Heard Museum, Phoenix

Following the advice of a couple of blogger friends (Lucy and Brenda) who live in the Phoenix area, Lloyd and I did a field trip to the world famous Heard Museum in Phoenix this afternoon.



It's a beautiful museum, established by the Heards in the 1920's and is devoted to the history and artifacts of the native peoples of the Southwest. If you click on this picture to enlarge it, you can read about the founders, Maie and Dwight Heard.



The exhibits and displays were beautiful. We took a guided tour of it and then wandered through the individual special exhibits ourselves. Here is some of what we saw.

This display was of interest to to Lloyd because it mentions the Dine (Navajo) people of Arizona, who are related to the Dene people of Northern Alberta, who Lloyd has been working with for the past 17 years.

This statue is at the entrance to the museum. It represents the native people on the southwest.


Baby carriers from hundreds of years ago.


This is a portion of a long piece of wall depicting a desert fence. These were originally made from the spines of old saguaro cacti. The modern ones shown here are made of clay, sticks and blown glass. Very beautiful when you see the entire wall.

An attempt at capturing the beauty of the entire wall.

These next two pictures were taken in a special exhibit of blown and sand etched glass created by an amazing native American artist. After I took these two pictures, the security guard came and very nicely told me that we were not supposed to take any pictures in the glass exhibit...so I stopped taking any more. Pity - the exhibit was the most beautiful I've seen.





These two masks were in a dark area, on a black wall. Each mask was backlit with what looked like flames behind the glass. Only by looking very carefully could you make out the shape and features of the faces. Very impressive glass blowing.

This is a little boy's outfit - several hundred years old. A lot of fancy beadwork for a child's outfit that he would probably outgrow within a year.


Another special exhibit there was the Andy Warhol one, with his famous Campbell soup can redone with a southwest indian twist.


I loved the colors in this one - it's actually a replica of the Indian head nickle if you look closely.

We saw so much more there that I didn't try to photograph. It's well worth the trip to go see the museum next time any of you are near Phoenix. We also drove around the neighbourhood around the museum. It's historical houses from the 1920s and 1930s. Very beautiful. Every two years they are open for tours. The next tour is on mine and Lloyd's 40th wedding anniversary - March 27, 2011. Maybe we'll be able to go.