Selling the Southwest Curators talk

Drawing from MNA’s Fine Art and Ethnography collections, Curator Alan Petersen tells the story of how two major corporations attracted the world to the Southwest using art and ingenuity. This talk is in conjunction with the exhibition "Selling the Southwest," which is on view at the Museum of Northern Arizona from January 2024 until January 2025.

During the first decades of the twentieth century, the marketing departments of the Santa Fe Railroad and the Fred Harvey Company created a sense of wonder and mystery about the American Southwest in order to attract tourists. The railroad gave tickets to well-known artists in exchange for paintings that were then used for marketing purposes; everything from travel posters and calendars, to railroad timetables. The Fred Harvey Company published educational materials on Southwestern cultures and sold volumes of Native American crafts. The collaborative marketing campaigns were masterfully executed and built upon the growing interest in a romanticized vision of the Southwest that was already being addressed and enhanced by artists and writers the first decade of the twentieth century.