The Anchorage Museum of History & Art began as a public-private partnership to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1868 purchase of Alaska from Russia by the United States. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts enabled the museum to host its first national traveling exhibition, The Far North, from the National Gallery of Art in 1973. That same year, the museum became the first in Alaska to be accredited by the American Association of Museums. The Anchorage Museum’s collections further its mission to collect, preserve, exhibit, and interpret cultural materials that illustrate the art and history of Alaska and the circumpolar North.
The largest component of the museum’s collections is its Alaska Native collections. A major element of this section is composed of large collections of Eskimo and Aleut material that were donated to the Cook Inlet Historical Society in 1955 by Col. Marvin “Muktuk” Marston, Robert Reeve, and Arthur Eide. The historical society’s collections became the core of the Anchorage collection when it opened in 1968. The museum’s historical collection contains material from the American period of Alaska’s history. This includes important collections of clothes and toys, but most of this collection illustrates Alaska’s mining, trapping, fishing, oil industry, railroads, and military history. The tribal collection includes approximately 16,500 pieces of Alaska and Arctic material ranging from prehistoric archaeological objects to contemporary Eskimo ivory carving, Eskimo baskets, Northern Northwest Coast Indian baskets, Eskimo drawings, and Eskimo dolls. Important pieces include a nineteenth century Alutiiq decorated spruce root hat (co-owned with the Alutiiq Museum of Kodiak) and an Aleut/Unangan decorated sea mammal gut cape. The collection also features an archive of 350,000 historic photographs.
The arts of Africa and pre-Columbian, Central American, and North American Native populations are represented by about 750 pieces.
In 1992, the museum became the home to the first regional office of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History Arctic Studies Center. It is currently planning a major expansion in this area.
About ten percent of the Alaskan collection is on view at any given time. Items in storage can be viewed at the request of the public.