Drawn from the unparalleled collection of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo., Go West! features major works of art and important artifacts including paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs, frontier firearms and objects from Native American cultures that showcase the exploration and settlement of the American West.
Through these objects, the exhibition highlights the ways visual images and stories of explorers and legendary western celebrities such as Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull continue to inform American identity and character today.
Highlights from the exhibition include:
- Artwork created for Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show, including posters, photographs and paintings of Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull
- More than a dozen majestic landscape paintings, including some of the earliest painted representations of the American West by Albert Bierstadt and representations of America's first National Park by Thomas "Yellowstone" Moran
- Paintings and sculptures by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell
- Recreational frontier firearms and the advertisements that promoted them
- Objects for work, play and war crafted by members of Plains tribes, including a deer hide and porcupine quill war bonnet, a toy cradle and exquisitely beaded deer hide moccasins
- Mammoth plate photographs produced during the construction of the transcontinental railroads in the late 19th century by survey photographers such as William Henry Jackson
The exhibition begins with early 19th-century representations of the West made by the artist-explorers who traveled with government surveyors to map the continent. Complementing these representational artworks are objects made by Sioux, Kiowa and other Native American tribe members who interacted with the earliest frontier settlers.
Moving into the early 20th century, Go West! demonstrates how these early representations and objects gave way to widespread perceptions of the West. Paintings and sculptures by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell portray so-called cowboy and Indian dramas, and populist paintings and advertisements for recreational firearms highlight the way in which the West became known as America's playground.
America's growing romance with the West in the 20th century can be attributed, in part, to the theatrics of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West. Go West! includes a focus gallery that examines the extraordinary union of popular culture and history in the Wild West show and the art that the shows inspired.
