See the slideshow of the
Southwest Museum's funeral event
held on:

> Saturday, July 15, 2006...

FROM THE FRIENDS OF THE SOUTHWEST MUSEUM COALITION

From its beginning in January 2003, The Coalition has met 15 times, negotiated regularly with Museum management, solicited Museum attendance and membership, provided publicity and volunteered at Museum events. Despite this, we have never been given a business plan or any type of commitment to the future of the Southwest Museum on Mount Washington.

We believe that we delayed an expected 2003 Museum closing, ensured continuance of the Intertribal Marketplace and showed the viability of the Mount Washington location of the Museum. Information provided at our March 2005 Coalition meeting showed that both the Autry National Center study conducted by Brenda Levin and Associates and the Coalition's peer review of this document by independent consultants, support this viability.

However, the Autry National Center has stated in a public relations document sent to elected officials that: "A 2003 study conducted by Brenda Levin and Associates found... it would not be economically viable to rehabilitate the Southwest Museum and continue operating it only as a public museum." Additionally, the Autry presented a timeline in this PR document that included community meetings to occur in Spring 2005" "Public meetings are to be held with specialists to vet all the issues." These meeting have not occurred.

The latest development is that the Autry National Center president, John Gray, has refused to meet with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Coalition representatives— indicating that negotiations are closed and that the intent is that the proposed 100,000 sq, ft. expansion in Griffith Park will become the Southwest Museum. It would seem that the Autry National Center believes it has the financial and political strength to make this happen.

We believe we have many potential strategic approaches at this time. Fundraising from our March meeting was very successful. We have legal representation standing by. We have issued two area-wide press releases, regarding recent developments. We are considering demonstrations, corporate contact and activities. To stay informed, bookmark THIS web site and check it regularly.

We appreciate your continued support.

>sign the petition...

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We demand that the Board of Autry National Center make a firm and legally-binding commitment to take responsibility for the continued maintenance and operation of the Southwest Museum’s Mt. Washington facilities, in perpetuity, as a condition of being allowed to develop new facilities on lands owned by the City of Los Angeles in Griffith Park virtually free of charge and in recognition of the enormous investment of public funds expended to construct the Gold Line’s Southwest Museum station.

Further, the Autry National Center must commit to a thorough programmatic study to determine how the Casa de Adobe and Southwest Museum may continue to be operated in a manner consistent with its founders’ vision, as a reflection of the cultural, historical and artistic heritage of the Southwest, of California and of the City of Los Angeles.

Having assumed possession of the Southwest Museum’s assets and priceless collection, the Autry National Center must officially recognize its moral responsibility to maintain and revitalize the Museum’s original Mt. Washington home so that it will play as integral a role in the future cultural and economic development of Los Angeles’ Northeast community as it has in its past.

>sign the petition...

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Southwest faces major repair job
If the site at Mount Washington clears funding/permit hurdles,
it will reopen in 2010.

