Creative Connections

In museums, we often talk about looking closely. But what happens in our bodies and brains when we actually do it? Recent research is beginning to put language—and data—around something many museum visitors intuitively know: spending time with art can change how we feel. A study highlighted in The Washington Post explored the physiological effects of slow looking, asking participants to spend just 20 minutes with works of art. The results were striking. Levels of cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, dropped by an average of 22 percent. Markers of inflammation fell even more sharply. Heart rhythms suggested deeper relaxation. [...]

"She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," 1949, Lithograph, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City, OK When most people imagine a Western film, a lone cowboy rides into view: stoic, dust-covered, and armed with grit. But not all Westerns follow this familiar trail. In a lesser-known but equally dramatic corner of the genre, the cowboy steps aside, and in his place rides the United States Cavalry. These soldiers, clad in iconic blue uniforms, brought a new dimension to Western cinema—one rooted in spectacle, military might, and a complicated legacy of American expansion. Filmmakers like John Ford turned their [...]

From classic Hollywood Westerns to sweeping contemporary epics, the American West on film is one of the most enduring visual languages in popular culture. The cowboys, outlaws, frontier families, and vast open landscapes feel instantly recognizable. But these images do more than tell stories. They shape how generations imagine American history. As our current exhibition Cinematic West: The Art That Made the Movies examines how paintings inspired filmmakers and helped define the look of the Western, scholars like Dr. Mike Wise push us to look closer at the narratives beneath those images. Wise, a historian of the American West at [...]

What happens when the heroes and villains of Western film trade places — when the Comanche become the storytellers, not the stereotypes? The Sid Richardson Museum’s exhibition The Cinematic West: The Art That Made the Movies explores how artists and filmmakers shaped our visions of the American frontier. Yet beyond the painted canvases and silver screens lies another story, one told by those who have long been left out of the frame or shown through someone else’s lens. Through his research and creative work, Dr. Dustin Tahmahkera, a scholar, playwright, and citizen of the Comanche Nation, illuminates the vital role [...]

From galloping riders to sweeping desert vistas, the American West as we know it was shaped as much by the artist’s brush as by the filmmaker’s lens. Our current exhibition, The Cinematic West: The Art That Made the Movies, explores how Western art influenced—and was influenced by—the silver screen. The exhibition invites us to reflect on how painters and filmmakers alike helped craft a mythology of the frontier, a mythology that persists in American popular culture. But behind the romanticized imagery of cowboys and Indigenous figures lies a more complicated story, especially when it comes to how Native people have [...]

Our current exhibit, Remington and Russell in Black and White, features some of the artworks the artists made as illustrations to accompany a story in a magazine or a book. Most of the examples of such stories on display were written by men. (A noted exception in the museum exhibit is one of the illustrations Russell contributed to Carrie Adell Strahorn’s book, Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage: A Woman’s Unique Experience during Thirty Years of Path Finding and Pioneering from the Missouri to the Pacific and from Alaska to Mexico.) Publishers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco sought [...]

African American soldiers have served in every military campaign of the US since the American Revolution.[1] In 1866, after the Civil War the government established the first peacetime army for the US. As part of a reorganization, the US military created six all-Black units, including the 9th and 10th cavalry, the 38th, 39th, 40th, and 41st infantry. Three years later in 1869, those four infantry units consolidated to become the 24th and 25th infantry. These men became known as Buffalo Soldiers. (Folklore suggests that Indigenous warriors gave the Black soldiers this name due to their naturally curly hair.) In popular [...]

For well over a century, through prose narrative, poetry, and drama, writers have interpreted what the American West has meant in the context of American ideals and democracy. During the African American literary renaissance of the 1990s, Black women writers produced ground-breaking contributions, with a number of prominent authors who turned westward in particular. Writers such as Toni Morrison, J. California Cooper, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Pearl Cleage, Maxine Clair (and others) chose to focus their narrative energies on communities, histories, and lived experiences of African Americans in the post-emancipation American West. Using historical fiction and drama as a medium, these [...]

As millions of settlers moved into the western United States between the 1860s and the early 1900s, they relied on a continent-spanning communications network to connect them to the wider world: the US Post.   Charles M. Russell, Maney Snows Have Fallen. . .(Letter from Ah-Wa-Cous [Charles Russell] to Short Bull), ca.1909 – 1910, Watercolor, pen & ink on paper, 8 x 10 inches     Thoughts of the American West and the postal service often conjure images of the Pony Express from the mid-19th century. But despite its hold on the American imagination, the Pony Express was a [...]

Our current exhibition, Charles M. Russell: Storyteller Across Media, focuses on the artist’s talent and ability to tell stories – largely set in the American West – through his art. When Hollywood emerged in the 20th century and began producing Westerns, many of the great film directors like John Ford often looked to artists like Russell as a visual model for storytelling. How does one tell the story of a Western? And what happens when the themes of the Western, this quintessential American genre, transform through changes in cultural constructions and acquire new meanings when it transcends borders? Stories of [...]