By Stephen Aron, Calvin and Marilyn Gross Director and President and CEO, Professor of History, Emeritus, UCLA

What does the American West and its history look like from Los Angeles? That question looms large in “The Autry 40” Strategic Plan. Taking up what I call “The View from Here,” the plan’s third goal states that we will “direct programming and rotating exhibitions to reveal the links between Los Angeles and the wider West.” Our aim is to illuminate episodes from greater Los Angeles that anticipate, exemplify, and exaggerate developments across the American West. We do so to amplify the ties that bind our primary audience—Southern Californians—with our principal mission to bring together the stories of all peoples of the American West, connecting the past with the present to inspire our shared future.

“The View from Here” reverses the usual approach to the American West and its history. Convention dictates viewing the West from the East and following a history that is assumed to proceed exclusively from east to west. As Exhibit A of this orthodoxy, consider John Gast’s American Progress, which pictures a procession of pioneer types moving right to left (that is, east to west if the canvas is a map)

And Los Angeles? It lies beyond Gast’s panorama, which presents New York in its “northeastern” corner, but includes no cities within its West. Indeed, visions of the West have generally excluded urban areas, with Los Angeles often relegated to a place beyond the “real” West. “The View from Here,” by contrast, sees Los Angeles very much in the West. In fact, “The View from Here” treats Los Angeles as the “westest” West, because its past, present, and future explain so much about the rest of the region.

As an introduction to “The View from Here,” let me highlight how this perspective informs two upcoming exhibitions. The first, Black Cowboys: An American Story, opens at the Autry this June. Initiated by the Witte Museum in San Antonio, Black Cowboys hews to its Texas roots by focusing on the Lone Star state. Its principal concern is with “the lives and work of the numerous Black men, women, and children—enslaved and free—who labored on ranches” in Texas and “participated in cattle drives” that moved north from Texas. From this genesis before and immediately following the Civil War, the Witte’s version of Black Cowboys tracks the ongoing legacy of African American cattle herding and equestrianism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Autry’s contribution to Black Cowboys adds a California component that brings “The View from Here” into focus. Curated by Carolyn Brucken and Joe Horse Capture, Black Cowboys at the Autry will attend to the movements north from Mexico dating from the eighteenth century that established an African American presence in California and on its earliest ranches. Our exhibition will also feature the stories of Black Angelenos and Californians who made their way west, often from Texas, during the Great Migration and the Second World War, displaying the equestrian traditions they carried with them, planted here, and still maintain. The Autry’s iteration will examine, too, how “Black Westerns” emerged in the early twentieth century, evolved across the decades, and exported content from Southern California to audiences around the nation and the globe.

The second exhibition with a focus on “The View from Here” is Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles. The third collaboration between Carolyn Brucken and Autry chair of Western history, Virginia Scharff, Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles is a fitting follow-up to their last pairing, Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West. That 2015 exhibition, staged on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, looked at the epic conflict between North and South in the West and from the West. The upcoming 2026 show, concurrent with another momentous commemoration, considers the animating ideals of the Declaration of Independence—the promise of equality and the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—from the perspective of Los Angeles on the 250th anniversary of that foundational document.

In the case of Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles, the exhibition’s framing of “The View from Here” is less regional than national. “Seeing American history from Los Angeles,” Scharff explains, “reveals a set of deep-rooted and enduring contestations about who has the standing to claim rights.” Bringing together a range of artifacts, voices, and stories from Los Angeles past and present, the exhibition stakes our claim in the national conversation about the legacy of the Declaration of Independence as its ideals have been worked out in Los Angeles and sometimes worked their way east across the United States. Our goal, writes Scharff, is to “inspire visitors to ask how they see themselves in the long and ongoing struggle to live up to the still unfulfilled promises of the Declaration and of deeper and broader commitments to freedom and equality.”

Black Cowboys and Life, Liberty, and Los Angeles add depth to “The View from Here” by situating local contexts in larger conversations. Along with other upcoming exhibitions, as well as what’s currently on view in our galleries (especially in Human Nature and Imagined Wests), they start to fill in a picture of what the West and Western history look like from Los Angeles, at least from a few perches.

I’ll have much more to say about “The View from Here” and where it will lead the Autry Museum in terms of its exhibitions and programs in subsequent issues of this publication. Or click here if you’re interested in reading a fuller prospectus now.