Southwest Museum’s future at heart of tussle

In one room at the Southwest Museum on Friday, two dozen children gazed at Zuni bowls and Navajo blankets. In another, third-graders huddled at the foot of a yellow tepee -- business as usual, it might seem, at the oldest museum in Los Angeles.

But that man and woman in the lobby -- why were they debating moral responsibility? And that printed notice on the bench -- why are the museum collections disappearing from public view on Saturday?

The compound answer is that next week, the Mt. Washington institution will begin a stem-to-stern overhaul aimed at repairing the 99-year-old institution’s long-neglected building, an effort that starts with moving tens of thousands of artifacts from room to room, but that will eventually relocate many to Griffith Park and redefine the institution itself.

Some of the museum’s neighbors, however, say it’s more like a hijacking than a redefinition. Denouncing “cultural piracy,” the Friends of the Southwest Museum coalition contend that the people behind the move are dodging “a moral responsibility to maintain and revitalize” the institution’s original location.

Their nemesis is the man who stood in the lobby Friday: John Gray, chief executive of the Griffith Park-based Autry National Center, which has operated the Southwest Museum since rescuing it from financial doom in a 2003 merger.

He loves the building, Gray said, and “this is a very poignant time.” But “we really have decided that this can’t be an exclusive museum usage.” His moral obligation, he said, is “to preserve a collection in perpetuity and to enhance the public’s understanding of our shared history. And that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

The woman standing with him and waiting for her turn was Nicole Possert, co-chair of the coalition, a Highland Park resident since 1989, and a frequent critic.

“This is a three-year trail of broken promises, from our perspective,” she said. “We’re fighting to have them see what we see -- that the glass is more than half full.”

The coalition doesn’t deny that the iconic Southwest building needs work and that the collection is getting better care now, she said. But in its zest to expand in Griffith Park, she said, the Autry is deliberately underestimating the 12-acre Mt. Washington site’s potential as a museum location.

Not so, Gray maintains. Without the Autry’s intervention in 2003, “the Southwest would have closed,” he said. “And it would have closed for good reason. It didn’t have the attendance, it didn’t have the membership, it didn’t have the public that was needed to keep the doors open.”

Autry officials estimate last year’s Southwest Museum attendance at 40,000, about half of which was nonpaying youngsters in school groups. The Autry’s Museum of the American West drew an estimated 165,000 visitors, about 50,000 of them students.

Autry officials say that they’ve already spent more than $5 million shoring up the Southwest’s building and that they could end up spending an additional $15 million on replacing the roof and on seismic work, drawing heavily on state and federal grants.

The Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, nudged into the middle of this argument by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, has already held two public meetings to air museum leaders’ plans and collect community input. A third meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Ramona Hall, 4580 N. Figueroa St.

The most dramatic of the seismic tasks is to reattach the Southwest’s signature tower to the rest of the building. To do that, staffers must empty the tower, which has stored tens of thousands of artifacts for decades -- and it’s those pieces that workers are moving from plywood cabinets into portable archival storage materials and freezing (to kill bugs). In months ahead, thousands of those displaced artifacts will be stacked in the Southwest’s exhibit areas.

The destination of the collection, roughly 240,000 objects, is the core of the disagreement. Autry leaders plan to move many of the pieces to Griffith Park and exhibit them in about 20,000 square feet of space they hope to build adjoining the Museum of the American West there.

Back at the old Southwest building, which in recent years has devoted 8,000 to 10,500 square feet to exhibition, Autry leaders aim to cut that number to 4,500 square feet and devote the rest to nonmuseum uses, such as educational programs. It will be at least 3 1/2 years, Autry officials say, before the Southwest’s Mt. Washington campus is fully open again.

“Two rooms do not a museum make,” Possert said. “If you need more exhibition space, don’t build it in a public park. Build it here.”

In its battle, the coalition has gathered thousands of names on petitions, enlisted the aid of several neighborhood councils and struck alliances with dozens of organizations. The group has called for more specificity from the Autry on its plans for the Mt. Washington site, including the rarely used Casa de Adobe, a facsimile of a 19th century rancho also on museum property, and it urges Autry leaders to promise to maintain the site forever.

