The Autry Museum Goes Further West

From its opening in 1988, the Autry Museum of Western Heritage has been both blessed and somewhat burdened by its founder, Hollywood’s Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry. His generosity (and that of his wife, Jackie) paid for the building, and a bronze statue of him with his faithful horse Champion dominates its atrium. But the cowboy star--and the movie and TV version of the West he symbolizes--has never been the focus of the museum’s collections.

Not that the Autry doesn’t celebrate the West’s always appealing myths and icons. There have been exhibitions devoted to such predictable subjects as Wild West shows and Gen. George Armstrong Custer; there is an annual popular exhibition and sale of the kind of nostalgic Western art that mainstream critics disdain.

But serious scholarship on the West in the broadest sense has also been the museum’s mission. And as it enters its 13th year, it’s doing what teenagers are wont to do--coming of age. Yes, traditional Western buffs in bolo ties will still find much to enjoy in its galleries, but so increasingly will others who are unlikely to have a Remington in their foyer or a Nudie cowboy shirt in their closet.

More and more confidently, the Autry is exploring the niche it has carved out for itself, a niche that includes the multicultural West and the contemporary West, as well as the West of popular culture and the imagination. It has exhibited surreal Polish western-movie posters, looked at the Disney version of the West and originated “On Gold Mountain,” the most extensive museum show mounted on the Chinese American experience. Shows planned for the future reflect creative thinking on such offbeat topics as spaghetti westerns, urban Indians, Jews and the West, the West Coast sound and violence. With little fanfare, it is revamping the museum’s permanent exhibits to reflect state-of-the-art scholarship, and transforming its research center into something that looks more and more like a regional think tank.

Executive director and CEO John Gray describes today’s Autry as the fulfillment of its founder’s vision: “You know what Gene said. He wanted a museum that showed the American West as it was, not as he showed it in his movies.”

A former banker and deputy administrator in the Small Business Administration under Clinton, Gray assumed the Autry’s leadership last year. Gray sees his mission as building on the accomplishments of his predecessor, Joanne Hale, now president of the museum’s board of directors.

“Joanne Hale built the museum in the most beautiful, wonderful and progressive way,” he said.

But insiders say the Autry is growing up under Gray.

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Among the most urgent projects on Gray’s agenda is the comprehensive revision of the museum’s seven permanent galleries. The result will be exhibits that are technologically current and reflect the revolutionary new Western history that has emerged over the last decade.

Gray estimates that it will cost $750,000 to $1 million each to update the galleries, currently named the Spirit of Discovery, Spirit of Romance and so on through Imagination, Opportunity, Conquest, Community, and the Cowboy. Money for the make-over will come from the museum’s operating budget of about $12 million a year.

Gray has entrusted leadership of the project to another Autry newcomer, historian Louise Pubols, who earned her doctorate since joining the staff last year. In explaining the American West and presenting it to the public, Pubols said, “there’s no one story anymore.” To ensure accuracy and the desired complexity, the museum is depending not only on its own expertise, but on a panel of outside experts brought in as consultants. Among their fields of study are the Mexican American experience, labor movements and the West, gender and sexuality, the impact of technology on the West, and history and memory.

In the revamped galleries (the first is scheduled to open in 2002), expect to see the story of the West extend beyond the 1890s into the present day, an emphasis on the interaction among groups rather than stories about conquerors and victims, and displays relating to Western ecology and the role of the federal government in shaping the West.

Pubols talks a lot about layering, presenting many levels of information in a museum sign or exhibit so that it will appeal and enlighten everyone from the youngest child to the knowledgeable adult visitor. The first new, still to be named gallery, which will replace the old Spirit of Discovery hall, will include a replica of a fur-trading post. An excited Pubols describes it: It will be interactive (the museum is overdue for a technological update), a place where visitors won’t just push buttons, but will also be able to touch furs and get a visceral sense of what a 19th century post was like.

The original galleries were designed with the help of Walt Disney Imagineering. No outside firm has been chosen for the redesign, which is still in its earliest stages and may incorporate such 21st century amenities as audio cones that direct sound down on a single visitor or small group, and virtual-reality helmets.

