Description

The Autry Museum of the American West (AMAW) opened in 1988 with a mission to tell the stories of all peoples of the American West through the art and ideas of diverse cultures and traditions. AMAW holds a collection of over 600,000 objects, including the former collection of Southwest Museum of the American Indian (SMAI, founded in 1907), which were merged with the AMAW in 2003. AMAW’s holdings of Native American art and objects number 238,000.
Over the past decade, the AMAW has prioritized initiatives and practices that seek to advance Native American community engagement and agency across its curatorial, collections, education, and programming activities. Beginning with the 2013 opening of its gallery Art of the West, AMAW has made contemporary Native American art central to its presentations and programming. In December 2020, AMWA signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the local Tongva community, the original peoples and caretakers of the Los Angeles basin, creating an official partnership that will center Tongva voices throughout the museum.
AMWA meanwhile has been working to address the historic SMAI collections, which have been largely inaccessible to outside stakeholders since 2003. From 2005-2015, AMAW systematically inventoried, conserved, re-housed, catalogued, and photographed the entire collection. From 2010 to 2020, AMWA expanded and renovated a nearby building to serve as its Resource Center, a state-of-the-art collection storage, research, and education facility.
AMWA now seeks funding for the staff required to complete the remaining work to render the Native American collections in the Resource Center accessible to visiting tribal communities, curators, and scholars. Chief among these tasks is the unpacking of 20,000 objects and reorganization of 43,000 objects, including large numbers of ceramics, baskets, and textiles, as well as jewelry, ceremony regalia, Katsina dolls, cradleboards, and carvings. The project will deconstruct the colonialist practice of classifying objects by medium and size, and will reorganize them by region and tribe. In an effort to provide communities greater authority over their cultural materials, the Resource Center will offer private ceremonial space, a dedicated consultation room, and altars for offerings, similar to those available in the museum building. These dedicated spaces will welcome and facilitate repatriation work, and opportunities to reconnect with Native histories, languages, traditions, and creative and cultural practices.