Saving Southwest Traditions 

With a grant award from the Save America’s Treasures program, the Arizona State Museum (ASM) is working to protect its American Indian collection of ceramic vessels from the Southwest. The museum was awarded a $400,000 grant in 2000 through this federal program to preserve nationally significant intellectual and cultural artifacts, historic structures, and sites.

ASM’s project, Saving Southwest Traditions: The Pottery Project, focuses on 20,000 pots documenting 2,000 years of life in the region and reflecting nearly every cultural group in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. It is the most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world. While ASM has taken every possible reactive and remedial measure, the collection is still at risk due to inadequate environmental controls in the museum’s historic buildings on the University of Arizona campus. Only comprehensive renovation will create an adequate facility to preserve this and other premier collections.

The Pottery Project proposes to protect this collection by raising matching funds to create an environmentally controlled and secure vault with state of the art storage furniture. The project will professionally examine, conserve, and move the collections that are currently housed in five storage areas in two buildings to a single glass-walled storage vault. The proposed facility will also make the collection more accessible to the public and scholars.

"This is the largest and most extensive preservation project the ASM has ever had for its collections. It is extremely exciting and rewarding to participate in a project that has such broad and long-term benefits to the museum, university, and people of Arizona," says Nancy Odegaard, ASM Conservator.  George Gumerman, Director of the Museum, adds, "Our goal is to provide the most responsible stewardship we can. The cultural responsibility for these pots, which are Arizona’s treasures, is really a shared responsibility. We hope the public will step forward and help us with this task." 

The deadline to apply for 2001 Save America’s Treasures grants is April 11. The program is administered by the National Park Service, this year in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. Applications to care for collections of national significance are strongly encouraged. For more information and an application, see www2.cr.nps.gov/treasures.