Woman: When we talk about memorials, do we keep them up?

Do we take it down?

People think this is a yes or no answer, but it's really a conversation.

Woman: This mural romanticizes so much about Western culture, but there's all kinds of people missing and narratives missing.

Woman: I think contextualization is key.

Rather than pretend that this interpretation of the past never existed, we need to question grand narratives and think about where they come from and why they continue to be told.

Announcer: The National Endowment for the Humanities, bringing you the stories that define us.

This program was made possible in part by City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Frieda Berlinski Foundation.

Man: Once upon a time, there was a West that conjured a set of symbols, icons, visions, and heroic depictions.

It's not that easy to disentangle what really happened from what people believed happened.

Man: Couple of fool kids playing with Indians.

Man: We had our times, didn't we?

[Marlboro commercial theme] Man: What matters is not whether the story is true or not true.

[Whistles] It's whether people believe it to be true.

[Thunder] In that way, the West and the frontier provided foundational myths about how America came to be, what it is, and who we are.

The Autry Museum itself is almost an artifact of how changing interpretations have played out.

Woman: The West, I think, in the past 20 years since I've been here at the Autry has taken on many new meanings apart from sort of the linear chronology of expansion to be something that is more dynamic and complex.

Man: So the Spirits of the West mural sits at the heart of the Autry building, and it functioned as a sort of guide to the galleries.

The mural tells one story of Western history and the idea of the West, but over the years, through many types of exhibits, the museum has told all sorts of other stories, and our collections continue to tell different stories.

Man: The mural makes a valiant attempt at trying to tell a very complicated and complex history of the American West, but it gets so much right and so much wrong simultaneously.

And this is why we must continue to imagine who, in fact, inhabits the American West.

Woman: Every curator who starts at Autry grapples with the mural.

It's a signature piece.

It takes up a lot of real estate.

It's loved by many of our visitors.

I respect the original intention of it, which was a chronology of one version of the Western history.

Of course, history doesn't go in straight lines.

History has multiple paths.

Man: I often wonder if our mission and the work that we do is in alignment with what the mural depicts, and we want to ensure that what we are depicting in our institution is reasonably accurate and reflective, not only of history but also the people around us.

I'm not sure the mural does that.

Woman: I think what we're trying to tell our visitors is that a lot of these ideas, even things that they're learning in history and in school or in other institutions, there's not a one side, and its broad and it's complex.

Woman: I think that's an important part in contextualizing murals.

It's not to say that murals like this don't have a place in our shared history, but they do need to be contextualized and not just by one group of people, by everyone involved in that history, all the shareholders, so to speak.

Pat Buttram: I'm enjoying hearing Jackie Autry, your wife, tell about the Great Western Heritage Museum.

I see it being built there.

You can see it right from the freeway.

I go by every day, and it's gonna be a big sucker, I'll tell you that.

Jackie: It sure is.

Ha ha!

Gene Autry: I wanted to build a museum for many years and kind of leave something for the future generations to see.

And we have a lot of people ask just what this is going to be.

Man: My wife and I visited Los Angeles and interviewed for the jobs at the Autry Museum.

And I think what drew me was just the idea of being able to create something totally from the ground up.

Jackie: We're building a museum in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

It's a 140,000-square-foot building, and this is a serious Western History museum.

It will depict the cowboy from the 16th century to the modern- day cowboy and how our forefathers came across the mountains to Arizona and New Mexico and Colorado and Wyoming and California, and how our West really began.

Man: News reporters today were treated to a preview of the soon-to-open Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum in Griffith Park.

James: The initial charge of the Autry project was to create a museum about the West.

It was never to create a museum about Gene Autry but to create something much broader that addressed the West and its many aspects of human presence in what we think of as the West.

It was always meant to look at how mythical forces--literature, film, television, et cetera-- affected people's perceptions of the West, but that vision was to be a very whole view, multidisciplinary view of the West viewed through art and artifacts.

Jackie: We hired some time ago as part of our construction team Disney Imagineering, and they, of course, are doing all the exhibit designs within the museum.

So it will be fun, it will be creative, but at the same time, very educational.

James: Walt Disney himself was a storyteller.

What he created in Disneyland became a model for other museums.

Storytelling as an art form was certainly something that we wanted to realize in the Autry.

Woman: There was a fine line between designing a true museum exhibition versus a themed environment, which coming from designing for theme parks, you have to be very conscious of "I'm expressing an environment for guests so that they will be enticed to continue, but I don't want to be false with it so that it's contradictory to the authenticity of the artifacts."

That took a lot of discussion with the curatorial and the historian individuals, and they didn't want it to look like Disneyland, because this was a museum.

It's a fully accredited museum.

