Center of Southwest Studies has grand opening Saturday

Center of Southwest Studies has grand opening Saturday

Jan. 25, 2001

Schedule of events

3 to 7 p.m. — Grand opening festivities at Center of Southwest Studies (next to the Community Concert Hall). The event is free and open to the public.

3:30 p.m. — Welcoming remarks from Kendall Blanchard, Morley Ballantine, Andrew Gulliford, Richard and Mary Lynn Ballantine, Mark and Lerin Winter and Jackson Clark II. A ribbon-cutting ceremony will follow.

Durango-area musicians will perform throughout the afternoon. There will be building tours and exhibits and live demonstrations of weaving techniques. Refreshments will be served throughout the afternoon. For more information, call 247-7194.

7:30 p.m. — American Indian Dance Theatre will perform traditional and contemporary dances and music in the Community Concert Hall that reflect the spirituality of native peoples. Tickets are $25 for balcony, $30 for orchestra and $35 for plaza, and are available at the Community Concert Hall box office at 247-7657. Box office hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and noon to 6 p.m. Saturday.

By Tom Sluis
Durango Herald Staff Writer

The Center of Southwest Studies in Durango is much more than dusty baskets, ancient maps and centuries-old bits of historical flotsam and jetsam.

It is a magnet for scholars, a destination for tourists and a showcase for artists.

It is also one more piece in the Cultural Arts Complex at Fort Lewis College. The center shares a rotunda with the Community Concert Hall to the south. When the theater building is installed to the north, the interplay between art, history, culture and tourism will reach its educational zenith, said Andrew Gulliford, the center’s director.

"My goal is for this center to become the intellectual heart of the Southwest," he said.

This is not the idle boasting of a proud parent.

The center has more than 2,000 ancestral Puebloan ceramic vessels, 300 textiles, 140 items of Southwestern basketry, various military objects from the old Fort Lewis and about 200 pieces of antique photographic equipment. Most of the center’s collections were donated from nearly 700 sources.

The first floor of the $8 million center will be reserved for public activities and exhibits. Offices, classrooms, laboratories and a computer room will be on the second floor, as will the college’s anthropology and southwest studies departments.

"There is nothing comparable for four-year schools," Gulliford said.

FLC President Kendall Blanchard said the center will serve as a magnet for intellectuals.

"People are doing groundbreaking work here in areas related to the Southwest, but we have never had the kind of visibility we have now. The archives, collections and technology will make Fort Lewis more attractive to researchers, students and provide additional support for faculty scholars," Blanchard said.

Under Gulliford’s plans, local residents and students will have a vast offering of seminars and lectures from which to choose.

A seminar will be offered in the fall on Hispanic land grants and equestrian traditions in La Plata County. Another will focus on how the National Park Service seeks collaboration on interpreting controversial subjects – such as the Sand Creek massacre.

A Hispano history day is planned for May 4. "It will coincide with Cinco de Mayo, but with an academic twist," Gulliford said.

A celebration of Hozhoni Days is planned. A Four Corners tour sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution is scheduled for May.

None of these seminars were possible in the cramped third floor of Reed Library, where the center has been housed since 1967.

"We have the collections, but we’ve never been able to do the public programming," Gulliford said.

The center was established in 1964 as a small addition to Berndt Hall, and it was later moved to Reed Library.

Robert Delaney, the center’s first director, set the standard for acquisition of the material, with thousands of volumes of Southwest history, rare Navajo weavings and thousands of maps and photographs acquired over the next 23 years. So much material was acquired over the years that the center ran out of space by 1985.

The overflow from the center is housed in the Reed Library basement and five secret storage areas in Durango.

"We know where everything is," said archivist Todd Ellison. "It’s just a matter of getting to it."

On a tour of the library basement, Ellison pulls out boxes filled with a hangman’s rope, KKK hoods (donated anonymously) and a penitent’s knife that folds out from a small cross. An ancient drum and basket are also tucked away. In a former janitor’s closet is a wall of transcribed oral histories.

Papers from the careers of Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., and Sen. Jim Dyer, D-Durango, are also stored in the Reed Library basement and will be accessible to the public once the papers have been processed.

It is this processing of the vast collections, and the simple logistics of moving, that will require a second grand opening in the summer, after truckloads of artifacts and collections deposit the priceless goods: the centuries-old weavings, the baskets, pottery, rifles, photographs, petrified dinosaur dung and local Ku Klux Klan memorabilia; the nearly two miles of manuscripts, unbound printed material, more than 7,000 microfilms, 600 oral histories and more than 35,000 photographs.

There will still be plenty to savor on Saturday, though.

A sample of The Durango Collection, a $2.5 million collection of textiles covering eight centuries, will be on display. The oldest known Navajo weaving in existence, dating to 1750, will be displayed, as will an Inca shirt.

And the 39,000-square-foot center building will impress on its own merits.

The cantilevered gallery walls, stretching to 30 feet high, were designed to mimic a canyon. In the top corner of the gallery’s south wall, summer sunlight will pass through a spiral slot and will work its way down the north wall.

Spiral solstice markers dot the entryway floor in a nod to the ones used by the ancestral Puebloans, or Anasazi. The 100-seat lyceum has telephone jacks and electric outlets for laptop computers built into the top of the tables.

And the classrooms, laboratories, storage areas, 15 humidity sensors and display cases galore are all carefully orchestrated in an efficient ode to modernity.

But for all of its presumptive grandeur, the center will really come to life once the seminars and forums kick in, said Gulliford.

Fund-raising began in 1996 for the building. Campbell persuaded the Department of Housing and Urban Development to donate $1 million. The state paid 51 percent of the balance, with private donations paying for the other 49 percent.

The lectures, forums and special exhibits will be offered for minimal cost to the public for the first year, Gulliford said.

Three people – Gulliford, curator Jeanne Brako and archivist Todd Ellison – will be running the center.

Brako was hired specifically for the new center, as were two additional custodians, said FLC Vice President for Business and Finance Bob Dolphin.

The center’s current location on the third floor of Reed Library is about 2,500 square feet. The basement of the new center is a comparatively cavernous 10,000 square feet of storage.

Add to that the 4,400-square-foot museum, 900-square-foot library and 116-seat lyceum, and there’s clearly a lot of room to fill, but Gulliford is undaunted.

"It will be easy to fill," he said.