Tumbleweed Tree
Oct. 29, 2024 - Jan. 19, 2025
Explore the 60+ year history of Chandler’s Tumbleweed Tree. In the late 1950s, Chandler resident Earle Barnum spearheaded the construction of a tree made from tumbleweeds to decorate downtown Chandler during the Christmas season. Since then, the Tumbleweed Tree has become a unique holiday season tradition.
Marvelocity: The Art of Alex Ross
Oct. 29, 2024 - Jan. 19, 2025
Considered one of the greatest artists in the field of comic books, Alex Ross has created some of the most iconic images known to comic fans today. For nearly 30 years, he has revitalized classic superheroes into works of fine art by illustrating characters including Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man, Storm from the X-Men, the Avengers, Black Panther and many more.
In addition to highlighting original art from his book Marvelocity, visitors will also learn about how Alex Ross developed into a great illustrator through his childhood drawings, preliminary, sketches, paintings, and 3-dimensional head busts of characters in the Marvel Universe.
Marvelocity: The Art of Alex Ross was developed by the Bess Bower Dunn Museum.
- Related Event: Night at the Museum: Superhero Edition
Image: Captain America Marvelocity Cover, 2018, Alex Ross, Courtesy of the Bess Bower Dunn Museum
Select Treasures from The Organic Architecture + Design Archives: A Micro Exhibit
Nov. 5, 2024 - Jan. 26, 2025
In 2013, the Organic Architecture and Design Archives, Inc. was founded as the only educational non-profit organization in the world dedicated to the mission of preserving materials associated with the American organic architecture and design movement.
OA+D has since saved hundreds of thousands of drawings, plans, correspondence, photographs, slides, publications, ephemera, furniture, decorative objects, architectural salvage, and many other forms of historical documentation.
This “micro exhibit” provides a glimpse of the treasures that continue to accumulate under OA+D’s stewardship.
Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories
Nov. 12, 2024 - Jan. 5, 2025
Beginning in the 1870s, the US government attempted to educate and assimilate American Indians into “civilized” society by placing children—of all ages, from thousands of homes and hundreds of diverse tribes—in distant, residential boarding schools. Many were forcibly taken from their families and communities. They were stripped of all signs of “Indianness,” even forbidden to speak their own language amongst themselves. Up until the 1930s, students were trained for domestic work and trade in a highly regimented environment. Many children went years without familial contact. These events had a lasting, generational impact.
This exhibition is made possible by NEH on the Road, a special initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was adapted from the permanent exhibition, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, organized by The Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.
Image: Students posing at the entrance to Chemawa Indian Training School, near Salem, Oregon, 1905; photograph, variable size; Courtesy of Pacific University Archives.