“I think it’s essential to revisit all the assumptions,” Gray said of the renovation project. He has the highest hopes for the new galleries, both as attractions and as educational tools. “I think you can be edgy and funny and also very serious and scholarly in the same building at the same time.”

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The relative youth of the Autry museum has its advantages and disadvantages. As Gray explained, it has to do things differently from most older museums. In mounting temporary exhibits, long-established institutions typically reach into their vast collections and plan around them. The Autry, which began with minimal holdings, stands that process on its head.

In a process established before Gray took over, it starts with favored themes such as multiculturalism, and creates a series of conferences and symposiums. The ideas generated by scholars and the public often lead to publications. The input also helps the Autry draw up wish lists of acquisitions that will strengthen its holdings. Finally, often years after the initial conference, the process will lead to an exhibition.

Committed to long-term planning, Gray has asked the staff to come up with a tentative schedule of shows for the next decade. Preparing for an exhibition five or 10 years hence, Gray said, “allows you to make opportunistic acquisitions that you wouldn’t otherwise think of.”

This week, the Autry will host one of those seed conferences, “Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California.” Grounded in a series of public lectures held at the museum in 1994, the weeklong conference will feature Quintard Taylor, Lonnie Bunch, Gerald Horne and other highly regarded commentators on the African American experience in California.

It will also mark the publication of a book of the same title, containing essays on such provocative topics as the suburbanization of the African American experience and the black-Jewish coalition that helped elect the late Tom Bradley mayor of Los Angeles.

A small exhibit timed to coincide with the conference will feature recent acquisitions that were identified, in part, because of the 1994 talks. Among them is a lavish broadside announcing California’s ratification of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery. A full-scale exhibition on African Americans in the West--part of the museum’s overall strategy of telling the story of the new West--isn’t scheduled to take place until 2006.

There are multiple signs of the museum’s maturation and growing respectability. The Autry is entering into partnerships and sharing expertise with the Huntington, UCLA, Caltech, the Skirball Cultural Center and other institutions. Last year, it became an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution. The arrangement allows the Autry to borrow from the nation’s premier cultural storehouse.

This year, “On Gold Mountain” will travel to the Smithsonian, the first of the Autry’s exhibitions to do so. Increasingly, the museum expects its shows to travel, which is important for both prestige and its bottom line, according to Gray. Patrons want to be associated with an institution whose shows have large viewership and extended futures. When it was announced that “On Gold Mountain” was going to Washington, visitor contributions jumped threefold, Gray said.

Other evidence of the Autry’s coming of age: The catalog for “How the West Was Worn,” a show on Western dress that opens in October, will be published by art-book specialist Harry N. Abrams, a first for the Autry. Favorable reviews of such books in major newspapers and other publications enhance the museum’s reputation in countless ways, said Kevin Mulroy, head of the Autry’s research center.

The museum’s research center is also extending its reach and raising its scholarly profile. It has named a board of advisors that includes Roy Ritchie, director of research at the Huntington, and Caltech historian Bill Deverell, and this summer it will host its first fellow, from UCLA. The center is also starting a Western History Workshop, open to local scholars, that will begin meeting monthly in the spring. Mulroy can imagine a not-so-distant time when scholars are in residence at the Autry.

One of the consequences of the museum’s ambitious agenda is an energized staff, working hard and dreaming big.

“For me, there isn’t a more exciting place to be,” said managing curator Michael Duchemin. Mulroy too is full of ideas that stretch conventional notions of the West.

One of the exhibits down the line will be on Western writers. Mulroy would like to see a conference, publication and show that once again look at the West through the broadest, deepest and most timely of prisms: “When people think Autry, they think Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Why not Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey--and on and on and on?”

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AUTRY MUSEUM OF WESTERN HERITAGE, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Griffith Park, L.A. Admission: $7.50; $5, seniors and students; $3, children 12 and under. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday and until 8 p.m. on Thursdays. Phone: (323) 667-2000. Conference: “Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California,” Tuesday-Saturday. Information: (323) 667-2000, Ext. 271.