James: Developing the mural was very much based on the research that was going into developing that plan for the galleries.

Doris: It was decided by the team, "You know, this is a big space," and it's a space that encompasses basically 3 major walls, just because of the way the architecture was designed for it.

We went, "You know, it would be wonderful if we were able to tell chronologically the story of the entire museum in a fashion where it would be palatable and understood quickly.

So that bubbled up to the senior leaders, and they all agree.

"Go for it."

Guy Deel was an amazing artist in Imagineering, and I knew Guy loves the West.

James: He grew up in Texas and considered himself to be very much a Westerner.

Guy did hundreds of covers for Elmer Kelton and Louis L'Amour and others, certainly highly romanticized expressions of the content of those books.

So he had prominence as an illustrator, and for the purposes of this mural, that was a great fit.

Man: At the time this museum was established, the mural served as an appropriate orientation space that introduced visitors to the interpretation and to the perspective of this museum.

Doris: It was a collage, it was an historical collage that emulated all the galleries.

James: The basic sources that we were using, whether they were library resources or archives and manuscripts, we were collecting materials that could be useful both for the exhibits themselves and for the mural.

Doris: I remember clearly James struggling with myth and reality and how far do we go with storytelling.

And in the end, we ended up just deciding being balanced with it.

James: We spent a lot of time talking about a number of broad themes related to the history of the West.

Ultimately, when the project was done, that had evolved into a series of galleries we referred to then as the Spirit Galleries--Spirit of Community, Spirit of Conquest, Spirit of Imagination, et cetera.

In some ways, that now becomes a problem.

One of the things in creating a mural is that it's so closely tied to the museum as it existed in 1988 that any changes in the galleries themselves, which have to happen--museums constantly need to evolve--that mural is sort of frozen in 1988, while the galleries themselves are changing.

Ronald Reagan: One of the things I'm proudest of, the resurgence of national pride that I called The New Patriotism.

Announcer: Here's to you, America, from Dodge, giving you the cars and trucks you want.

Announcer: ...thanks to the services, you've got the chance in the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.

It's a great place to start.

Josh: The mural was created 33 years ago.

There was no Internet.

It was still in the Cold War.

So the U.S. thought of itself in relation to the Soviet Union in a lot of ways.

Ronald Reagan was President.

Man: The fifties were fashionable again in the 1980s.

And this was Ronald Reagan's America, and Ronald Reagan brought back a conservative, Republican, Cold War, suburban perspective to the nation's political culture during the 1980s.

Announcer: It's morning again in America.

And under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better.

Woman: The mural is painted at a moment when the study of the history of the American West was undergoing a sea change.

Up until the 1980s, the study of the history of the American West had been influenced by the Turner thesis.

So, Turner was a historian.

He comes up with a "Frontier" thesis in 1893, and he argues that the way to understand American history and American identity is through this process of the frontier unfolding across the American West.

This is what defines the United States as unique--this process of turning what he understood as unpopulated, uncivilized land in the American West and bringing it into American democracy.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, there's a number of historians who start to argue that really the history of the American West needs to be understood in terms of a process of conquest, of settler colonialism on the part of the United States, and of racial and ethnic violence against people of color in the American West, rather than this celebratory unfolding of a frontier and the bringing in of new regions into American democracy.

So when you think about that history and how understanding the history of the American West shifts in the 1980s, I think you can see threads of both approaches to the history of the American West in this mural.

Stephen: By providing some evidence of the diversity of Western peoples, the mural captures Western history at a moment of pivot.

And in that sense, the mural still works wonderfully as a statement about where this museum was at its inception and where the understanding of the West was 30-some-odd years ago.

John Schubeck: He's back in the saddle again.

That's right.

The singing cowboy Gene Autry.

Man: Western Star Gene Autry is back in the saddle again.

Man: Back in the saddle again tomorrow, but back in the museum again.

His long-awaited Heritage Museum opens in Griffith Park.

Man: The $54 million museum is the biggest facility ever dedicated to Western history.

Autry, a long-time western star before he turned businessman, cut the ceremonial lariat with a Bowie knife.

The museum is Autry's dream come true.

Gene: ♪ I'm back in the saddle again ♪ Woman: Whoo!

[Applause] Gene: Thank you.

James: With the opening of the museum, there was a very rewarding response to the public to seeing the museum.

Of course, there'd been a lot of publicity, and there were large crowds that came to see the institution.

But from the first opening of the doors, it was clear that there needed to be ways to help that mural ask questions as much as to answer questions, to provide the means to help people express themselves about what's not included in the mural or what's included in the mural that might be questioned or what is the rest of the story.

