Becoming the Roswell Museum and Art Center
The arrangement between the FAP and the A&H Society had enabled the Roswell Museum to provide a variety of exhibitions and programs to its visitors, but it also caused tension between federal staff and local leadership due to differing expectations for the museum. While the FAP emphasized classes and rotating art exhibitions, local leaders wanted to focus on archaeological materials. As early as 1938, the Roswell Museum’s sponsors expressed concern over the FAP’s focus on art exhibits at the expense of historical and archaeological ones, and investigated a potential partnership with the Museum of New Mexico to bring more historical materials to Roswell.
Tensions became more pronounced during the 1940s, when the federal government shifted the focus of community art centers toward serving enlisted troops. Art centers became known as Service Centers, and began hosting exhibitions that addressed the Red Cross and other wartime interests in addition to art. At the Roswell Museum, the basement workshop was converted into a classroom for soldiers, and hours were adjusted to accommodate troops training at the Roswell Army Airfield. While other plans were in progress to enhance the Roswell Museum’s wartime activities, these were never implemented. By July 1942, the Roswell Museum’s sponsors decided to end their affiliation with the federal government and run the center themselves. The museum returned its FAP equipment to Santa Fe at the end of the year, and remaining staff assigned new positions with other projects. After five years of operating under the auspices of the federal government, the Roswell Museum had become a municipal institution.
The outcome of the Roswell Museum’s separation from the FAP was ultimately positive. By becoming a municipal institution, it fulfilled the long-term objective of the Community Art Center project, which was to have local communities assume control of these institutions. The Roswell Museum’s transition into a city department also secured its future as a cultural institution. With US involvement in World War II well underway by 1942, the WPA was no longer considered necessary to the economic recovery of the United States. It officially ended its operations in June 1943, and the art centers that still depended on it for funding and staffing were closed. Although the Roswell Museum scaled back its operations due to wartime priorities and a reliance on volunteer staff, it remained open, hosting regional traveling exhibitions and providing arts access to troops training at the Roswell Army Air Field.
A series of donors reenergized the Museum during the late 1940s. Donald Winston, a petroleum businessman and former resident of Roswell, instigated a renewed interest in collecting when he offered a set of Peter Hurd’s lithographs to the museum. Together with his brother, Frederick Winston, and business partner, geologist Samuel Marshall, Winston established the museum’s collection of New Mexican modern art, donating works by Peter Hurd, Henriette Wyeth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and others. In 1949, Esther Goddard, widow and collaborator of pioneering rocket scientist Robert H. Goddard, offered her late husband’s launch tower to the museum, instigating the Goddard collection. Rogers Aston, a petroleum businessman and bronze sculptor, created the Rogers Aston Collection of the American West, while Donald B. Anderson, another oil businessman and artist, would strengthen the museum’s contemporary art holdings and establish the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program in the 1960s. To properly house these burgeoning collections, the museum began expanding its gallery spaces. It also started to professionalize its staff, with its first director being none other than Thomas Messer, later director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Today, the Roswell Museum’s collections include more than 8,000 objects, and its education spaces encompass classrooms, an extensive ceramics studio, and the Goddard Planetarium.
The Roswell Museum and Art Center has evolved dramatically since 1937. Yet throughout its history, it has remained committed to the education-based ideals of the FAP. While the ways in the museum engages the public have changed, enriching southeast New Mexico through art and history remains a core objective. By thriving as a community-minded cultural institution, the Roswell Museum and Art Center continues to recognize its WPA origins.
