Palm Springs Desert Museum

About this property

The Palm Springs Art Museum (formerly the Palm Springs Desert Museum) is a visual and performing arts institution with several locations in the Coachella Valley, in Riverside County, California, United States, founded in 1938. PSAM has been focused on design and contemporary art since 2004. PSAM houses an art museum and an Architecture and Design Center in Palm Springs, California, along with the Faye Sarkowsky Sculpture Garden at a satellite location in Palm Desert. 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 10,000-square-foot (930 m2) 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 75,000-square-foot (7,000 m2) 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. Art: contemporary art, sculpture, studio art glass, and architecture archives

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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