The mural was never designed to tell the whole story, and one of the things that any museum needs to do and what the Autry did was to listen to those visitors and the comments that they made when they visited.

One change was made because an Asian visitor observed the Chinese man in the mural was looking down and that impressed upon them the idea that he was being portrayed as demure or less important in the story.

Not everyone would react to it the same way, but it's an important point to address.

Woman: If we're talking about the Chinese worker, if I had his life, I would also have a downcast look.

You know, he wasn't allowed to emigrate with his family.

He had the worst, the most dangerous jobs.

What is the point of repainting him to look noble when his lived reality that was structured by laws, by sanctioned violence was something that would make him look downcast?

So, to me, the context is much more important than trying to make everybody look proud in the mural.

Stephen: I recently have coined the term "wishtory" to describe the ways in which people reach for histories that we wish for.

I think today, the wishtories tend towards what I call kinder, gentler frontier stories.

Jessica: So if a grand narrative about the past exists, who created it, who perpetuated it, what does it mean?

Are there ways that we can take it apart?

Some historians have argued that the best way to understand the past in a multi-faceted way is to be exposed to and have an understanding of a variety of subjectivity.

So whether that's reading a letter from a Chinese miner that he's written home to his family, a diary entry of an Irish railroad worker, a letter from a woman who has traveled west and is really in the minority in the 19th century.

There are not a lot of women in the American West.

So understanding what happened from a wide variety of sources and voices that brings us closer to understanding the past.

If you ignore those, you end up with this kind of triumphalous narrative that the North American West was brought in to the United States in kind of a adventurous, rollicking, frontier narrative, and that's simply not true.

Natalia: If you look at the mural, that's based on an understanding of, you know, progress and community and conquest.

But whose viewpoint is that from?

To me, it feels like a 19th-century Manifest Destiny remix.

It's almost like no time has gone by between John Gast's painting and this painting.

It's just John Gast painting on a larger scale.

James: John Gast's "American Progress" is sort of a visual catalog of ideas of American progress walking across the continent.

They're sort of vignettes that deal with stringing the telegraph, with stagecoaches moving West, with dominant white society pushing Indians out of the way, of Buffalo being pushed out of the way.

It is a painting of triumph and progress of ideas of the 1870s of what was good and important about the West.

Stephen: "American Progress" represents that older vision of how the West was understood as a story of progress.

Natalia: And yet, we see it in the media all the time.

We see it in television representations.

We see it in terms of who does the labor in a movie.

We see it in so many ways that people of color still aren't active agents when we represent them.

So while it's easy to pick on this mural, it's also not the exception.

I would still argue, it's the rule.

Jessica: Americans in the 21st century can't understand racial, ethnic, economic inequality that exists right now, unless we're telling accurate, nuanced, and honest stories about the American past.

There are ways to do this that must be responsible to what happened in the past, and issues of conquest, settler colonialism, racialized violence are some of the most important threads in understanding the history of the American West.

[Whistling and cheering] Man: Push it!

[Loud cheering] [Thud] Natalia: I think that a lot of times when we talk about civic memory or memorials, do we keep them up?

Do we take it down?

People think this is a yes or no answer, but it's really a conversation.

What work is a memorial doing?

What work is a mural doing?

Maybe it was a perfect memorial and everybody agreed it was at the time that it was built, but maybe now in hindsight, there are other questions being asked.

Why not revisit memorials?

Why not revisit murals and ask, is it still serving us?

Eric: The 1980s was a very different political, economic, social climate than where we're at now.

I mean, this is post-George Floyd, post-9/11, post-2008 crash.

Our sensibilities have been shocked, and not necessarily entirely in bad ways.

We go through trauma and suffering, hopefully to come out with broader perspectives and more inclusive understandings of who belongs and who's been left out of particular social movements or social developments or artistic perspectives.

Woman: There's definitely a shift of the assumptions that the role of a museum or a collecting institution is to entirely hold and own the reins of expertise, the reins of knowledge, and instead, really understanding that the audience that you serve comes with their own knowledge, their own cultural forms, and that we all have knowledge that's valued.

Jessica: How do you engage various communities and many diverse types of people in retelling stories of the past and in creating and memorializing stories of the past and weaving that into institutions and civic memory?

Stephen: As you go through different galleries, you can see the ways in which the history of the West, even the reflections between myth and history have changed over time.

And that, I think, was a deliberate effort, again, to keep up with a movement in scholarly circles to really emphasize the ethnic diversity of the West.

As time has moved on, we're really interested in ways in which cultures don't exist in isolation from one another in the American West, but the ways in which cultures are in conversation with one another in which it's the combination of cultures that create this interesting weave where the threads are still discernible, but the weave, the tapestry they make is something quite interesting and different.

