Now the West Is One

As fourth-graders zigzag through the galleries of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, hollering to come see this or that, the themes change kaleidoscopically.

Images of Jewish life in the American West mesh with posters documenting African American cowboys, photographs of Mexican charros in their silver-laced suits and paintings depicting Spanish priests in their missions. The children’s quest continues to detailed artifacts of the westward march of Anglos and a replica of the founding of Chinatown, where Union Station is today. A larger space holds a Native American collection, telling of the group whose cultural story is central to the others.

Watching the children pass, John L. Gray, the Autry Museum’s executive director, explains the mission of the institution. It is “the story of the American West. It includes many cultures, many races, many ethnicities. And the whole purpose is to show how the American West came together.”

Coming together to be stronger is also the driving idea behind the merger of the Autry, with its $100-million endowment and its financial discipline, and the venerable but fiscally broken Southwest Museum.

The merger should keep the Southwest’s leading collection of Native American art and artifacts together and on view in Los Angeles.

If all proceeds as planned, the Southwest will move to a new building added to the Autry in Griffith Park. The two institutions will retain separate identities, but their research functions will be combined in an Institute for the Study of the American West. Together, the three institutions will become the Autry National Center of the American West.

The possibilities for cross-fertilization are rich. Consider, for example, White Swan, a Crow warrior who served as a scout for Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn. White Swan turned to painting war scenes he had witnessed after being wounded in battle.

“To my knowledge,” says Steve Grafe, chief curator at the Southwest Museum, “no other institution has more than one of White Swan’s large muslin paintings. Combining the one from the Southwest and the one from the Autry not only allows for an opportunity to show them together, but alongside other collection items we have like his headdress.” There’s also a Southwest-owned painting by Kicking Bear, the Sioux chief, that offers a view of the same battle with Crazy Horse and Custer’s representatives.

“The merger,” says Duane King, executive director of the Southwest Museum, “creates the potential for something that is much more than what the Autry and the Southwest Museum could ever be independently. And does it without taking away anything from the educational mandate, the collections or the missions of either museum.”