The Paris News

IDABEL, Okla. – Those wanting an art and culture fix need travel no farther than the Museum of the Red River.

Tucked away off the beaten path, the museum has grown exponentially since its inception in 1975. It now consists of 33,000 square feet featuring mainly Caddo and Choctaw archeological artifacts, Precolumbian artifacts from Middle and South America and native archeological arts and crafts from the Americas, both historic and contemporary.

Because of the location, director Henry Hoy said visitors are primarily from the Oklahoma/Texas area, although the museum is well-known across the United States.

“We’re actually much better known outside our immediate area,” Hoy said. “Unfortunately, because it’s Idabel, we’re not really a destination. People from California are not going to come out here just to see the museum. They might drop in on their way to see something else. Our local population, we do our best to get them interested and at least we offer them the opportunities to learn. We work with the schools and things like that.”

The museum experience offers something for all ages. Rooms of fascinating artifacts are on display and for children, hands-on activities are available. It is easy to be immersed in the history and art filling the building.

The original museum in 1975 was only about 2,000 square feet. In 2000, a big portion of the museum was constructed, and in 2005, another wing, the lobby area and a classroom were added. Another 12,000 square-foot addition was completed earlier this year, which serves as a conference and classroom center for the community in addition to serving museum needs.

“We’re now at 33,000 square feet, nearly as big as the hospital,” Hoy said.

“The founding collection and the major focus of the museum is Native American art and archeology,” Hoy said. “We did start out as a regional archeology museum. The basis for the museum was really in the early ‘70s when the government began giving out a lot of money for art and archeology. They tied archeological projects with major federally-funded construction projects.”

The plentiful water in the Oklahoma area made it a popular excavation area, but the artifacts were not excavated by Oklahomans, and therefore did not stay here. Hoy said a group of locals got together in the interest of seeing some of the artifacts kept in the area.

Instead of the government having to contract with surrounding colleges for excavation work, the museum became a contractor until about 1985. When the contractor operation wound down, the museum’s founders starting collecting ethnographic art, and the collection bloomed from local and the southeast to the southern plains, the northern plains and beyond.

“What happened was by the mid-‘90s, this museum collection actually had more things from other parts of the Americas,” Hoy said. “About 80 percent of our collections are from the Americas – north, south, from prehistoric to contemporary, as we collect what we call contemporary interpretations of traditional craft. We have historic material, but we also have contemporary material.”

The director said the museum is up to 18,000 objects in its collection, and as a result, the museum is set up in themes. Pieces are changed out regularly to give viewers something new to see.

One area in the gallery is the thematic gallery, where the museum hosts about six shows a year, Hoy said.

Most of the year the gallery hosts historical pieces, but not always.

“Being the largest exhibit facility for 150 miles in any direction, we have this responsibility as an art museum — we do ethnographic art, that’s our interest — but in terms of exhibition, once a year we also do a modern, contemporary art show just to provide that opportunity for contemporary artists, but also for our visitors, once a year they get to see that art,” Hoy said.

Dominating the front part of the museum and always a child favorite is the Acrocanthosaurus atokensis skeleton replica. In 1983 in McCurtain County about 12 miles from the museum, amateur paleontologists uncovered the dinosaur skull, nearly all the teeth and about 50 percent of the skeleton – unheard of for this particular dinosaur. After years of excavation, the skeleton was sent to a research institution for preservation and research. The Acrocanthosaurus atokensis is now the Oklahoma state dinosaur.

“For a single exhibit, it’s probably our most popular,” Hoy said.

Surrounding the dinosaur skeleton is a fossil exhibit featuring fossils found within the Idabel city limits, Hoy said.

The director said the museum hosts approximately 5,000 school children each year in organized groups from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana.

The museum receives collections and donations from individuals all over the United States, and the staff of six works steadily to keep the museum up and running while cataloguing and preparing new exhibits and handling the influx of artifacts the museum receives regularly.

At any given time, only 2 percent of the museum’s collection is on display. Hoy said exhibits are constantly being changed, so frequent visits should always bring something new for the museum-goer.

The storage facilities for the museum are extensive and the objects are meticulously catalogued and organized. Glass windows allow visitors to see how the pieces not on display are stored.

The newest wing of the building, the Non-Americas section of the building, as Hoy called it, is the Mary H. Herron Building, which sports classrooms for school groups traveling to the museum and as a space for the community to rent. The building also has a large conference room — a large space that is hard to find elsewhere in McCurtain County.

Hoy said the museum is about out of expansion space, but is planning to build a museum park to be completed sometime in the next year or two.

Visitors who can’t make it out to the museum still have an opportunity to see its extensive collection. The museum Web site, www.museumoftheredriver.org, has an extensive collection of pictures and information available for viewing.

The museum is located at 812 Lincoln Road in Idabel. Admission to the museum is free and hours of operation are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.

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