Woman: One of the ways that I teach about U.S. history is that I always do this parallel timeline to show that U.S. history starts on the East Coast with Columbus and then the Mayflower, but Juan de Cabrillo was here in the West around the same time.

So I try to show this parallel history, but we're not ever taught that.

Right?

I think that sort of linear progression is something that we should challenge.

Jessica: When we approach Western history in that way, then we de-center this frontier narrative from East to West, and we understand the influence of the Spanish Empire of indigenous nations in fighting back against European empires in the West, the continued influence of Mexico, of Mexican-Americans, of Mexican immigrants, and that all of these kind of entities, nations, empires, sovereignties overlapped in what is now the American West.

And I think that approach gets us closer to a more representative and nuanced understanding.

Theresa: It's really about actively seeking out and representing, making visible, those histories that have been erased, oppressed, silenced, ignored.

It's not just about dismantling and deconstructing.

It's, I think, actually about rebuilding, repairing, and reconciling and reimagining.

Jessica: One of the things that can be done, rather than erase and pretend that this interpretation of the past never existed, is to provide audiences with context, help audiences understand why these narratives or these myths exist in the first place, why they were perpetuated, and often that can be done by posing questions.

What does this reflect?

What do you see going on here?

What do you think might be left out?

What might be a more accurate interpretation of the 19th-century West and the myths that come out of it?

Josh: The mural tells one story of Western history and the idea of the West, but the institution continues to evolve all around this mural that kind of stays the same.

Our latest project this year is we're renovating the former Spirit of Imagination gallery as a long-term exhibition called Imagined West.

And this is really about storytelling, the way people tell their own stories about the West, and that takes many forms, from clothing to comic books to movie posters to art sculptures and paintings in other forms.

We are hoping that these objects can kind of help tell those stories.

They're examples of different groups or people, individuals throughout the West telling different versions of the story.

Woman: What I'm drawn to in working with the objects is opening up how we think about these things, what they have meant both to the people who initially created them, what they might mean to us today.

And it's those kind of meanings that I think we need to return back to the mural and kind of figure out how to account for them and how to reckon with changing in meaning, changing interpretations.

Man: I think, looking at the mural through the lenses of our objects allows us to reimagine who, in fact, inhabited the West and also to interrogate who in fact, is not represented in our narratives of the American West.

[Film projector clicking] James: We all back?

We're all set?

The mural has a lot of different elements.

What we've done, in brief, is to be basically chronological, starting with prehistoric peoples and moving around to the mythical West of film and television.

You can get an overview of the museum if you look at the center section and see the band at the bottom.

And the names at the bottom, of course, refer to the different names of the galleries in the museum.

Spirit of Discovery, Opportunity, Conquest, Community, Cowboy, Romance, and Imagination.

We've represented the presence of prehistoric peoples in a variety of ways.

The hunters that you see here and the woolly mammoth represent the nomadic hunters who followed the herds for subsistence.

The habitations above them are pueblos, representing the presence of village peoples in the prehistoric Southwest.

Woman: As an archaeologist, we get to push back on some of the fixed notions and understandings about who actually occupied the American West, and we have the collections to support it.

I guess they went with what is common and popular belief.

Start with the mammoth, and then you jump to a ruin, and then shift really quickly to the 1600s, when Spain is starting to explore through the Southwest.

Condensing it like that gives your average viewer probably not the right kind of big picture, since it's more and more common knowledge that there were communities here that existed 10,000, 12,000 years ago that you don't hear talked about.

What's so nice about the collections is that they support how long people have been in this landscape.

The Autry Museum merged with the Southwest Museum of American Indian in 2003.

That was a unique opportunity for the Autry to work with the second-largest collection of native objects in the nation.

One perspective is that the Autry was focused on pop culture, history of the West, and with the inclusion of the Southwest Museum of American Indians collection, it's an opportunity to tell a more older and historical story with support of the collections.

So the mural starts with the mammoth and the hunters and the spears.

They obviously were trying to recreate Clovis points and the beliefs about what the Clovis points were used for.

When they were first discovered with mammoth bones, the belief is that they were used for big game hunting.

What we're understanding now is that communities were thriving on more than just big game meat.

There is lots of understanding of the vegetation surrounding and small game and birds and fishing.

So it's very, you know, very diverse.

They're just a part of the toolkit, and I think the assumption per mural is that they were only used to spear a mammoth to death and kill it.

I also pulled what is not reflected in the mural are the crescent points.

I think what's nice about these in particular, it pushes on an idea of discovery.

There's a study by Erlandson who talked about these crescents being found at coastal places and wetland places and definitely on the Channel Islands, which these were, and it's probably a tool for killing and hunting birds.

