Palm Springs Art Museum

The Palm Springs Art Museum (formerly the Palm Springs Desert Museum) was founded in 1938, and has become the regional Art, Natural Science and Performing Arts institution for Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley, in Riverside County, California, United States.

History

Desert Museum years

The Palm Springs Desert Museum was first housed in 1938 in a small room in La Plaza Arcade on Palm Canyon Drive near 'downtown' Palm Springs. The museum focused on the Colorado Desert environment and the original local Native Americans, such as the Cahuilla people. On the edge of the present-day business district, the arcade was a gathering place for residents. Soon the growing Museum found temporary new quarters in a section of the town's library. During World War II it was operated by biologist T. D. A. Cockerell. It then expanded in 1947 into a section of a converted wartime hospital. Folk singer and marine biologist Sam Hinton served as director from 1942-1944. The Desert Museum had evolved to reflect the community's growing interest in its natural science and American Indian collections and programs. In 1952 the desert wildlife reserve habitat natural 'open air natural history museum' and botanical garden was added, and the name for all was the Palm Springs Desert Museum.

Art Museum

A new modern 10,000-square-foot (930 m²) structure was built for the Art Museum component in downtown Palm Springs in 1958, and in 1962 it expanded for an auditorium and new galleries to house contemporary art exhibitions.

Renowned local architect E. Stewart Williams designed another new 75,000-square-foot (7,000 m²) building only a few blocks away, in the Modernist architectural style, for the third location of the ever growing. It continues as the location of the architecturally dramatic and innovative Art Museum and Annenberg Theater in downtown Palm Springs, at 101 Museum Drive just west of North Palm Canyon Drive, with a commanding presence at the base of Mt. San Jacinto. At this time the desert wildlife reserve museum component became an independent public institution as the Living Desert Museum, now the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens.

Museum scope

Emphases of the Palm Springs Art Museum developed into three areas:

• Art: contemporary art, sculpture, studio art glass, and architecture archives
• Natural Science
• Performing Arts

Educational programs related to each of the three disciplines were planned, and the new Palm Springs Desert Museum opened to the public in January 1976. The Museum expanded again in 1982 with the addition of the Denney Western American Art Wing, the museum was renamed the Palm Springs Art Museum, and classic American western art was added to the collection's fine art emphasis.

Art and natural science

Today the permanent collection consists of more than 24,000 objects. 12,000 objects include fine art, fine art photography, photographic archives, Native American art, Mesoamerican art and artifacts from other cultures. The natural science collections are categorized in geology, biology and archaeology. 12,000 specimens include ceramics, lithics, tools, weapons, minerals, fossils, rocks, casts of fossils, herbaria, mounted invertebrates, preserved amphibians and reptiles, study skins and whole mounts of birds and mammals.

Performing arts

The intimate 437-seat Annenberg Theater presents internationally known performers and concert artists in music, dance and theater.

New growth and accreditation

In 1982 the Museum earned national accreditation from the American Association of Museums. After a two-year process of self-evaluation in 1993/94, the Museum was commended as one of the country's extraordinary institutions and received subsequent accreditation until 2005.

The Museum building had originally been designed with the possibility of adding a third level. The need for more exhibition space and educational facilities was recognized by the Board of Trustees, noting increased population and tourism in the Coachella Valley, in addition to the Museum's growing collections. An expansion project was initiated with a gift of $1.5 million seed money and 132 works of art from the personal collection of renowned designer and art collector Steve Chase.

The Steve Chase Art Wing and Education Center, also designed by E. Stewart Williams, opened in November 1996. The expansion included 25,000 additional square feet of art galleries, a mezzanine, a sculpture terrace, four classrooms, two art storage vaults and a 90-seat lecture hall. The entire Museum complex now encompasses 124,435 square feet (11,560.4 m²) and is an institution poised to greet the 21st century with exciting new educational opportunities for the region and for its national and international visitors.

See also

• Edmund Jaeger - noted naturalist who helped establish the Desert Museum

Further reading

• Young, Patricia Mastick (1983). Desert Dream Fulfilled: The History of the Palm Springs Desert Museum. Palm Springs, California: Palm Springs Desert Museum, Inc.. pp. 80. LCCN 83080384. OCLC 19266381.  LCC QH541.5.D4 Y68 1983
• Williams, E. Stewart (1979). Palm Springs Desert Museum. Palm Springs, California: Palm Springs Desert Museum. pp. 120. OCLC 7442716. 

External links

• The Palm Springs Art Museum Official website