Autry National Center

Location/Dates:

Museum of the American West at Griffith Park
Ongoing Exhibit

This gallery explores the role of artists and performers in shaping the mythic West through imaginative visions of its landscape, people, and history. Filled with iconic paintings such as Thomas Moran's Mountain of the Holy Cross, John Gast's American Progress, and others by Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Russell, and Frederic Remington, this gallery explores how cultural ideas and values - such as wilderness and the sublime - informed romantic thinking about the Western environment and those who lived within it. The gallery also explores these ideas in popular form, through the Wild West shows and dime novels that reinforced the epic nature of conquest and mythologized its heroes from George Armstrong Custer to Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill Cody. Images and objects from the careers of Cody, Annie Oakley, and other performers reveal how the dramatic stories of Western history were adapted and changed for widespread audiences in the early twentieth century, and continue to influence popular culture today.