Showing the mammoth and the hunter symbolizes kind of the early belief that communities came over from the Bering Strait and the land bridge, but there's so much evidence that supports a coastal migration.

That pushes back our understanding as opposed to this East to West.

So that part of the mural, it leaves out the variety that we nicely have in our collections that we hope to further put out to tell more expansive stories of the West.

James: As you'll learn in the Spirit of Discovery, we talk about the Hispanic presence from a couple of points of view.

One is that of the conquistador, the soldier, and the goals of the Spanish to conquer and exploit the West that they claim.

The priest represents the church presence, and their goal in proselytizing the native peoples.

Man: What's interesting to me is that relationship between ancient Native Americans, the priest, and then the 19th-century Native Americans.

It gives the appearance that the priest is there to save the native people.

And I think that the mural does a very good job of depicting that, which is far from reality.

It's far from the stories that we should be hearing, and it's our responsibility as an institution to ensure that we tell a full range of stories.

So as we think about Mato-Tope, Four Bears, who's a member of the Mandan tribe, and we look what Mato-Tope is wearing.

In traditional historic, Plains Indian culture, the way that a man would achieve honor is through several ways.

With this particular robe, this style of robe, the way that it would be worn is you would put your exploits or your friends' exploits, because you're gonna go out to battle to go on a war party, and then the entire village will be able to see the exploits.

So you are, in a way, broadcasting your bravery and also your commitment to your community.

So essentially what this is, this is a Native-American resume and they're talking about going to battle.

For example, this exploit right here with the guy on the blue horse, he is coming out and he is defeating this enemy right here.

The enemy is laying over.

He has a rifle.

He has a staff.

He has this long crook, which we commonly call as a coup stick.

The highest honor that you can achieve in traditional Plains warfare is not by killing your enemy, but by touching your enemy, because your enemy is trying to kill you.

It's called counting coup.

So as you start looking at these over and over and over, you start to understand the visual language that is almost universal to all warrior artists on the Plains.

In this case, the warrior artist clearly had an agenda here, and this is one part of that overall story.

The mural doesn't necessarily tell one story.

It tells multiple stories at the same time, and often times these stories are disconnected.

These snapshots of individual figures, I think, really does a disservice to telling the complete story of Native Americans, how their life was, and how we, not only as non-native people, but also native people can be inspired by these leaders.

James: In the Spirit of Opportunity, the figure on horseback up above represents a sort of free-willed and spirited trapper exploiting the environment, and taking the beaver and other furs in the streams of the Rocky Mountain West.

Carolyn: One of the mural's original purposes was to orientate visitors to galleries, not just to the galleries, but to specific objects in the galleries.

And one of those objects was this coat.

Originally, this was on display in the gallery that explored fur trapping in the early frontier.

You can see the meaning of the world's embedded just in the object itself in this kind of long history of clothing that was part of exchange, part of trade, and part of expression of a new place and a new identity.

The fringe that you see decorating this had been one of the earliest techniques used by native people to use fringe as a way to kind of save material, to save seams, and to decorate and adorn the object.

The leather, which is still-- even after hundreds of years-- very flexible and very tough, was a practical choice of material for people who were hunting, trapping.

But if you look at the cut and the style of the coat, think of like early John Austen novels or Charles Dickens' novels and the kind of the frock coats that men would wear.

This is taking from contemporary fashion, merging it with hide and with leather to create a new material for the life and realities in this early West.

You also have native women who are taking kind of inspiration from European coats and military coats, creating very elaborate beaded coats, jackets that become part of their cultural traditions.

And so you have this kind of wonderful document of people who were merging between worlds in encountering each other in these in-between spots.

Over time, though, this form became adopted as an icon of the early West.

That jacket would be picked up by other performers and even politicians like Daniel Boone to kind of represent a Western-ness, and so the meaning starts to change, and it becomes a romantic view of the past, and performers like William "Buffalo" Cody to actors in the movies to performers in rodeo almost see the jacket as a costume that they use it to perform a Western identity.

Then it continues to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.

Even today, you see people wearing fringe leather jackets as musicians as performers.

Lil Nas X: ♪ Can't nobody tell me nothin' You can't tell me nothin' ... ♪ Carolyn: What's erased in that when it becomes an icon of the West is that long history of multiple makers of creativity that's exchanged, and instead it becomes kind of a trope.

Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus: ♪ Yeah, I'm gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road I'm gonna ride till I can't no more ♪ [Cheering and applause] James: The Spirit of Conquest in our galleries deals with, in part, with the Indian/White conflict, conquest in the sense of creating transportation and communications lines in the 19th century.

And of course, there were lots of gold rushes in the West.