By Christopher Reynolds
Times Staff Writer

March 21, 2006

Operators of the Southwest Museum say they will close its collections exhibition areas beginning June 30 to make way for at least 3 1/2 years of major repairs to the historic but bedraggled Mount Washington landmark, a move that has alarmed some long-time volunteers and neighbors who fear a permanent closure could follow.
But officials at the Autry National Center, which operates the Southwest, say the real message in the move is just the opposite. Not only will they keep the Southwest's library and gift shop open, they say, they're aiming to reopen the rehabilitated Southwest building with exhibition space in 2010, so long as they can raise enough donor money and get city approvals needed to expand their Griffith Park site.
Until then, "the collection has got to be moved out, because it's imperiled where it is," said John Gray, the Autry's chief executive.
Gray declined to speak in depth, citing a mediation agreement with neighborhood groups and the mayor's office aimed at avoiding negotiations via the media. But he did say Autry's ambition is to get City Council approval and break ground on a 100,000-square-foot expansion in Griffith Park in 2007, to complete that project by 2009, move most of the Southwest Museum's collections to the Autry's Griffith Park complex, then complete renovation and reopen the Southwest with exhibition areas the following year.
On Friday night, leaders of the museum, the neighborhood coalition and a mayor's representative will meet at City Hall. Then, "we'll be learning things. The devil's in the details," said Nicole Possert, co-chair of the Friends of the Southwest Museum Coalition and a board member of the Highland Park Heritage Trust.
Possert acknowledged that the Southwest building's troubles are "a short-term issue — renovation work that we all knew needed to happen…. The Autry National Center is being a steward for the building, doing this work, and they deserve significant credit…. But we'd be uncomfortable if that work were used as a pretense."
The big question, she said, is whether the Autry will make Griffith Park additions at the expense of the Mount Washington site. The issue, Possert said, is "IMBY. We want the [museum] to be in our backyard."
The Southwest, which was the first museum in Los Angeles, has stood at its bluff-top site since 1914, its 225,000 Native American and other artifacts ranked among the most valuable public collections in North America.
But the museum struggled with tight money and deteriorating facilities for years. In the year ended May 31, 2003, tax filings show, the museum raised less than half the money needed to cover its $1.4 million in costs.
The threat of closure led the Autry organization to step up with a merger plan that year. Since then, the merger has been a delicate effort, uniting an old, impoverished institution focused on Native American culture and a new, wealthy institution founded in 1988 by a singing screen cowboy, Gene Autry.
Autry officials say they've already spent more than $5 million shoring up the Southwest. Expenses ahead could reach $15 million, including replacing the roof and seismic work to reattach the Southwest's signature tower — which holds most of its artifacts — to the rest of the building. Only a month ago, Gray said, rain penetrated building walls and stained a 105-year-old Osage shield of painted rawhide with eagle claws and feathers.
The Autry aims to raise that Southwest upgrade money, along with costs of adding to its Griffith Park campus, through a $150-million capital campaign now in its early "silent stage."

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-et-southwest21mar21,0,2552871.story?coll=cl-art

CityBeat, June 22, 2006:

Southwest Squabble
A battle is raging over what exactly will become of the
significant collection from L.A.’s first true museum...

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Cowboys and Indians
Gene Autry vs. Southwest Museum: Piracy or preservation?
by ROBERT GREENE

It was one of those seemingly endless Los Angeles school-board meetings, even more contentious than usual because the elected officials were bickering over whether to put a huge construction bond on the November 8 ballot. A representative of the PTA came to the microphone to say the bond should move forward. And then the parent did something most unexpected. He pulled out a petition with a drawing of a pirate on it — and pleaded with the board to save, of all things, the Southwest Museum. “We really need your help on this,” he told the board members, some of whom nodded gravely.

Meanwhile, along Marmion Way, one of the main freeway bypasses between the woodsy Mount Washington homes of elected officials and their downtown offices, a poster appeared with a drawing of a pirate and a warning that the historic Southwest Museum is being plundered. “Come to the meeting!” it said, but the poster disappeared well before the meeting day.

Just this week, at a City Council candidates’ debate a stone’s throw from the Spanish Colonial–style museum tower just northwest of the Pasadena Freeway, a room packed with voters yawned at promises of leadership and boasts of experience and accomplishments but cheered wildly at the two would-be councilmen’s vows to stand up for the Southwest. “There’s this perception that only downtown Los Angeles can have museums,” complained José Huizar, who promised to block the institution’s operators — the Autry National Center — from moving a century’s accumulation of Native American baskets, arrowheads, kachinas (and, it must be admitted, human bones) from the leaky, bug-ridden Mount Washington tower to the modern and airy Autry facility in Griffith Park, or any new annex that might be constructed there.“I join [City Councilman] Ed Reyes in saying that this is cultural piracy!” Huizar added.

