20 Fabulous & Fascinating Facts
About Central Arizona Museums
Here are a few reasons to visit Arizona’s great museums!
1. Arizona’s museums offer a spectacular array of exciting adventures for children. Kids of all ages will love the myriad rock displays at the Arizona Mining & Mineral Museum. If big trucks are your thing, there’s a life-size painting of a mine truck as well as a 13-foot diameter truck tire on display. Adults looking forward to the exciting monsoon storms will enjoy the fulgurite display, which features samples of sand fused by lightening when it struck the ground.
2. Speaking of big trucks, the Hall of Flame is the world’s largest museum of firefighting history and features more than 90 fully restored pieces of fire apparatus from 1725 to 1969 in five galleries.
3. If your child is fascinated with bugs, the Arizona Museum for Youth has a great array of the creepy crawly things – great and small – in its exhibit Jeepers Creepers: Bugs in Art. Plus, for the 5-and-under set, the museum’s ArtVille offers exciting adventures including a new bug room featuring books by Eric Carle.
4. From mammoths and mastodons to whales and dinosaurs, it’s a larger than life experience at the Mesa Southwest Museum, where they’re kicking off the Summer of Giants. The exhibit Tusks! Ice Age Mammoths and Mastodons will be on display all month in May, and Whales: The Inside Story opens May 14.
5. Five little monkeys hanging from the trees … that’s what kids will see – and more – in The Phoenix Zoo’s new Monkey Village. Families can get up close and personal with squirrel monkeys as they walk through the space where these adorable little critters roam free.
6. Fashion runways have nothing on the Phoenix Art Museum, which is featuring an exhibit about the iconic classic trench coat. Originally designed in the 1890s by Thomas Burberry for field sports, the trench coat was used by officers in the trenches during WWI – hence its name.
7. Attire also can be seen across town in Glendale, where the Glendale Arizona Historical Society is stepping back in time to that most special day with an exhibition of vintage wedding attire and accessories.
8. Visitors will find accessories galore at The Bead Museum, which is featuring the exhibit The Bead Trail: Trade Beads of the North American Frontier. All about trade beads from Europe and Asia and explores the astounding cultural and artistic changes these small objects created among Native peoples of North America.
9. See a variety of Native American artists up-close and personal at the Heard Museum, where they will be demonstrating every day through May 22. Or, you might want to hold out until May 22 for the opening of HOME: Native People in the Southwest, a new 18,000-square-foot signature experience with nearly 2,000 of the museum’s most prized masterpieces, sweeping landscapes, poetry and personal stories.
10. Journey to Arizona’s past at the Pueblo Grande Museum, which is celebrating its 75th Anniversary this year (as is the Heard Museum). The Pueblo Grande Museum is the first museum in the country to house a city archaeologist; in 1929, Odd Halseth became the first city archaeologist in the nation.
11. While the Phoenix metropolitan area is young compared to many eastern cities, there is a broad range of great historical museums to explore. In many cases, the buildings that house the museums have a fascinating history. One of those, the Scottsdale Historical Museum, was originally built as a two-room schoolhouse and later was used as Scottsdale’s city hall and a police station, complete with a holding cell in the basement.
12. Another museum that started out as a school is the Mesa Historical Museum, which originally was built as a school in 1913. The auditorium, which was built in the 1930s, is a bomb shelter.
13. Two additional museums are housed in what formerly were police stations. The Show Low Historical Society Museum used to be the old Show Low police station, and the Mesa Southwest Museum’s original 3,000-square-foot exhibition space was the former police department and city jail as well as the mayor’s office. Those same jail cells now serve as a history exhibit but remain in the same part of the building where they were in use until 1975.
14. And here’s another interesting building … the Casa Grande Valley Historical Society building was a church and a mortuary before becoming a museum.
15. Many early settlers in the Valley came for the warm, dry climate, which improved their lung ailments. The Cave Creek Museum boasts the last original tuberculosis cabin in Arizona, a building that was placed on the National Registry in 2001. Sunnyslope in far North Phoenix (now considered the central city) was a hub for treating TB patients. The Sunnyslope Historical Society is the 1953 Peoples Drug Store, which had the first prescription drive-thru window in Arizona.
16. The 1895 historic Rosson House Museum was and still is located on what was once part of the original Phoenix townsite (Block 14) during the late 1800s.
17. The ASU Art Museum has one of the nation’s best collections of American and British modern and contemporary ceramics, and it also houses the largest collection of 1990s Generation contemporary Cuban art outside of Cuba.
18. While most people don’t think of the airport as a place to see great art, the Phoenix Airport Museum is one of the largest airport museum programs in the United States. In Terminal 3, see 21 exciting contemporary ceramic pieces.
19. One of the Valley’s newest museums, the River of Time Museum in Fountain Hills, is home to one of the largest collections of Western photography from the 1800s to early 1900s.
20. Everyone knows that May means Mother’s Day, and the Shemer Art Center and Museum is celebrating Mom with a special exhibition about motherhood. Eleven artists have taken on the task of interpreting the theme in a variety of ways, viewpoints and forms.
