Heard Museum History in the 1929 Gallery

Five brief lines in the Arizona Republican newspaper announced the opening of the Heard Museum on December 26, 1929. As the museum approaches its 100th anniversary, a brief history of the decades that led the museum to the present is offered in a sunlit gallery on the second floor of the museum’s original building.

Maie Bartlett Heard and Dwight Bancroft Heard collected Indigenous art on their world travels, and in the early 1920s, they decided to share their collection with the public in a museum they would build adjacent to their home. A plan of the museum’s original galleries indicates that American Indian art was featured on the museum’s ground floor, with art from Asia and Africa on the second floor.

The exhibition features sculpture by leading American Indian artists Allan Houser (Chiricahua [Warm Springs] Apache), his son Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache/Diné), and Doug Hyde (Nez Perce/Assiniboine/Chippewa). The sculpture speaks to healing themes of family, care, peace and beauty that epitomize the strength of Indigenous people looking from the present into the future.

Credit: Overview from museum website