His chief rival, Nick Pacheco, was no less adamant, noting that back when he was on the City Council, he authored two motions to protect the museum. How is it, he asked, that, in the two years since he left the council, nothing further has been done? “The one who swings the biggest bat on this issue is the mayor,” Pacheco said, invoking the name of Mount Washington resident Antonio Villaraigosa — and pressing the mayor to take the lead.

The Southwest Museum? Cultural piracy? The words have become fixtures on Northeast L.A. blogs and listserves, in neighborhood-council meetings, and in the recent wave of art galleries and coffeehouses that have sprung up in this historic and newly trendy part of town. And, apparently, downtown in school-board meetings. Elsewhere in L.A., the Southwest has yet to re-emerge in public discussion, five years after the fate of the venerable but dowdy institution’s future was supposedly put to rest by the merger with the Autry.

But get ready. Absent some mediation from cooler heads, the angry and provocative charges bandied about at the time of the merger — that the cowboys (the Autry) are once again ripping off the Indians (the Southwest) — are poised to go citywide.

And this time they could get louder, in part because the political nexus of Los Angeles has shifted to this part of town, until recently a backwater, but now the home of some of the city’s most powerful figures. Like Villaraigosa.

Administrators of the now-vacant City Council office that Villaraigosa once filled, and that Huizar, Pacheco and others are trying to win, have slated an August 25 closed-door meeting to defuse the situation. But it will be tough. Huizar is only one of several candidates and elected officials who have promised to block any building permits for new Autry construction in Griffith Park, where a display and storage facility for the Southwest collection is to go.

In some ways, it’s a battle for possession of the city’s cultural heritage.

For decades, cultural Los Angeles has run east-west, from MOCA and the Music Center to LACMA and the Getty. Museum-support dollars — and campaign contributions — flowed downtown from the estates of Brentwood and Beverly Hills. The blue bloods of Pasadena also sent their bucks downtown and to the Miracle Mile and the Westside, but the historic arts and cultural institutions of the Arroyo Seco languished.

Now, some political and community leaders are arguing that cultural L.A. should also run north-south, moving up from the Watts Towers and taking in African-American landmarks like Central Avenue and the Dunbar Hotel, and the museums of Exposition Park, into downtown, to take in not just the Music Center but the new galleries and performance spaces. And then, on the way to Pasadena, through the Arroyo, past the remarkable home of Charles Lummis and the Victorian mansions of Heritage Square.

And, at its fulcrum, in Mount Washington — the Southwest Museum.

Between the lines of the argument come layers of ethnic politics and social complexity. The high-culture pipeline from downtown to the Westside is tailor-made for a car trip down Wilshire Boulevard or across the 10 and the 405. A north-south axis, in the eyes of its proponents, embodies a Los Angeles comfortable with public transit, since each of the icons on the north-south route is walking or shuttle distance from a Blue Line or Gold Line stop. The Southwest may not have much parking, but it’s got a Metro station that was placed there expressly to support the museum. Plus, the new axis arguably accords respect to blacks and Latinos, who have long been left out of the city’s elite-culture circuit. “The notion that the Southwest Museum is out of the way is shaped by an old, pre–Gold Line view of Los Angeles,” argues Nicole Possert, chair of the Coalition To Save the Southwest Museum.

Possert is impatient with the Autry’s arguments that the Southwest’s collection would be better preserved and displayed if moved to Griffith Park, away from the home of Lummis — a near-legendary figure who virtually invented the term “Southwest” as it refers to the indigenous and Spanish and Mexican cultures of the area between Los Angeles and Texas. “The cultural legacy of Los Angeles is about to be lost,” Possert claims. “If the city does not understand that our first museum is about to be replaced by something six miles upstream for no reason, what are we saying about our history? Our culture?”

