Context

It was quiet this morning, overcast and cool.  The big robust trees that line the streets here in Spokane are in varying stages of autumnal transition.  Some are still sporting a full head of deep green, some are already burning red or glowing yellow, while others are Ombre – morphing day by day into shades of pink or orange or gold or maroon.  I didn’t have anything pressing here at home to do, so I set out to explore an attraction in my new hometown – the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture.  I’ve read up on the museum a bit and have been following their activities on Facebook since we landed in Spokane, so I knew that several new temporary exhibits just rotated in, that a historic home is associated with the museum and I suspected that there must be a store and a café on the grounds, too (I love museum stores and cafes!).

Since I didn’t have any time constraints, I decided to try out the bus system for the first time to get there and back.  I set out from our house to catch the #33 south toward the museum, waited a few minutes at the tiny triangle-shaped convenience store a couple of blocks down the street, then hopped aboard the green and white bus.  Only a few of us were riding – a couple of men, a young mother with two small children, me.  Our route took us down the hill, across the river, through the Spokane Falls Community College campus where we picked up a small group of foreign exchange students, then along the curving forested avenue into the city’s historic section.  Big stone and brick houses stair-stepped up the hill south of the river, stately trees leaned over the sidewalks, runners trotted underneath.  I pulled the cord and disembarked just below the museum and walked a block up the hill.

The grounds were peaceful and the grass was dappled with hardwood leaves.  I kicked through shallow deposits of pine needles gathered on a path that led to the entrance and found several friendly staff members waiting for patrons.  I got my pass and headed downstairs to the galleries. 

The museum has existed in Spokane in various iterations since 1916.  Like so many local historical societies and museums, this one began as a collection of relics and antiquities that the founders thought were interesting – many of the objects sourced from personal and family collections, and thus comprising a fairly narrow historical focus.  And, like so many local museums, this one has gone through a number of recreations and re-identifications as the times, social and community interests, personnel and board members, and financial resources changed.  In the 1980s and 1990s, new ideas took hold in the field of local history and museums moved more toward diversification and inclusion, education, and collaboration.  You can clearly see these ideals today behind the design and programming at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture.

When I entered the galleries downstairs there were four exhibits – one was focused on women of the Columbia River Plateau tribes, one was a contemporary art exhibit inspired by political activism, the third featured historical items and interpretation about Spokane’s relationship to World War I, and the last was a western photography exhibit from mid-century masters.

I have spent precious little time since arriving in Spokane learning about the city’s history, so was anxious to pick up anything that might be offered – I like to understand my context.  The museum is not a traditional “local history” museum.  You won’t find a chronological display of Spokane’s past – from pre-history through modern times.  Instead, the temporary exhibits reveal bits and pieces, vignettes, moments of insight into the community.

I started in the exhibit “As Grandmother Taught:  Women, Tradition, and Plateau Art”.  It held the most appeal to me and was the reason I most wanted to visit today.  The cases held lovely examples of old and new functional items – baskets, handbags, clothing, footwear, and (interestingly) horse regalia such as saddles and head coverings.  I learned about natural materials that have been used over the years to craft these items – wild cherry, red cedar bark, hide, bear grass.  But, I was most impressed by the selection of black and white photographs of Native women from the late 1800’s and early 1900s.  I rarely see photographs of tribal women and I’m not sure if that’s because photographs don’t exist in quantity, if they haven’t been collected by the historical institutions, or if the images that are held in collections just don’t make the cut when exhibits are being designed.  Whatever the reason, I felt grateful to see their faces here – some old, some young, some stoic, some smiling and laughing, some solitary and others in groups.  The image that captivated me the most was of a young woman astride a beautiful horse.  She was dressed to the nines in riding pants, shawl and embellished calf-high boots; her hair was coiffed into two shining looped braids and she wore big statement earrings.  Her horse was gorgeously adorned with a fancy saddle and flowery halter.  The exhibit panel told me that this girl’s granddaughter is, today, an artist who specializes in saddle work.  The family, I read, still has the articles of clothing that this girl wore in the photograph.

I moved more quickly through the other exhibits.  The Phantom Lands exhibit is an activist exhibit meant to stimulate viewers to think about the negative impacts of rapid development – dam construction and urbanization, for example.  I tried to imagine the artists’ pieces in this exhibit changing or swaying an individual’s opinion about the environment.

The final exhibit I visited was the photography exhibit F-64.  I’ve seen Ansel Adams photography, of course, but the other artists were new for me.  Each of the pieces was intriguing, lovely, exact, but as artistically perfect as each image was, my favorite was the photograph titled “Portrait of My Father at Age 90”.  You can find the image at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture now or you can look it up on line at https://www.loc.gov/item/94504367/ and I think you’ll see why I loved it.  

After visiting the galleries, I returned to the main floor and satisfied my less culturally inclined interests by visiting the store and the café.  After browsing the shop, I sat at a small table in the far corner of the café and enjoyed an Americano while looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the lovely fall foliage, the rock-wall lined pathways winding toward the historic homes, the river valley below, and the tall buildings of today’s Spokane in the distance.