The Floors

As, you walk up to the Museum of Northern Arizona you will notice the trees and the old stone building, but once you are inside, I have to tell you sometimes I wonder if people ever take their eyes off the floor. There are comments about how the carpet is ripped over there, why don't they have hard wood, well there is tile over here. Now, if you think after working here for short few months I have, that I haven't heard and noticed what the people that walk through here are talking about...well, you are wrong. Now, if I had a million dollars I would redo the floors, the roof, change the galleries, add a cafe, but now we are at about 5 or 6 million dollars. So, you don't like the floors, well me neither, but my question is why are you so worried about what the floors look like and not more concerned about what is in the museum? huh?

Well, let me tell you... If you blink you are going to miss an exhibit, because that's the way life works these days. We go to sleep and we are 15 and we wake up and we are 40, says the 24 year old working at the museum. I have managed to keep my eyes open in the time that I have been here and I have learned a tremendous amount from the walls of this museum. 

The Museum of Northern Arizona has three changing exhibits and in the time I have been here Mary-Russell has shown me the sunsets of the southwest through her own beauty and her paintings even more beautiful. See, Mary-Russell Farrell Colton moved to Flagstaff in 1926 with her husband, Dr. Harold S. Colton and together they established the Museum of Northern Arizona in 1928. As curator if art and ethnology, she sought to bring new awareness, and appreciation of art to northern Arizona. She taught art classes to adults and children, organized one of the museum educational outreach programs in the country, encouraged preservation of traditional Native arts by instituting the Hopi Craftsman Show in 1930 and the Navajo Craftsman Show in 1942.As an internationally acclaimed artist, her focus on Southwest landscapes and portraiture resulted in her election to the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame in 1981. Many of her works are now part of the MNA Fine Arts Collection.

Her colleagues, the Pioneering Women of the Southwest have shown me the southwest through their eyes on horseback, or by foot, but they managed to make the Grand Canyon look as vibrant and real as it still is today. Arizona was the final territory to join the United States by 1912, before the much later addition of Alaska and Hawaii. Coincident with that position, Arizona was also one of the last territories to receive significant visits and depiction by artists. Although more men came here to paint, female professional artists outnumbered male professional artists in the area and boldly explored a wild region that was largely unknown to the rest of the country around the turn of the century. The majority of works of art and design objects in the exhibit come from the collection of Fran and Ed Elliot of Sedona. As a collector, Fran Elliott has also followed an independent path. After moving to Arizona in 1988, she began collecting the work of the overlooked and unappreciated women artists of the state.

The mountain lions have taken me on an adventure across the united States and brought me right back to my home here in Flagstaff which is home to as many as 3,000 mountain lions at one time. Mountain Lions are like teenagers; the females take care of their young, conserve their food, and keep watch of the den while the  males roam in a 30 mile radius, will go weeks without eating during mating season, and they tend to move around even after they mate with a female so that they can find the next female to mate with.

The Discovery Program at MNA displayed their artwork and reminded me what it was like to be a child again. Everything is a adventure with this program and getting to paint with their fingers they can depict anything from flowers and landscapes to animals and bugs. The world is at their fingertips and the Museum displays their world every year.

So, I have to ask, why are you staring at the floor when the walls are saying so much?