Words like that baffle John Gray, executive director of the Autry National Center. Gray claims the Autry is saving the Southwest’s collection from ruin, and reviving an institution that virtually no one comes to visit. The Autry is rehabbing the building, protecting and cataloging the collection, and trying to come up with a master plan that puts the building to the best possible use and presents the priceless collection of anthropological and cultural treasures to the greatest number of appreciative people. So what’s the problem? “They’re trying to hurt us, and they absolutely are,” Gray said of the most vocal coalition members. “To force us to make a financial commitment for a long-term permanent operating use of the Southwest Museum here, which we don’t have the money to do.”

Charles Lummis — newspaper editor, city librarian, civil rights advocate, historic preservationist, civic booster — came to Los Angeles from Ohio on foot in 1884. In a series of columns he wrote for the Los Angeles Times, he described how he became captivated by the indigenous cultures he encountered while walking through Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. By the time he arrived in L.A., he had dreamed up what was to become the Southwest Museum, housing his collections of Native American and Spanish treasures and curiosities. But the building itself didn’t open until 1914, and was already destitute on its first day of operation.

Over the post-Lummis years, generations of third- and fourth-grade schoolchildren walked through the displays of baskets and mockups of various indigenous nations’ living quarters.

But adults rarely sought out the museum, and it foundered. One director actually did commit cultural piracy, stealing and selling parts of the collection in the 1990s. Without money to rehab the building or to adequately house or display the collection, the museum’s board looked for suitors.

That’s where the Autry Museum of Western Heritage came in. Without the Autry, there’s a good chance that the collection would have been sold or dispersed, or would simply have perished from the mold and insects that plagued the building. The merger held forth the promise of saving both the artifacts and the building.

But it also left many people unhappy. The new institution founded by singing cowboy and movie star Gene Autry got a sweet deal from the city — virtually free land in Griffith Park, arguably in violation of the city charter. And the displays emphasized the American pop-culture image of the West — a 1950s cowboy-themed boy’s bedroom set, Gene Autry records, John Wayne movie posters, Billy Crystal’s New York Mets cap from City Slickers. The museum, renamed the Autry National Center, is currently featuring the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. Let’s face it, the place is a lot of fun. But the pop-culture emphasis (which is basically the public sheen on some serious scholarship conducted at the center) is a rather shocking counterpoint to the anthropological collections at the Southwest.

After the merger went through, Possert and other coalition leaders became alarmed that a master plan for the Southwest Museum and the nearby Casa de Adobe that they expected in 2003 still was not done. Then came the battle of the reports, with the Autry citing figures suggesting that the Southwest couldn’t draw enough visitors to support itself, and the coalition responding with figures that said it could. Then came the lawyers, with the Autry retaining legal powerhouse Latham & Watkins, and the coalition responding with its own land-use attorney. Then the media fray, with Times columnist Patt Morrison suggesting that the Southwest building could make a great Museum of Los Angeles, and the local community paper warning that the Southwest was being looted.

And the politicians weighed in. Villaraigosa, while still on the council, told coalition members that when he was elected mayor, he planned to “yank their chain,” referring to the Autry. Councilman Ed Reyes, whose district includes the Casa de Adobe, warned that he would not allow the “cultural piracy” of the neighborhood.

That remark, borrowed from the previous councilman, caught on and produced the poster that called on residents to attend a July meeting. While the pirate theme appealed to the coalition’s more militant members, others saw it as an inflammatory barrier to constructive talks, and the poster was quietly removed.

Villaraigosa’s old council district is for now in the hands of caretaker Lisa Sarno, who is convening the August 25 meeting. Her efforts have been hailed by coalition leaders like Eliot Sekuler, who said he is counting on city officials to block any new Griffith Park building permit for the Autry unless the Southwest retains its role as the home of at least part of the Native American collection for which the museum is known. But Sarno’s promises are more measured and may fall short of what coalition members are seeking. “We are here to facilitate a dialogue between the Autry and the coalition so that some portion of the Southwest will be able to be maintained as a public space,” Sarno said.

