Join MNA Fine Arts Curator Alan Petersen at 2:00 in the Museum auditorium for a presentation about the art that sold the Southwest to the world. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the marketing departments of the Santa Fe Railroad and the Fred Harvey Company created a sense of wonder and mystery about the American Southwest in order to attract tourists. The railroad gave tickets to well-known artists in exchange for paintings that were then used for marketing purposes; everything from travel posters and calendars, to railroad timetables.
The Fred Harvey Company published educational materials on Southwestern cultures and retailed great volumes of Native American crafts. The collaborative marketing campaigns were masterfully executed and built upon the growing interest in a romanticized vision of the Southwest that was already being addressed and enhanced by artists and writers the first decade of the twentieth century. Drawing from MNA’s Fine Art and Ethnography collections, Curator Alan Petersen will tell the story of how two major corporations attracted the world to the Southwest using art and ingenuity.
Free to MNA members.
