The Autry Museum of the American West: A Reinterpretation of the Imagined West

FAIN: GI-261046-18

Autry Museum (Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462)
Joshua Garrett-Davis (Project Director: January 2018 to present)

Implementation of a permanent exhibition, a documentary, and public programs exploring images of the American West in popular culture.

The Autry seeks an implementation grant of $400,000 to re-envision a 30-year-old exhibition, the “Imagination Gallery,” as "Imagined Wests." Our goals are to explain the historical and current significance of the “imagined West,” and stimulate critical reflection and participation in reshaping cultural narratives. The exhibition seeks to widen its view from a specific focus on the Western genre to reflect new understandings of popular culture, genre art, gender and ethnicity. The new, permanent exhibition will explore many myths of the West. The primary learning objective will explore the power of these myths, but also their malleability. There will be four themes: overlapping imagined geographies of the imagined West; the power of myths to shape the West and the world; the power of creative actors to change perceptions; and the cross-cultural hybridity of popular culture in the West. Activities will include public and educational programming, and documentary media with KCETLink TV.

Associated Products

Imagined Wests (Exhibition)
Title: Imagined Wests
Curator: Joshua Garrett-Davis
Abstract: In the long-term exhibition Imagined Wests, visitors of all ages can explore the ways we tell stories about the American West through pop culture, clothing, toys, art, archives, and other media. The exhibition features over 250 objects from the Autry collections, as well as multimedia and hands-on activities, including the museum’s popular “green screen.” The gallery asks, as we so often do at the Autry, “What is a Western?” Imagined Wests travels through Western storytelling landscapes, through retellings of history, and through the craft of many “West makers” from tailors to actors. We also explore the “view from here,” a focus on Southern California’s role as a place for stories.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://theautry.org/exhibitions/imagined-wests

Artbound: Imagined Wests (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Artbound: Imagined Wests
Writer: The documentary is a compilation of interviews
Director: Corbett Jones
Director: Anna Rau
Producer: Juan Devis
Producer: Nic Cha Kim
Producer: Laura Purdy
Producer: Angela Boisvert
Abstract: "Artbound: Imagined Wests” is an hour-long broadcast about how the West has been portrayed in popular culture. While the documentary episode is not a preview of “Imagined Wests”, it explores some of the same themes the exhibition explores. It reviews the “Spirits of the West” mural that stretches across 138 feet of the Autry’s Heritage Court. The episode begins by looking back to the founding of the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in the late 1980s. At the time, the mural created by Guy Deel distilled a widely accepted mythology about the West and oriented visitors to the museum’s original galleries. As the hour-long program unfolds, the Autry’s curators and eminent outsiders reflect on how the mural’s vision of the western past has been upended in recent decades and how the Autry Museum has changed with changing times. The mural, though, has (mostly) stayed the same, which opens it to provocative discussion of history and heritage and places the Autry in broader national debates about memory and monuments. These are conversations in which the Autry must take part given the museum’s role as “civic forum.”
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/episodes/imagined-wests
Access Model: Open Access
Format: Film
Format: DVD
Format: Web

What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination (Book)
Title: What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination
Author: Joshua Garrett-Davis, PhD
Author: Foreword by Patricia Nelson Limerick
Editor: Kathleen Kelly
Abstract: There’s “Western,” and then there’s “western”—and where history becomes mth is an evocative question, one of several questions posed by Josh Garrett-Davis in What Is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination. Part cultural criticism, part history, and wholly entertaining, this series of essays on specific films, books, music, and other cultural texts brings a fresh perspective to long-studied topics. Under Garrett-Davis’s careful observation, cultural objects such as films and literature, art and artifacts, and icons and oddities occupy the terrain of where the West as region meets the Western genre.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://worldcat.org/title/1086525922
Access Model: Available for purchase
Publisher: Norman: University of Oklahoma Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8061-639
Translator: NA
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Prizes

Bonney MacDonald Award for Outstanding Western Book
Date: 12/15/2020
Organization: Center for the Study of the American West, West Texas A&M University
Abstract: This juried prize recognizes a book that demonstrates excellent scholarly or creative insight concerning the American West or some aspect of its history, culture, society, or environment. Of particular interest are books that are geographically relevant to the Southern Plains region and/or the concerns of a Southern Plains regional readership; that balance scholarly/creative excellence with accessible style or popular appeal; and, books that are in keeping with CSAW’s general mission in that they balance a localized focus with global perspective and significance.

Imagine the West (Film/TV/Video Broadcast or Recording)
Title: Imagine the West
Writer: Laura Purdy
Writer: Anton Lieberman
Director: Melanie Mandl
Producer: Autry Museum of the American West
Producer: Laura Purdy
Producer: Monsterobot, Inc.
Abstract: This video short was created for the "Imagined Wests" exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West. It plays on a recurring loop in the media space that is at the physical center of the gallery.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://vimeo.com/849754486
Access Model: Open access
Format: Video

Strata of Meaning: Monument Valley in and out of Frame on the Navajo Nation (Article)
Title: Strata of Meaning: Monument Valley in and out of Frame on the Navajo Nation
Author: Liza Black
Author: Joshua Garrett-Davis
Author: Mihio Manus
Author: Tommy Rock
Abstract: This roundtable opens a discussion about Tsé Bii' Ndzisgaii (Monument Valley) as a site, first within the sovereign Navajo Nation, but also located within the United States, at the boundary of Arizona and Utah. It is also a crucial site in the American West of the imagination. This site's many layers, or strata, of meaning speak in many ways to this special issue of the Journal of Arizona History on "Imagining Arizona."
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/869738
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Journal of Arizona History
Publisher: Arizona Historical Society

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