We've taken California as sort of the classic example in the mural.

Woman: As a native historian, "conquest" is very loaded.

That term implies certain kinds of violence, taking of resources, and also just this idea that you can take something from another person that doesn't belong to any one person.

One of the things a lot of native communities stress is that the land doesn't necessarily belong to them.

They take care of it, they're the custodians, the caretakers.

So, how can you conquer something that doesn't belong to anyone?

One of the standout aspects of the mural is the lack of discussion about violence against Native American people and especially the genocide of California Indians.

So there is a image of a gold rush poster advertising for people to come and partake in the gold rush and make their fortunes.

And it even shows, I believe, some people gold panning as well.

Without context, that is damaging.

We've labored under this idea of the 49ers for so long and used it as our mascots, et cetera, et cetera, without addressing the fact that it was directly resulted in the genocide of California Indians, where thousands of men, women, and children were in many cases slaughtered, you know, not just violence but murder, massacre, disease, pushed out of their homelands, resources taken, and swindled out later.

Frank LaPena's "History of California Indians ca.

1990" I think is a very nice counterpart to what's shown in the mural.

The piece is split into two planes.

The top 4 lithographs address different kinds of violence, whereas the bottom 4 address actions by native people to strengthen their own communities.

So this one talks a lot about the missions and also disease, which was a huge factor in the depopulation of California Indians.

And then here we have different kinds of environmental damage, as well as a reference to the state-sponsored violence of settlers being paid for the scalps of California Indians at that time.

So down in the bottom 4, we have some of these acts and actions that native people have taken as well as the Federal government to change the situation a little bit and improve the circumstances for California Indians.

So here we have the American Indian Citizenship Act, the Reorganization Act, and Civil Rights Act, all through the twenties and sixties, as well as, you know, different occupations by native people.

Here we have the Freedom of Religion Act and then also Denial of Freedom of Religion.

And then here we have the memoriam of the artist family of Frank LaPena's family and ancestors that have passed in contrast to what we have with the mural in talking about 1849.

This provides a much more robust history.

And while it does address the violence, it does also address direct action by indigenous people to improve their circumstances.

James: As we get to this point, we start to meld into the story of the cowboys.

And there's a real culture of cowboys and business of cowboying in the West.

Man: You consider the very fashioning of what the American West is, and you can see the intersections of a lot of thoughts and themes that deserve teasing out and exploring.

But when you isolate and distill it down to particular communities' experiences, particularly the African- American experience after the Emancipation Proclamation, the West actually showed so much promise for formerly enslaved Africans Who desired to finally leave the trenches of plantation life.

I react to the mural through comics like "Lobo," because where you see one individual figure like Nat Love within the mural, you also understand as a historian that there were so many more black cowboys that helped to innovate the American West.

And to just amplify one does a larger disservice to not only those cowboys but also the black cowgirls, who existed in the same period.

"Lobo" is fitting because he speaks to the commonplace of how black cowboys really had always inhabited the American West.

The history of the cowboy is definitely being researched by scholars throughout the country, because the narrative of who and what the cowboy was is controversial on its face after enslavement.

1 in 4 of all cowboys wear black.

The term itself, "cowboy," has an etymology and a connection to black cowhands who were formerly enslaved and then derogatorily named by their enslavers.

So the term "boy" is not something that an African-American man traditionally wants to be called, and cowboy or a black cow hand is where the term cowboy came from.

And these kind of rich nuances and truths about the tradition of equestrian life deserve to be amplified.

It was only two issues that came out between 1965 and 1966.

The reason of the short-run was because the comic book wasn't selling because he was a black protagonist.

So on the cover of issue 1 of "Lobo," which says "Collector's Issue" it says, "Lobo--BRANDED FOR LIFE!

An honest man blamed for a crime HE DID NOT COMMIT!

Read The first dramatic Adventures of Lobo, a fugitive on the side of the law."

And this is important because it dovetails with the black experience, what it means to be a hero but still be on the run and how there is a very complicated relationship with someone who might have been enslaved but always wants to keep their freedom.

And that's something that African-Americans in this country know all too well.

The larger whitewashing that we see of American culture happens at the expense of communities that have existed underneath that erasure for decades and centuries.

When you think about the black American experience, there are countless examples of the ways in which black food, black music, black artistry sadly gets co-opted and then mainstreamed and then extracted, The best way to reclaim those narratives is to tell them from the various perspectives of those who started it, and then also find the descendants of those who started it and how they're still channeling and using the spirit to infuse it for future generations.

James: The Spirit of Romance deals with how artists, authors, and performers in the 19th century affected perceptions of the West and what we think about the West, how they romanticized the West.

