Museums - Southwest Museum of the American Indian

The Southwest Museum holds one of the nation’s most important museum, library, and archive collections related to Native American art and culture. It also has extensive holdings of pre-Hispanic, Spanish colonial, Latino, and Western American art and artifacts. For nearly one hundred years it has supported research, publications, exhibitions, and other educational activities. A privately funded nonprofit organization and the oldest museum in Los Angeles, the Southwest Museum was founded in 1907 by Charles Fletcher Lummis and members of the Southwest Society. In the 1920s, the museum narrowed its focus to anthropology and its subject matter to the cultural history and prehistory of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Between 1925 and the mid-1960s, the Southwest Museum sponsored archaeological investigations in Casa Grande, Arizona; the Mimbres area in New Mexico; Mesa House and Gypsum, Nevada; and Twentynine Palms, California, among others.
In 1932, Frederick Webb Hodge became the museum’s director. Under Hodge’s leadership, the museum’s focus expanded to include indigenous peoples living in most areas west of the Mississippi, and its collections grew dramatically. The museum’s collections contain more than 350,000 objects including: 11,000 pieces of pottery; 13,000 baskets; 1,000 Kachina dolls; 1,300 Navajo textiles; 600 Pueblo textiles; and beadwork, costumes, clothing, tools, and paintings from the Great Plains, Plateau, and Eastern Woodland Nations. The museum’s collections are supported and enhanced by the holdings of the Braun Research Library.
In 2003, after a long and failing battle with finances, the museum elected to merge with the Autry Museum of the American West and came under the directorship of the Autry National Center. This has provided it with the financial base to support its exhibitions and program. It is also documenting its collection, which will be available on the Autry National Center’s online database in the near future.