym.
Orvon Grover "Gene" Autry, nicknamed the Singing Cowboy, was an American actor, musician, singer, composer, rodeo performer, and baseball team owner, who largely gained fame by singing in a crooning style on radio, in films, and on television for more than three decades, beginning in the early 1930s.
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is a museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, with more than 28,000 Western and American Indian art works and artifacts. The facility also has the world's most extensive collection of American rodeo photographs, barbed wire, saddlery, and early rodeo trophies. Museum collections focus on preserving and interpreting the heritage of the American West. The museum becomes an art gallery during the annual Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition and Sale each June. The Prix de West Artists sell original works of art as a fund raiser for the museum. The expansion and renovation was designed by Curtis W. Fentress, FAIA, RIBA of Fentress Architects.
Jackie Autry is an American former owner of the Los Angeles Angels and widow of Gene Autry, actor, singer and businesswoman.
Tonantzin Carmelo is an American actress. She is known for her acting roles in film, TV and stage productions including in the Steven Spielberg miniseries, Into the West, for which she received a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Female in a Television Movie or Miniseries.
The Southwest Museum of the American Indian was a museum, library, and archive located in the Mt. Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States, above the north-western bank of the Arroyo Seco canyon and stream. The museum was owned, and later absorbed by, the Autry Museum of the American West. Its collections dealt mainly with Native Americans. It also had an extensive collection of pre-Hispanic, Spanish colonial, Latino, and Western American art and artifacts.
Harry Eugene Fonseca was a Nisenan Native American artist, and illustrator. He was an enrolled citizen of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians.
Charles Fletcher Lummis was a United States journalist, and an activist for Native American rights and historic preservation. A traveler in the American Southwest, he settled in Los Angeles, California, where he also became known as a historian, photographer, ethnographer, archaeologist, poet, and librarian. Lummis founded the Southwest Museum of the American Indian.
Southwest Museum station is an at-grade light rail station on the A Line of the Los Angeles Metro Rail system. It is located near the intersection of Marmion Way at Museum Drive in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. The station opened on July 26, 2003, as part of the original Gold Line, then known as the "Pasadena Metro Blue Line" project.
Walter Richard "Rick" West Jr. is the president and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, retiring from the position in 2007. He is also a citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes in Oklahoma and a Peace Chief of the Southern Cheyenne. His professional life has been devoted to serving the American Indian community on cultural, artistic, educational, legal and governmental issues.
The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture is a museum of Native American art and culture located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is one of eight museums in the state operated by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs and is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums as part of the Museum of New Mexico system. The museum and its programs are financially supported by the Museum of New Mexico Foundation.
Roxanne Swentzell is a Santa Clara Tewa Native American sculptor, ceramic artist, Indigenous food activist, and gallerist. Her artworks are in major public collections and she has won numerous awards.
The Burro Flats site is a painted cave site located near Burro Flats, in the Simi Hills of eastern Ventura County, California, United States. The Chumash-style "main panel" and the surrounding 25-acres were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, with a boundary decrease in 2020. The main panel includes dozens of pictographs in a variety of colors. The cave is in the mountains, near the bi-lingual Chumash/Fernandeno village of Huwam/Jucjauynga. The Burro Flats painted cave and the rest of the former Santa Susana Field Laboratory are not accessible to the public.
Paul Apodaca is an associate professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Chapman University.
Nellie Charlie (1867–1965) was a Mono Lake Paiute - Kucadikadi basketmaker associated with Yosemite National Park. She was born in Lee Vining, California, the daughter of tribal headman Pete Jim, and his wife Patsy, also a basket maker. She married Young Charlie, a Mono Lake Paiute - Kucadikadi man from Yosemite, and they had six children. Her Paiute name was Besa-Yoona.
Carrie McGowan Bethel (1898–1974) was a Mono Lake Paiute – Kucadikadi basketmaker associated with Yosemite National Park. She was born Carrie McGowan in Lee Vining, California, and began making baskets at age twelve. She participated in basket-making competitions in the Yosemite Indian Field Days in 1926 and 1929. She gave basket weaving demonstrations at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition.
Cara Romero is an American photographer known for her digital photography that examines Indigenous life through a contemporary lens. She lives in both Santa Fe, NM and the Mojave Desert. She is of Chemehuevi descent.
Zoë Marieh Urness is a photographer of Alaskan Tlingit and Cherokee Native American heritage. She creates portraits of modern Indigenous cultures in traditional regalia and settings.
Tony Abeyta is a contemporary Navajo Diné artist living between Berkeley California and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Abeyta's work is most well known as mixed media paintings and oil landscapes of the American southwest. His subject matter include the New Mexico landscape, ancestral Navajo iconography and American Modernism