Palm Springs Art Museum

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 natural 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

The Desert Museum started to transition to an art museum in 1953 when desert landscape paintings by Carl Eytel were donated by Cornelia White, Isabel Chase, and Earl Coffman. 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. Frederick Sleight – anthropologist and Executive Director – is credited with guiding the transformation.

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 and present location of the growing museum. It continues as an architecturally dramatic and innovative Art Museum and Annenberg Theater in downtown Palm Springs, at 101 Museum Drive just west of North Palm Canyon Drive at the base of Mt. San Jacinto. When the art museum was established, the desert wildlife reserve museum component became an independent public institution as the Living Desert Museum, now the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens. The Williams-designed building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

By 2003, the museum found itself in financial difficulty, still constrained by the debt incurred during its 1990s expansion phase. In that year, retired banker Harold J. Meyerman joined the museum board; he became its chairman in 2006 and served until his death in 2015. Under Meyerman, the museum pursued financial stability through steps such as increasing its endowment from $6 million to $15.5 million (and projected to hit $24 million in the near future); reducing staff; and raising fees for local groups using the museum's facilities.

Museum scope

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

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.

Notable artists

Noted landscape artists with works on displayed or curated by the museum include:

Performing arts

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

New growth and accreditation

The museum received accreditation from the American Association of Museums (now known as the American Alliance of Museums) in 1982.

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 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 Palm Springs Museum complex now encompasses 124,435 square feet (11,560.4 m²), with additional exhibition space in Palm Desert as of March 2012.

Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert

On March 15, 2012, the museum opened a satellite facility in the nearby community of Palm Desert. The inaugural exhibition was "Rodin to Now" a survey of modern sculpture from the groundbreaking French artist's work which arguably began the modern epoch in sculpture through to the immediately contemporary works of artists such as Tracey Emin, Anthony Gormley and Jennifer Steinkamp.