Exhibits
The museum encompasses more than 200,000 square feet (19,000 m2) of display space, The museum's collection includes over 2,000 works of western art, the "William S. and Ann Atherton Art of the American West Gallery". There is a 15,000-square-foot (1,400 m2) exhibit space which contains landscapes, portraits, colorful still lifes and sculptures by 19th and 20th-century artists. It includes over 200 works by Charles Marion Russell, Frederic Remington, Albert Bierstadt, Solon Borglum, Thurmond Restuettenhall Robert Lougheed, Charles Schreyvogel and other early artists lead to the Museum's prize collection of contemporary Western art created over the last 30 years by award-winning Prix de West artists. The first winner was a large oil by Clark Hulings "Grand Canyon - Kaibob Trail" about a mule team barely crossing a Grand Canyon trail in deep winter snow. The collection also includes over 700 pieces by Edward S. Curtis, and over 350 from Joe DeYong.
The historical galleries include the American Cowboy Gallery, a look at the life and traditions of a working cowboy and ranching history; the American Rodeo Gallery, fashioned after a 1950s rodeo arena, provides a look at America's native sport; the Joe Grandee Museum of the Frontier West Gallery, which exhibits some of the more than 4,500 artifacts once belonging to Western artist Joe Grandee; the Native American Gallery, focusing on the embellishments that Western tribes made to their everyday objects to reflect their beliefs and histories, and; the Weitzenhoffer Gallery of Fine American Firearms, which houses over a hundred examples of firearms, by Colt, Remington, Smith & Wesson, Sharps, Winchester, Marlin, and Parker Brothers, used to tame the West.
The Museum also houses Prosperity Junction, a 14,000-square-foot (1,300 m2) authentic turn-of-the-century Western prairie town. Visitors can stroll the streets, peek in some of the store windows and actually walk into some of the fully furnished buildings. The town comes alive with historical figures once a year during the Museum's annual holiday open house, "A Night Before Christmas".
Read more about this topic: National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum
Famous quotes containing the word exhibits:
“Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)
“After all the field of battle possesses many advantages over the drawing-room. There at least is no room for pretension or excessive ceremony, no shaking of hands or rubbing of noses, which make one doubt your sincerity, but hearty as well as hard hand-play. It at least exhibits one of the faces of humanity, the former only a mask.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)