In the neighborhoods around the museum, “the opinions are divided,” said Carol Jacques, a veteran community activist who has lived on Mt. Washington for 23 years.

Jacques joined the coalition’s negotiating committee, then left it, dismayed by the lack of compromises.

The coalition’s demands were “a good starting point,” Jacques said. “And many of us are still afraid that they’re going to take everything and run, and leave us with nothing. But I think we have to give Autry the opportunity to see what they can do.... We have to stop drawing lines in the sand, and take a step toward trusting.”

If things go wrong later on, she added, “we can still organize. We can still boycott.”

The Autry still needs to get city approval and raise money for the proposed expansion, but because the Southwest is a subsidiary of the Autry, nobody outside that institution has any particular authority over where it shows the Southwest’s trove of baskets, blankets, arrows, dolls and other items, which is ranked among the best in North America.

From its beginnings, the Autry-Southwest relationship has been riddled with obvious and subtle ironies. The Autry is a young, relatively wealthy cowboy institution, founded in 1988 by the family of screen star and singer Gene Autry. The Southwest (formally the Southwest Museum of the American Indian) has from its origins in 1907 focused on native cultures, and it struggled with funding shortages for decades before the merger. (In fact, before the deal with the Autry was struck, the Southwest came within inches of an alliance with the casino-rich Pechanga tribe near Temecula.

Also, while the rest of Southern California remains steeped in NIMBYism, the Southwest’s neighbors say they’re fighting to keep the museum in their backyards.

And yet, among those raising their voices to question the Autry’s intentions, coalition leaders can cite only one who has made a major donation to the Southwest, before or since its merger.

“Participating and caring can’t just be talked about in terms of money,” Possert said.

In their arguments, both Autry leaders and their foes make frequent reference to a rehabilitation study prepared two years ago for the Autry by Southern California preservation specialists Brenda Levin & Associates.

Possert notes that in the study, Levin concluded that in two different scenarios, a revived Southwest Museum would operate in the red but might be able to cover those losses through gifts and grants, as most museums do.

But in his introduction to that study, Gray wrote that because of those projected losses -- in the neighborhood of $2 million yearly -- “we do not believe it is economically feasible to operate the site exclusively as a museum.”

Even with activities so curtailed at the site now, Autry and Southwest officials don’t like to say the museum is closing. They point out that the gift shop and some public areas will be open and free from noon to 5 p.m. on weekends, with displays but no artifacts. The research library is still in business, by appointment, and tours of the conservation effort will be offered.

At one point Friday, Gray started to suggest that the museum had never achieved vitality as an exhibition space. Then, cooling his language, he offered this instead: “The museum hasn’t operated as museums are expected to operate in today’s world.”

So far, workers have moved 2,200 textiles, 450 paintings, 300 pieces of jewelry and about 500 Katsina and other dolls to Griffith Park -- those were the items most threatened by mildew, mold and bugs, museum officials say. The workers have also moved out 8,000 of the 12,500 artifacts in the Southwest’s tower, placing them elsewhere at the Mt. Washington site.

“Nothing has been cleaned for 75 years,” lamented Linda Strauss, senior director of collections. “We’re very fortunate that more things weren’t damaged.”

The Southwest, founded in 1907, has stood at its bluff-top site since 1914. In the fiscal year that ended May 31, 2003, tax filings show, the museum trimmed its spending to a skeletal $1.4 million, yet brought in donations, bookstore sales and admission fees of less than half that.

“It’s like your grandmother’s tea set. It sits there and gathers dust. But you love it,” said Jacques.

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Southwest Museum of the American Indian

Where: 234 Museum Drive, Los Angeles

When: Tuesday through Friday, the museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., adult admission $7.50. Beginning Saturday, most exhibition areas will close to the public and no artifacts will be on display. However, some displays in public areas and the museum store will be open noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, free of charge. The museum’s Braun Research Library will remain open by appointment.

Contact: (323) 221-2164; www.autrynationalcenter.org

Public input forum documents are available at www.autrynationalcenter.org/downloadsHRC_Public_Input_Form.doc.