Women of the West Museum Will Merge With the Autry

The Denver-based Women of the West Museum will merge in April with the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Griffith Park, the heads of both announced Thursday.

The announcement came only weeks after John L. Gray, chief executive of the Autry, said it was no longer pursuing a partnership with the financially troubled Southwest Museum of Los Angeles.

Founded in 1991, the Women of the West Museum is best known for its online and community programs.

Its prize-winning Web site says its mission is “to discover, explore and communicate the continuing roles of women in shaping the West.”

According to Gray, the Denver museum proposed the merger, in which the women’s museum will be absorbed into the Autry. “They approached us in November based on our work on Western history and our inclusive and contemporary view of the West,” Gray said. “They feel our missions are closely aligned.”

Each museum will contribute $1 million to create a new endowed position at the Autry, curator of Western women’s history.

A committee of people from each museum will conduct a national search to fill the post.

The Denver museum has an endowment of $100,000 to fund the annual Women of the West Museum Butcher Scholar Award. That award will continue, with the Butcher Scholar in residence at the Autry each year.

Four trustees of the women’s museum will become members of the Autry board. Exhibits, programs and related materials now part of the women’s museum will be incorporated into the Autry’s program.

Some 800 volumes from the library of the Denver museum also will go to Autry. Marsha Semmel, chief executive of the Women of the West Museum, said that early in its history it had hoped to have a museum structure.

But it was never able to fund construction or to amass, preserve and store museum artifacts. Instead, it began to emphasize programming, often tapping the collections of other institutions to create original exhibits on such topics as women on the sod-house frontier and the struggle for women’s suffrage in the West.

The exhibits often involved community outreach and were distributed electronically.

The museum discovered, Semmel said, that “the Web site was an effective and convenient way to reach large national and international audiences.”

The Autry was founded in 1988 by singing cowboy and businessman Gene Autry and his wife, Jackie. It has an extensive collection devoted to the West and has mounted numerous exhibits on the cultural diversity of the West.

It has an operating budget of about $12 million a year and gets about 330,000 visitors annually.

The Denver museum has an annual operating budget of $900,000. Its Web site gets about 28,000 viewings a month.

“One indication of what a good fit this is is how smoothly [the merger process] has gone,” Semmel said. She said she and her colleagues had no regrets about the merger. “The atmosphere is one of joy and celebration. We think we’ve found a wonderful partner in the Autry.”

Sue Armitage, a distinguished professor of history at Washington State University, said she thought the merger was a creative way for the Denver museum to continue to fulfill its mission in spite of financial problems.

“Ideas are one thing, and buildings and funding are another,” said Armitage, a pioneer in Western women’s history who helped the Denver museum create its first exhibits.

“I think it’s wonderful,” Armitage said of the merger. “Really, the goal of women’s history is to have it be part of the mainstream story. We want everybody to know about women’s history.” The women’s museum will close its offices in April, and the Web site will continue in some form, Semmel said.