Southwest Museum, January 28, 1916. Photo by Charles Puck.
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, a branch of the Archaeological Institute of America. The museum
was in downtown Los Angeles until 1914, when the doors of the present building—located
on a hill overlooking the Arroyo Seco, midway between downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena—opened
to the public in 1914. Designed by the firm of Sumner Hunt and Silas Burns, the
Southwest Museum is now a Los Angeles historic landmark.
The Southwest Museum was the brainchild of Charles Fletcher
Lummis (1859-1928), journalist, photographer, amateur anthropologist, and prolific historian
of the southwestern United States. (For additional information on Charles Lummis, go to
www.charleslummis.com.) In 1903,
Lummis organized the Southwest Society, the western branch of the Archaeological Institute
of America, whose mission was to create “a great, characteristic Southern California museum.”
He garnered support among the city's financial elite, and in late 1907, he chartered Los
Angeles's first “free public museum of science, history, and art.” When the new museum
opened in 1914, it included halls of conchology and Asian and European art, along with
displays of Southwestern and California archaeological materials, the Munk Library of
Arizoniana, and the Lummis Library. In the 1920s the Southwest Museum narrowed its focus
to anthropology and its subject matter to the cultural history and prehistory of the
indigenous peoples of the Americas. By building on the work begun by the Southwest Society,
which had sponsored Edgar Lee Hewett's early excavations in New Mexico, the museum set about
becoming a leader in Southwest, and later Great Basin, archaeological research. Museum staff
and research associates, including Charles Amsden, Monroe Amsden, A. V. Kidder, Sylvanus
Morely, and James A. B. Scherer, participated in the first Pecos Conference in 1927.
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.
C.F. Lummis, age 24, in a studio photograph taken in Los Angeles some
time after he completed his “Tramp Across the Continent,” 1884.
Southwest Museum of the American Indian, March 2004. Photo by Tony Bailey.
In 1925 the museum took on the stewardship of the
Casa de Adobe. Built in 1917, the Casa is a replica of a Spanish California ranch house
of the early nineteenth century. It consists of an adobe structure, built according
to traditional methods, whose rooms form a quadrangle with a central patio and garden.
Regarded as one of Southern California’s earliest examples of the popular Mission Revival
style of architecture, the Casa is a house museum depicting daily life in Southern
California between 1821 and 1849, the period of Mexican rule. The Casa is home to
the museum's collections of materials pertaining to the Spanish presence in the New World.
In 1932, Frederick Webb Hodge became director of
the Southwest Museum, after a distinguished career that included work with Frank
Hamilton Cushing on the Hemenway Expedition in New Mexico; archaeological
investigations at Hawikuh near Zuni, New Mexico; and tenures with the Smithsonian
Institution, the Bureau of Ethnology, and the Museum of the American Indian/Heye
Foundation.
“Today, with a tradition of scholarship, and holdings that constitute one of the finest
collections of American Indian art and artifacts in the United States...”
Under Hodge’s leadership, the Southwest Museum’s focus expanded to
include indigenous peoples living in most areas west of the Mississippi, and its
collections grew dramatically. Over 200,000 objects entered the museum, including
some of its most important collections of ethnographic and library materials. Today,
with a tradition of scholarship, and holdings that constitute one of the finest
collections of American Indian art and artifacts in the United States, the Southwest
Museum and the Braun Research Library are poised to serve a broad audience and
to fulfill their mission to protect, present, and interpret the history and culture
of American Indian peoples.
Indigenous horticulture at the Southwest Museum of the American Indian. Photo by Tony Bailey.
