Palm Springs Art Museum

• Name — Palm Springs Art Museum (PSAM) • Former Name — Palm Springs Desert Museum • Established — 1938 • Location — PSAM (main) 101 Museum Drive, Palm Springs, CA, 92262 Architecture & Design Center 300 S. Palm Canyon Palm Springs, CA Faye Sarkowsky Sculpture Garden 72-567 Highway 111, Palm Desert, California 92260 • Type — Visual and performing arts • Accreditation — American Alliance of Museums • Collection Size — ≈ 24,000 objects • Director — Christine Vendredi • Architect — E. Stewart Williams • Public Transit — SunLine Transit Agency Palm Springs: Routes 111, 14, 24, 30, 32 Palm Desert: Routes 111, 32, 50 • Website — http: www.psmuseum.org/

The Palm Springs Desert Museum originated in 1938 in La Plaza Arcade, a gathering place for residents, on Palm Canyon Drive near in central Palm Springs. The early museum focused on the Colorado Desert and the Cahuilla and other Indigenous Americans. The museum grew and was temporarily relocated within a section of the town's library. During World War II, the museum was operated by biologist T. D. A. Cockerell. In 1947, the museum was moved into a section of a converted wartime hospital. Folk singer and marine biologist Sam Hinton served as director from 1942 to 1944. The Desert Museum focused on natural science and Indigenous American collections and programs. In 1952, the museum added a desert wildlife reserve habitat and a botanical garden.

The Desert Museum started to transition to an art museum in 1953 when desert landscape paintings by Carl Eytel were donated by Cornelia White, Isabel Chase, and Earl Coffman. A 10000 sqft structure was built for the Art Museum in downtown Palm Springs in 1958. In 1962, the museum added an auditorium and more gallery space to house contemporary art exhibitions. The executive director, anthropologist Frederick Sleight was credited with guiding the transformation. Architect E. Stewart Williams designed a 75000 sqft building in the Modernist architectural style for the third location of the museum. When the art museum was established, the desert wildlife reserve museum component became the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, an independent public institution. The Williams-designed building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016. In 2003, the museum experienced financial difficulty, following debt incurred during its 1990s expansion phase. That year, retired banker Harold J. Meyerman joined the museum board; he became its chairman in 2006 and served until his death in 2015. Under Meyerman, the museum pursued financial stability through steps such as increasing its endowment from $6 million to $15.5 million, reducing staff, and raising fees for local groups using the museum's facilities.

• Illustration — Palm Springs Art Museum, 2021 Emphases of the Palm Springs Art Museum developed into three areas: • Art: contemporary art, sculpture, studio art glass, and architecture archives • Natural Science • Performing Arts Educational programs related to each of the three disciplines were planned, and the new Palm Springs Desert Museum opened to the public in January 1976. The museum expanded again in 1982 with the addition of the Denney Western American Art Wing, the museum was renamed the Palm Springs Art Museum, and classic American western art was added to the collection's fine art emphasis.

The permanent collection consists of more than 24,000 objects. 12,000 objects include fine art, fine art photography, photographic archives, Native American art, Mesoamerican art and artifacts from other cultures. The natural science collections are categorized in geology, biology and archaeology. 12,000 specimens include ceramics, lithics, tools, weapons, minerals, fossils, rocks, casts of fossils, herbaria, mounted invertebrates, preserved amphibians and reptiles, study skins and whole mounts of birds and mammals.

Noted landscape artists with works displayed or curated by the museum include: • John James Audubon • Carl Oscar Borg • Alson S. Clark • Edward S. Curtis • Carl Eytel • Nicolai Fechin • Leon Gaspard • Philip R. Goodwin • Paul A. Grimm • Woody Gwyn • Thomas Hill • Grace Carpenter Hudson • Frank Tenney Johnson • William Keith • Sydney Laurence • George Montgomery • Thomas Moran • Edgar Alwin Payne • Agnes Pelton • Frederic Remington • Carl Rungius • Charles Marion Russell • Millard Sheets • James Swinnerton • Walter Ufer • Harold Joe Waldrum • Stephen H. Willard

The 437-seat Annenberg Theater presents internationally known performers and concert artists in music, dance and theater.

• Illustration — Palm Springs Art Museum, 2021 The museum received accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums in 1982. The museum building had originally been designed with the possibility of adding a third level. The need for more exhibition space and educational facilities was recognized by the Board of Trustees, noting increased population and tourism in the Coachella Valley, in addition to the museum's growing collection. An expansion project was initiated with a gift of $1.5 million seed money and a donation of 132 artworks from the personal collection of designer and collector Steve Chase. The Steve Chase Art Wing and Education Center, also designed by E. Stewart Williams, opened in November 1996. The expansion included 25,000 additional square feet of gallery space, a mezzanine, a sculpture terrace, four classrooms, two art storage vaults, and a 90-seat lecture hall. The Palm Springs Museum complex grew to encompass 124435 sqft, with additional exhibition space in Palm Desert as of March 2012.

On March 15, 2012, the museum opened a satellite facility in the nearby community of Palm Desert, California. The inaugural exhibition was "Rodin to Now", a survey of modern sculpture from the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Contemporary artists whose works have been displayed at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert include Tracey Emin, Anthony Gormley, Lino Tagliapietra, Klaus Moje, Richard Marquis, Karen LaMonte and Jennifer Steinkamp.

In 2011, the museum purchased the Santa Fe Federal Savings & Loan building, also a Palm Springs building designed by the architect E. Stewart Williams in 1961. PSAM converted the building into exhibition space and opened it to the public as the Architecture and Design Center, Edwards Harris Pavilion, in 2014. The opening exhibition showed the desert modern style work of Williams. The building was renovated for PSAM by the Marmol Radziner architecture firm of Los Angeles.