Woman: In the mid-19th century, artists were really important in influencing and shaping the way we see the West as a place and as a collection of natural resources ripe for the harvesting and the taking in the service of this larger project of nation-building.

Josh: As you get toward the right side of the mural, there's a little bit about the development of large ranches and cattle industry, but then it pretty quickly goes to the Spirit of Romance, and you have artists and photographers and Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull and the Wild West Shows.

Even way before we have film or TV, the American West as a story has been created.

So I'd say that the American West as an idea and popular culture as a phenomenon in general kind of grow up together.

There were numerous different types of Wild West Shows that toured all around the world.

They were often part circus, part rodeo, part drama.

Some of the firearms that we are showing in the exhibition that I'm working on are from different performers who were with different Wild West Shows and just became synonymous with Western-ness.

This one belonged to Buffalo Bill himself.

Buffalo Bill is from Nebraska and working sometimes as a scout for the military in the Northern Great Plains.

In 1873, he started going back East and performing on stage as a scout, performing what it would be like to do what he's actually still doing in the summers.

In 1876, The Battle of Little Bighorn happened, and the 7th Cavalry Was defeated completely.

He was not near that, but somewhere along the line, his party of the military ran into a group of Cheyenne men who were theoretically involved, and he killed a man named Yellow Hair and scalped him and kind of proclaimed it as the first scalp for Custer to avenge this for the United States, but it was clear he committed this murder to perform it and saved this man's scalp and kept performing with it live.

And he actually killed him wearing his stage clothes.

And so this line between fiction and reality in which he would do something even as serious as killing somebody in order to tell the story and to re-enact it, it was horrific.

In 1914, he was still performing this as film came out as a medium.

And so you realize this sort of idea that myth and reality are really hard to disentangle and fiction and fact are really hard to disentangle with the West.

James: The Spirit of Imagination jumps into the 20th century and looks at how other media--film, television, radio, advertising, et cetera continued that and how they affected perceptions of the West in the popular mind.

Man: Hiyah!

Hiyah!

[Dramatic music playing] [Cattle lowing] [Horse nickers] Stephen: I would argue Los Angeles is where the West was invented.

So much of what we understand about what's West and what's Western is in part, at least the creation of Hollywood and what predates Hollywood in terms of the myth-making machinery.

There's no question that the West and the myth of the West may have been created here, but it was exported around the globe.

There's certainly one of America's most powerful exports in the sense, how much it's seeped into places far and wide.

Man: This is the West, sir.

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Man: He's right, Gramps.

Josh: There are all sorts of ways that people have played with, twisted, undermined the Western for a long time.

This poster from the Solidarnosc movement in Poland from their June 4, 1989 elections.

Gary Cooper from "High Noon" is wearing a Solidarnosc badge above his marshal badge, and he's carrying a ballot or-- it says "Election" on it.

They called on citizens to be heroes, right, do their part, and stand up to the Communist government.

That June 4, 1989 election, that's this famous moment in Polish history, was 8 months after the Autry opened over on this side of the world and when Gary Cooper from the same movie is painted into the mural.

It's just interesting that that symbol of Gary Cooper in that costume or from that role is popping up 30 years after the movie in these two radically different places.

As I understand the history, that poster by Tomasz Sarnecki, 10,000 of them just went up on the day of the election, and it said, "It's High Noon."

It's fascinating that they were looking at the U.S. and this image of the cowboy to give them hope in the same way we were talking about legends.

I think he talked about needing an image from outside of Poland that would kind of take heart, you know, be brave, do the right thing.

And it's interesting because they are kind of being brave against the sort of Communist government when the film when it came out was a protest against anti-Communism in the U.S. in the 1950s and the Red Scare.

And 30 years later, on the other side of the world, when a version of Communism had become very corrupt and repressive, they use the same image from that movie.

It's just a fascinating way of these things traveling and changing.

James: Spirit of Community really deals with different types of community.

There are wide range of communities in the West.

We talk about family community.

We talk about social, business, economic community.

We talk about different types of community, how people interacted with one another.

It just happens that in this image, We've included 3 people representing a late 19th-century Anglo family.

Kristin: Some of the trends and movements that have now become instrumental are the ideas around engaging community, even in the development of an artwork or development of a civic art piece or development of an exhibition, so that you're thinking about integrating the community voice in the process, and that's become a way that artists have been working, a way that curators have been working, a way that folks who commission art have been working that I think is really of critical import.

Tyree: The concept of community curation is, at its core, the radical inclusion of communities of color seldomly involved in museum decision-making processes.

Traditionally, when you consider mainstream museums, there's rarely transformative interactions and partnerships that actually yield and lend to exhibitions that reflect not only the communities but the strengths of the collections of those institutions as well.

