Today the highlight stop is planned to be the Scottsdale’s Museum of the West official opening, you can enter it for free today only. But first we visit an estate sale nearby to see if there is anything interesting for sale. It is a relatively small home so we go fast through it and not finding anything that exciting. This might be also due to the fact that today it is the last day of the sale and most things are reduced by 50%.
That is until we reach the small items table, there we find a few interesting items that after 50% off sounds enough like a bargain for us to buy a few keepsakes.
We then park near the downtown area and walk towards the museum passing a few party cars and then reaching the museum event section. This is today only right in front of the museum, a section with music, food trucks and art demonstrations.
The music and the demonstrations are fun but it is quite hot outside so we look forward to entering the museum and enjoying the AC inside.
Unfortunately there is a long line outside including a horseriding person. Even though that one might be there for fun only, as far as we know. But we don’t care as we learn that people who prebooked online can skip to the front, and we did prebook online. So soon we are in enjoying the AC and considering how best to proceed through the two story museum.
First we start through the short entrance gallery with some beautiful paintings before entering and exploring the gift shop which is quite expansive with lots of interesting items.
Recovered a bit after enjoying the AC we enter the interior courtyard where a lot of temporary exhibits and vendors are set up. There is even a live demonstration showing how to create Western style paintings.
The artwork for sale is quite interesting also however it is also expensive so we decide to look and not buy today.
We then return back inside and start exploring the lower level. It starts with quite an interesting miniature exhibit with magnifying glasses included, quite fun to look at the details in the paintings and minisculptures.
Of course there are also lots of implements related to horseriding from spurs to saddles, so many in fact that it is difficult to distinguish the differences especially for the spurs.
Given the free entry the museum is full of visitors and it is difficult to find a place where we can enjoy the exhibits in relative peace. But it is also what we expected on a free day of course.
A major exhibit here is the one about Mac Schweitzer, a woman painter from Arizona that we never heard before. However she had quite an interesting life and her paintings can be quite beautiful.
We especially like her animal paintings, there are quite a few of them and beautiful. Some are very special like the coyote one and the bobcat one but even the other ones are quite beautiful.
There are other exhibits related to Western culture like casinos and voting especially to the period around Goldwater candidacy in 1964.
And then there is the weapon section, which is quite expected for a Western museum. However besides all the guns there are also whips which is quite interesting, we think they are here more as an instrument of controlling the herds and not as a fighting instrument. Unless you are Indiana Jones of course.
There are also some interesting informational panels about the Arizona Rangers and the “Great Western” a women that followed to American Army for quite some time before settling down and being killed by a spider bite.
Next we move to the second floor and here the first section is dedicated to movies and cultural artifacts from the 1960s when there was a lot of interest in Western movies before the culture changed against depicting the Native Americans as either pure savages or noble savages.
There is also a small section of Native jewelry that we assume is quite modern but might also be older as the color schemes and methods have not changed that much in the last hundred of years.
And then there is a section on Western exploration and lots of paintings showing the view the painters had of the conquering of the West, which is almost always romanticized of course.
Many paintings are simply showing the beauty of the Western territories, you could argue that these were done to attract the people to the sparsely populated territories. Other paintings are focused on the noble savages memes showing how idyllically the Natives lived.
And then there are the paintings that show them as savages attacking settlers out of thin air after they settled and took over their land. Wonder why they were doing that? Those are also the paintings that are more likely to use terms like Redskins in the title for some reason…
Next is the most brightly illuminated room on the second floor which lots of paintings and a bit more airy with relatively fewer visitors. Here there are a few more paintings showing scenes from the American West and some sculptures and even some medallions.
Here there are lots of scenes of romanticized encounters with Natives and some moments that we didn’t even know before. Like the shooting on the Arizona capitol just for fun to see the statue on top rotate. And there was no police to arrest them?!
And then there are some paintings from the American West but not the Arizona one like cows going through snow, not something really realistic in Arizona. And this is the last room as we look for anything we missed like an interesting dress full of seashells before descending towards the entrance. Now it is time to eat lunch and we have the perfect restaurant in mind, Malee’s, a Thai restaurant that we really liked a decade ago when we were visiting the downtown more often.
The food options are quite different from last time, not surprising, but our preferred dish is still available, the Evil Jungle Princess. So we order that and a few other things and really enjoy the good food before buying a few items from the many but expensive stores on the main street and then returning to the car after a nice cultural day in the Phoenix area.
