Inside the Southwest Museum Part I: The Collection

The following is the first in a three part series on the in Mount Washington. Highland Park-Mount Washington Patch recently toured the soon-to-be 100-year-old building, and got a first hand look at the extensive work that is being done to catalog and preserve the massive collection stored there.

The first part of the series will focus on the state of the collection and the restoration effort. Part two of the series will focus on the condition of the historic structure. In the final installment, we will look into the future of the museum and the arguments for and against reopening the building as a museum.  

For more background on the Southwest Museum and the debate over its future,

The 230,000 items in the Southwest Museum of the American Indian’s collection have disparate origins. Museum founder Charles Fletcher Lummis gathered many of them in his numerous expeditions through South America and the American West. The collection was supplemented in following decades with artifacts from as far afield as the Pacific Northwest.

For those well-traveled artifacts, the Southwest Museum has become something like a way station, where they await transport to a state of the art storage facility in Burbank—scheduled for completion in 2014.

Before they can embark on that journey, though, they must undergo an extensive inspection, cataloging and preservation process.

According to Joe Bollert, director of the Southwest Museum project, the Autry National Center budgets approximately $268,000 per quarter for preserving the collection and has spent upwards of $10 million since merging with the Southwest Museum in 2003 on both preservation of the collection and repairs to the building.

The Southwest Museum, long Los Angeles’ oldest functioning museum, has been converted to a facility dedicated to that process.

For many of the collection items, the path to preservation began in the Southwest Museum’s three-stories-high, four-stories-deep tower.

“When we began the rehabilitation of the tower three years ago we quite literally had to take approximately 230,000 catalog items out of tower by hand,” said Steven Karr, director of the Southwest Museum.

Though Karr proudly reports that not a single item was damaged in the move, he said the two-year-long process was harrowing.

“Spiral staircases and artifacts don’t mix,” he said.

To facilitate the move, the museum’s gallery spaces have been converted into multi-purpose rooms. In former exhibition rooms, such as the Plains and California Halls, crews conduct preservation work in the shadow of massive storage cabinets were artifacts are stored.

In the California Hall, glass display cases from the First Californians exhibit, once a main draw for the Southwest Museum before it was closed for public exhibitions in 2009, can still be seen.

The Plains Hall is now dedicated to the preservation of the collection’s many ceramic artifacts. Organic materials are mostly taken to California Hall.

This is the fist step, explained LaLena Lewark, director of the Southwest Museum’s collection.  A common misconception among those outside the museum is that collection is being restored, Lewark said. However, she said that, for the most part, restoration is either unnecessary or inappropriate.

The current work is aimed at taking stock of what actually exists in the collection and moving them into state-of-the-art storage containers in order to prevent further decay.

Many of the items are currently being moved from cardboard boxes into Valara or ethafoam-chloropast containers—both of which are modern, inert materials designed not to interact with the artifacts stored inside them.

“The collection is so old that they just did what was industry standard at the time,” Lewark said.

Additional work stations exist inside the tower, where restoration efforts are conducted by trained conservators like Angie McGrew.

“Generally, if any restoration takes place, we’ll consult with the [native] communities and ask them what they want us to do with the piece,” Karr said.

In some cases, like that of a Kachina Doll from the Hopi tribe, a missing arm or leg would be reattached before display. However, if beads were to fall off a piece of beadwork, Karr said it wouldn’t be the Autry’s job to replace them.

“We wouldn’t re-bead in that case,” he said. “That’s not our charge.”

Items are also prepared for exhibit at work-stations inside the tower, as well.

For example, baskets from the Southwest Museum’s collection are currently on display at the Autry’s Art of Native American Basketry installation, which opened in 2009 and runs until 2012.

According to a recently for the Autry's Griffith Park campus--which includes the construction of a gallery space for a First Californians exhibit not unlike the one housed as the Southwest Museum for so long--it’s likely that even more collection items will be making their way to the Autry.

Last month, a group of Southwest Museum supporters--known as the Friends of the Southwest Museum Coalition--launched a campaign attempting to block the Autry's expansion effort. Among their many arguments, the coalition stated in an official appeal of the effort to the city council that the replication of the First Californians exhibit would render the Southwest Museum obsolete.

In response, the Autry has argued that the Southwest Museum's days as a museum have passed and have advocated for a mixed-used future for the building, through which the building would serve as an educational facility.

As of now, Los Angeles first museum is primarily a storage and preservation facility.

Check back tomorrow for part two, in which Patch looks at the state of the Southwest Museum building.