Amanda: So, when we do interventions like outreach and talking about the murals and talking about people that might have problems with the mural, people that like parts of it and don't like other parts of it, I think that's an important part in contextualizing these murals.

Tyree: I hope that we can reimagine who's at the center of murals like that, where it isn't just a central story, but it is one that is a bit more of a collective experience than it is a singular one.

Woman: Carolyn and Tyree were denoting the curatorial shifts that were happening in the institution.

There was a lot of discussion of the mural because the curators were genuinely sort of flummoxed and were coming to me to ask, you know, "How can we re-contextualize this piece?"

and specifically referencing these histories that are not neutral.

As someone who works primarily from a research-based practice and from historical material, all of my work sort of references the visual language of work such as Guy Deel's mural.

What does it mean to insert minoritarian affect into the heart of majoritarian culture?

And in the case of the mural, these 3 walls converge at the center as a haloed, white settler family.

And there are huge elements of white sanctity and colonization and Manifest Destiny.

And it was just a no-brainer for me to repaint the settler family as myself.

With all of my oil paintings, they are all self-portraits, and there is this sort of cognitive dissonance that occurs when you are placing the Asian femmes face in the center of what should be a cowboy's face or a white cowboy's face or a white settler colonial family's face.

And so repainting the settler family with 5 members all as myself in various stages of gender and life, that already is a power reversal, because that is a history that never existed and never will.

So much of American mythology is built upon this masculinist, white chronotope, the cowboy.

And part of me really desired that, desired to be that, desired to be surrounded by that, because that's what the mythology of this country sells us.

It's what Hollywood tells us.

It's what novelists tell us.

It's what car commercials tell us, and I think that's really what the crux of the work is-- seeing, well, why do I love it and not trying to overcome the fact that you love something you shouldn't love, but trying to understand how it came to be and how it can continue to be.

Stephen: It is really important that every generation continues to write and rewrite history, looking at the past through the eyes of the present.

That is to say, we always bring new questions to our study of the past.

Natalia: Museum-goers often think that this is the unalloyed truth that we're seeing at the museum.

And so it's not really like a monument where you think, "Oh, that's an artifact of the past.

It may or may not reflect our values now," whereas the museum, those pieces are chosen.

And so if our understandings about history change, a museum has a responsibility to open up those conversations and say, "This is something that we understand differently than when we first put up this mural."

Theresa: I'm not one who wants to de-monument everything.

I think it's good to hold space together.

These kinds of murals, this kind of history is still very much entrenched in our national imaginations, our national memory.

And there is the sense that people think if you erase it all then what is it going to mean to be American.

The Autry has a history of trying to right itself when there is outcry and there is contestation of the way that it's representing certain aspects of culture.

And this could be another opportunity to say, "We want to have a more inclusive representation of the history that brought people to California, and having the conversation that we're having today is a really good first step."

Kristin: I actually, personally think it's a mistake to think that the entire conversation is, you know, an up-or-down, "Are we gonna keep the monument up, or take it down?"

and that that's the whole conversation.

There's actually so much more richness around who gets to be in the conversation about finding ways to expand the multiple voices and narratives, sometimes conflicting that we may all have.

And how do we then learn?

What is the context we're providing or maybe before now, not providing around the narratives we tell?

Jessica: Contextualization is key, and I actually don't think erasing or eliminating artifacts like this mural is particularly useful.

Stephen: I would love to think about ways to animate the mural, so that we could both preserve and respect the vision that it conjures, but at the same time show how we were there, but we're also where we are now and that the vision that animated this museum in 1988 is not the vision that does in 2021.

Natalia: There's so many ways to do this.

What if you bring in digital storytelling?

What if there was a way to understand who that figure was, were they representative, is there more to that story?

What if you have an app that when you put it up to the mural, that story pops up?

Josh: I would like to have different voices intervene in the mural in certain ways, but just to have a conversation and to acknowledge it as an artifact because we are never going to cure us of the dark parts of our history.

James: Truth is, when we were developing it, I never assumed that it would always be there.

I think now about its potential for teasing out other stories and connecting with people at different levels is greater than I thought it would be.

I originally thought that in time that there would be something else there.

So, who knows what's its future?

Stephen: There's much to be critical about the heritage and history of the American West, but there's also much to celebrate about the West--its beauty.

The opportunities that it has afforded are worthy of celebration even as we also have to wrestle with the demons that come alongside it.

James: OK, that sort of rounds out the mural.

Any questions at this point?

Announcer: The National Endowment for the Humanities, bringing you the stories that define us.

This program was made possible in part by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Frieda Berlinski Foundation.