Wyoming Arts Council

Forrest E. Mars, Jr., Building at the Brinton Museum opens June 15

Featured News | June 12, 2015

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The following story was featured on the Wyoming Public Radio web site on June 12. It’s by Micah Schweizer. You can read the entire piece by going here.

Here’s the story of how a museum nearly closed but instead reinvented itself with a brand new building and a major American Indian art collection. The new incarnation of the Brinton Museum in Big Horn opens to the public on Monday, June 15.

Driving up the dirt road that leads to the Brinton Memorial and the Brinton Museum, all that’s visible is the white ranch house peeking through the trees. It’s all rather subtle for a $15.8 million state of the art building. The new building isn’t even visible until one pulls into the parking lot. That’s because it’s buried in a hillside on a century-old 600-acre ranch at the foot of the Big Horn Mountains.

“By burying most of the building inside of the earth, the building would become part of the earth,” explains museum director and chief curator Ken Schuster.

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For Big Horn state representative Rosie Berger, the building and the [Native American] collection put the new Brinton Museum on the map.

“And truly we are now at the top of the game,” says Berger. “I think we have opportunities we don’t even know about yet. But the word’s going to get out, and we really will make Wyoming a destination for the art and cultural seekers of the nation—and the world, really.”

 

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