Winter is the time to enjoy indoor activities, for me at least. When I think indoor activities, I think museums. And when I think museums here in Spokane, I think of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, informally known as the MAC. The Inland Northwest’s best-known museum, it was the first one I visited when I began to explore the city.
Courtesy Northwest Museum
Browne’s Addition:
The museum is located in a historic district known as Browne’s Addition, on the south side of the Spokane River. Browne’s Addition was Spokane’s first residential neighborhood. Beautiful mansions rose up around the spacious Coeur d’Alene Park in the late 1800s, but by the 1930s many of the homes were sub-divided into low-cost rentals for downtown workers. Starting in the 1980s, the neighborhood reversed a decades-long trend toward blight, and has become a historic district and a lovely, tree-lined neighborhood with many of the mansions renovated to their former glory.
Arts, culture, and history:
Campbell House
In certain respects, the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture should add the word ‘history’ to the name, particularly so if you look at its origins. The MAC started in 1916 as the Spokane Historical Society. A decade later, the society, its named changed to the Eastern Washington State Historical Society, moved into the Campbell house, one of the lovely mansions in Browne’s Addition. Built by a mining magnate, the house was gifted to the society by the miner’s daughter. The society amassed local relics, curios, artifacts, and other objects of the early pioneers. During the 1930s it expanded into collecting art. In 1960, a new museum – the Cheney Cowles Memorial Museum — opened adjacent to the Campbell house, and the house itself was restored to its historical elegance. The museum soon began to acquire extensive collections of Native American culture. By the turn of the century, a new building rose up adjacent to what is now known as the Cowles Center to house exhibition galleries, a store, café, and outdoor amphitheater. The entire complex became known as the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, accredited by the Alliance of American Museums and affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution.
Exhibits and activities:
Wooly mammoth exhibit
In spite of the relatively small size of the MAC, it has produced a number of outstanding exhibitions in the years I’ve been here. I experienced the opulent journey and disastrous sinking of the Titanic ocean liner; watched a collage of photographs that transported me from present-day downtown Spokane to the era when the wooly mammoth roamed the region; took in photographer Edward S. Curtis’s view of Native American Indians of the Northwest; and (currently) admired the photographs of Ansel Adams and other innovative photographers of the mid-20th century. In addition to the major exhibition, the museum at the same time also displays smaller exhibits, such as the current centennial commemoration of World War I and how it impacted the Inland Northwest. The exhibit rooms are arranged in a loop that is easy to follow.
The MAC also schedules talks related to exhibits in the Cowles Center auditorium, art classes, and walking tours through the elegant Campbell mansion. If you’re so inspired, you can rent a piece of local art to display in your own home for several months through the MAC Art Source program. The modern lines of the museum café overlook the outdoor amphitheater and northern Spokane in the distance, and the store offers a tasteful collection of gifts, often exhibit-related.
Upcoming events:
Glass by Chihuly
2019 will be a very good year for the MAC. It will start out with Inuit art, paintings and films of the Canadian north, and an exhibit I can’t wait to see — Dale Chihuly and the Studio Glass movement, opening February 23.
For more information, go to the Northwest Museum website.
Holiday hiatus:
Due to the delightful demands of the holiday season and other distractions, this blog will take a brief hiatus, returning at the end of the season (which for me continues to be after Three Kings’ Day on January 6). May your transition from the old year to the new one be merry and bright.