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| Entrance Gate |
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| "Sundown" at the entrance of the Western Heritage Museum |
The National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum is a large complex in Oklahoma City surrounded by well landscaped gardens and fountains. The buildings are huge, housing incredibly larger than life sculptures and full recreations of early Western towns as well as a full rodeo.
Larger than life sculptures are one of the Hallmarks of this museum. "End of the Trail" by James Earl Fraser (1876-1953) is an 18 foot tall sculpture that humanizes the American Indian. Popular literature pictures the Indians as savages but here an Indian warrior is captured in a timeless pose, tired and defeated. The sculpture is one of the Museum keystone pieces, featured on all their literature.
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| End of the Trail |
Another of the very large pieces of art is this Abraham Lincoln sculpture by James Earle Fraser. At the turn of the 19th century, entrepreneurs were promoting a Lincoln Highway as a New York to San Francisco National Highway. The start of this highway is denoted by a large bronze monument of Abraham Lincoln. This is the plaster original for that bronze.
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| Abraham Lincoln by Fraser |
A surprise treat was this Ronald Regan sculpture, "After the Ride" by Glenna Goodacre. We stumbled into artwork by Glenna later on this trip and when I googled her name, I found she was the sculptor for the Sacagawea dollar. I have seen this sculpture before, a casting of it is in the Ronald Regan Presidential Library.
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| After the Ride |
The Western Heritage Museum has many full size recreations of cowboy life when the West was Wild. I didn't care too much for this aspect since it seemed such a large devotion of space to a questionable endeavor. Who needs a full scale replica of a Western town in air conditioned space? This is more the stuff of movie studios. My preference of course is for more Western Art in gallery exhibitions. Despite this, the recreations are astounding.
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| Recreated Western Town |
I particularly liked this recreation of an old western photographers studio.
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| Photographers Studio |
A peek into the auditorium revealed many large murals on the walls such as this one of Monument Valley.
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| Western Heritage Museum Auditorium |
The highlight of the museum for me was the Prix de West, a juried invitational art show that takes place every year. The museum benefits greatly since they buy the winning artwork each year. The galleries containing the paintings and sculptures of past Prix de West winners are incredibly nice. The museum has had a splendid opportunity to purchase works of art from well known artists before they were famous. The artist gains as well since the winning painting or sculpture can easily have a price tag of $100,000. Unfortunately photography is not allowed in the Prix de West but LCD screens throughout the facility display an ongoing slide show of winners. I used that opportunity to photograph the winners as my memory of the show. The photo below is an example of this.
One of my favorite sculptures did not win anything. I wrote down a description of the artwork, the artists name and the title of the piece. It stands about 12 inches high and was priced at $3,000. Once home I went a-googling and found not only the artist, Blair Buswell, but a photograph of his entry, "Reflection". The image I found online is below.
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| Reflection by Blair Buswell, a Prix de West entry |
If you're there for the day, the museum features a very nice cafe with large expanses of glass over-viewing the fountain and water garden. This truly is an architecturally superb complex of buildings.
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| Cafe |
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