If her efforts fail, there is still the hope that Villaraigosa will step in. But given the greeting that Autry curator Richard Moll received at one recent coalition meeting, even the mayor will have his hands full.

When Moll described his efforts to rescue, preserve and catalog baskets and other artifacts that sat unprotected at the Casa de Adobe, coalition members accused him of looting. “You’re being an asshole!” one resident shouted at Moll. “Shut up and leave,” another said. So Moll left.

So far, though, the Autry is staying. “There absolutely was a commitment and still is a commitment to save this collection,” Gray says. “There absolutely was a commitment and there is a commitment to save this building.”

But — save the collection for at least partial display or storage in the building? To that, Gray answers only that “The discussion from the very first day was how do you generate enough support and revenue for a particular use in this site, or in Griffith Park, to warrant raising the kind of funds to rehabilitate this building. Or expand the Autry building.”

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The Autry National Center — formed two years ago by a merger of the Museum of the American West (formerly the Autry Museum of Western Heritage) and the Southwest Museum of the American Indian — has selected Overland Partners Architects to develop a master plan and design a greatly expanded facility for its 10-acre campus in Griffith Park. A major portion of the project will be devoted to displaying and storing the Southwest Museum's vast collection of art and artifacts, amassed at its historic home on Mount Washington.

"We chose Overland Partners because of they way they think," Autry President and CEO John L. Gray said of the San Antonio, Texas-based firm. "They understand the Autry National Center's large idea — that a convergence of diverse cultures shaped the American West. We think they will develop a design that will allow the value of that idea to come through."

Overland was singled out in a search that narrowed a slate of 17 firms to four finalists. The others are Michael Maltzan Architecture and Lake/Flato of Los Angeles and Antoine Predock of Albuquerque. Currently working on a Chickasaw Indian Nation cultural center in Sulphur, Okla., Overland has designed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, a master plan for the San Antonio Museum of Art, and The Wildlife Experience, a museum near Denver.

"We have been involved in a lot of cultural projects that tell pieces of the story of the West," said Bob Shemwell, a principal at Overland Partners. "The Autry is a unique place where all those pieces come together and you see the whole picture."

Overland's plan, to be presented to the Autry board of trustees by the end of the year, will enlarge the existing 148,000-square-foot building by at least 100,000 square feet.

The new structure will include about 20,000 square feet of galleries, 30,000 square feet of storage and a 50,000-square-foot study center that will house the two museums' libraries. Construction is expected to begin in 2006 and continue for two or three years.

The Autry is engaged in a $100-million fundraising drive to increase its endowment, renovate the Southwest's building and expand the Griffith Park facility. The budget for the Griffith Park project is being developed, the architects and museum representatives said.

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Autry National Center Commissions Overland Partners Architects
to Design New Buildings and Galleries at Los Angeles Campus
Design will highlight collection of Southwest Museum of the American Indian
and expand Center’s Research Institute and Library

LOS ANGELES (March 7, 2005) — The Autry National Center has selected Overland Partners Architects, an award-winning firm based in San Antonio, Texas, to develop a master plan and design new buildings and expanded galleries for the multicultural history center’s campus in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park. The project will physically merge the multiple institutions that have come together in recent years to form the Autry National Center. A large portion of the Autry’s expansion will be dedicated to the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, quintupling the gallery space currently devoted to its world-class collection.

Overland Partners was awarded the commission after a focused search for an architectural firm with proven experience in designing museums, working with natural materials, and designing sustainable buildings. Overland’s portfolio includes the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas; a seven-phase master plan for the San Antonio Museum of Art featuring new wings to house the museum’s collections of Latin American and Asian art; The Wildlife Experience, an art and conservation museum near Denver; a transit center for Grand Canyon National Park; and a cultural center in Sulphur, Oklahoma, to highlight the heritage of the Chickasaw Indian Nation.

“The architects of Overland Partners understand and celebrate the convergence of diverse cultures that shapes the American West, and can translate that convergence into a design for the Autry National Center that is respectful of the past, enduring for the future, and connected to the earth,” said John L. Gray, President and CEO of the Autry National Center.

