The Santa Fe New Mexican from Santa Fe, New Mexico • Page Z008

COURTESY PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS NEG 016039 COURTESY PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS NEG 142322 COURTESY PALACE OF THE GOVERNORS The first atomic explosion, July 16, 1945, Trinity Site. Approach to Acoma Pueblo Hispanic girl, 1949 It was almost time to begin construction, but nearly all of Chavez's staff had retired or left the project. Chavez, after staying on long enough to see through the third and last state funding appropriation and to prepare a roadmap for the museum's future, also moved on to the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. A new group would see the culmination of his two-decade struggle. To the museum's new staff, pulled from all over the country with backgrounds in education, history, and museumology the project still hadn't gelled.

Fran Levine, who succeeded Chavez, recalled that shortly after she came on in August 2002, it became apparent ii'i'iihiinw if that "no two visions of the museum matched." Everyone, Levine said, had a different idea of what the museum would be and what it would say to its diverse, cross- demographic audience. Levine, former Santa Fe Community College dean of arts and sciences and professor of Southwest studies, recalled her experience building the college's fine arts center, a project that within the United States, Levine is hoping to change the belief that New Mexico was merely added on to an already fully formed United States. The truth is that United States did not inherit a blank patch of dust, but a society and culture already much older than the young nation. New Mexico and its Wild West shaped the United States, much as the Americans shaped New Mexico. Above all, Levine wants to relate, is that New Mexico did not suddenly spring into being when the Americans arrived, but had been here long before even the first British colonies.

A large view of history Architects were chosen: Conron Woods (Santa Fe), Dagit-Sayler (Philadelphia) and NCA Architects (Albuquerque). Then, in early 2004, the museum awarded a design contract to Gallagher and Associates, a Bethesda, international studio with a variety of impressive and acclaimed museums to its credit. Gallagher, said museum deputy director John McCarthy, "had a larger world vision. Their outlook was greater than ours, and they helped give us a larger view of the history we were dealing with." With Gallagher's collaboration, the New Mexico History Museum emerged as a structure whose physical artifice would be sunk not just in concrete but in the mortal foundation of selves grand and meek, New Mexicans who played a large part in the state's history or merely caught its prevailing wind. "You can't tell the story of New Mexico as received wisdom," Levine said, chiding the old authoritative voice of historical study that reaches a single conclusion to the exclusion of all other possibilities.

"We have to tell it nuanced, tell it as it was, from the first person in the context of these people's situated experienced. We wanted to get away from telling New Mexican history as occurring in a certain place or in a certain way, away from the essentialism that says this is authentic New Mexico and this isn't." But how exactly do you guide people through intense personal histories without drawing conclusions and without losing them in the disarray? By laying multiple subjective stories one atop the other, in contrast to and in occasional agreement with one another, the staff is laying odds that the visitors will come away with a fuller, more balanced perspective of New Mexico's life. "Whenever possible, we want history to speak for itself," Harris said, underscoring that objectivity stemmed from a plurality of perspectives rather than from "a single curatorial voice." New Mexico's history has elements of violence and repression as well as tolerance and community. Previous treatments of the state's divisive moments have occasionally roused the ire of certain members of the public. "New Mexico was never a Garden of Eden.

But it was not Lord of the Flies either," Harris continued, alluding to William Golding's classic about a group of castaway boys who lose all pretense of civilization and descend into murderous infighting. "New Mexico is where many of our culture's mythic 'out West' moments took place. And New Mexicans have enormous pride in how long they've lived here or how long their families have been here," Levine said. "And therefore, we have to confront the whole story, violent history included." Levine and her staff hope that the populist philosophy of the museum, in addition to the technological adroitness of its exhibit design, will allow it to continue to adapt and stay forever modern. "This museum couldn't be static," Levine said.

"Museums are places where history can be retold and reinterpreted." she felt was successful because of a unified effort. Levine froze development, fearing that without a consensus on the museum's philosophy and means, the project would disintegrate. Instead, she brought in respected museum consultants Harold and Susan Skramstead to help guide the staff through a re-evaluation. The staff, Levine said, concluded that the Palace Annex was not ambitious enough. New Mexico's history, they concluded, is not just who and what passed through the Palace's low adobe doorways.

Levine and her staff wanted something bolder, broader. "We had an opportunity to tell the story of New Mexico from multiple points of view and from all across the state," Levine said. "We wanted to make another museum for all New Mexicans, not yet another just for Santa Feans." Levine and her staff piled into trucks and cars and sped to all corners of the state, to towns and villages and rural hamlets, holding over thirty meetings with local community leaders, residents, teachers, children, and amateur historians, asking each time the same question: What is New Mexico to you? What are the stories that define you? "We wanted to be inclusive," said Rene Harris, the museum's assistant director and content team leader. "We asked people what should be in the museum to reflect them. We wanted each person to call it 'my Everyone at the listening sessions responded with surprise and delight that historians were asking them what was important to remember, rather than other way around, Harris said.

The team filled whole notebooks with forgotten names, places, stories. The team continued to collect public input through 2005, but by December 2003, Levine said, the staff was in a "good strategic position" to announce that the Palace Annex would become The New Mexico History Museum. The Palace would become the paramount exhibit within the new museum and be refurbished in stages to house all of the artifacts directly related to it or its history. The new museum would be designed to not only change how New Mexicans see their own history but also to redefine United States arcs. history so as to "break the myth," as Levine put it, that American history began with the Pilgrims.

"People often think of American history from an East Coast perspective," Levine said. "But it was here in the West that so many impressions Ml about America and American history were created." By building New Mexico's historical backstory and emphasizing New Mexico's relationship to the development of and later place NEW MEXICO HISTORY MUSEUM.