Overland Partners has been charged with creating a master plan for the Center’s 10-acre campus in Griffith Park that incorporates new buildings with the Center’s existing facilities, chiefly the Museum of the American West. Opened in 1988, the museum’s existing 148,000-sq.-ft. structure along Interstate 5 expresses the California Mission style in a contemporary context.

Overland will work over the coming months to design an expansion comprising approximately 20,000 sq. ft. of galleries to exhibit and interpret the collection of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, an arm of the Autry National Center that is currently located about seven miles southeast of the Griffith Park campus in the Mt. Washington area of Los Angeles. An additional 30,000 sq. ft. of underground storage at the Griffith Park campus will securely house the remainder of the Southwest’s collection, most of which will be visible to museum visitors.

The Southwest’s cramped buildings in Mt. Washington, dating to 1914, have deteriorated to a point that threatens the museum’s holdings. Relocating to Griffith Park will result in more than five times the current gallery space to showcase a collection of Native American art and artifacts that is considered one of the largest and most significant in the world. Los Angeles architect Brenda Levin and urban planner Fred Glick are exploring potential future uses of the 12-acre Mt. Washington campus, whose buildings are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

In Griffith Park, approximately 50,000 sq. ft. of the Overland-designed master plan will be dedicated to the Institute for the Study of the American West, with large spaces for the Autry Library and the collections of the Braun Library, which is currently located at the Mt. Washington site. Incorporated as well will be classrooms, seminar and symposium rooms, and research offices for the Institute’s scholars.

A new visitor services center and an expanded museum store and cafe will also be components of the new design. Anticipating growth beyond this first phase, the master plan will include plans for an expansion of the exhibition space and storage for the Museum of the American West. The master plan will be devised to have minimal impact on the Griffith Park campus’s lawn and other natural areas.

“These new buildings will help fulfill the Autry’s mission to be an accessible, enlightening, inspiring, and nationally respected center of exploration of the American West. Moving the Southwest’s art and artifacts to a larger space, with the participation and guidance of the Native American community, will provide a proper home for the extraordinary collection,” said Autry National Center Trustee Tally Mingst, who served on the architectural selection committee. “Overland Partners’ extensive work for cultural institutions demonstrates their understanding of how architecture can tell multiple stories and offer a variety of experiences to visitors.”

To select an architect, a committee of Autry trustees and staff reviewed 17 responses to a request for qualifications sent out in September 2004. The field was winnowed to six, and committee members and staff visited the offices and past projects of the firms. In late November, four finalists were asked to develop a presentation: Overland Partners, Michael Maltzan Architecture of Los Angeles, Lake/Flato Architects of San Antonio, and Antoine Predock Architect of Albuquerque. All four firms sent representatives to visit the Autry and tour the buildings and collections, and, in turn, selection committee members and staff visited more of the architects’ past projects. In early February, the finalists returned to the Griffith Park campus to present their approaches to a design solution for an education pavilion.

“Overland Partners will collaborate with the Autry National Center to create a new facility that weaves individual threads of diverse cultures into a unified architectural expression of the Center’s mission,” said Tim Blonkvist, FAIA, a principal at Overland Partners. “To better integrate the Autry with the landscape of Griffith Park, my partners and I plan to use natural materials extensively, in a way very much in keeping with the story that the Autry is trying to tell.”

Overland will begin work immediately on designs for the Autry National Center, with the goal of presenting a final design to the Autry’s Board of Trustees by the end of 2005. Construction is anticipated to begin in 2006.

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Contacts:
Massie Ritsch Jay Aldrich
Sugerman Communications Group Autry National Center
310.689.7538 323.667.2000, ext.329
massie@sugermangroup.com jaldrich@autrynationalcenter.org
Websites:
www.autrynationalcenter.org
www.overlandpartners.com

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