This $15.5 million wing of the Tacoma Art Museum will tell forgotten stories of the West
It’s been a decade since cowboys moved in to downtown Tacoma.
The Haub Wing at Tacoma Art Museum turned 10 years old this year. In that time, the museum has integrated a largely Southwest art collection with a museum that was, until then, focused on Pacific Northwest Art.
Once home to mostly bucolic and often romanticized scenes of the American West, the Haub Wing recently opened shows examining the overlooked stories of those who helped build the West.
In 2014, the $15.5 million wing opened to house the 250-piece Haub Family Collection of Western American Art. The Haub family funded most of the wing and provided an endowment along with donating their collection of art that includes works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran and dozens of others. Another 50 pieces are promised.
Southwest in the Northwest
An incongruous addition to TAM at the time, the collection seemed more fitting for a museum in Arizona or New Mexico. A decade on, its addition has not altered TAM’s mission, just added to it, TAM officials say. Ultimately, it reflects those who built it: a family with deep ties to Tacoma and Germany coupled with the German fascination with the American West.
“(The Haubs) have really strong roots in the Pacific Northwest, but they’re also collectors of this material,” said curatorial head Jessica Wilks. Among their many holdings, the billionaire Haub family have a home in Pierce County and a buffalo ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming where they have hosted rodeos.
TAM hasn’t lost sight of its dedication to Pacific Northwest art, said Andy Maus, the museum’s executive director.
“The artwork of the Pacific Northwest is the core of TAM, always has been,” Maus said. “It’s very well going to be into the future.”
In its decade-long addition to TAM, the Haub Collection has reframed the way the museum and its patrons view Pacific Northwest art in context with the West, Maus and Wilks said. That includes influences from Japan to Europe.
“There’s ways that organizations like ours have contextualized works with other works,” Maus said. “And so I think about the collection in that way.”
The Haub Collection
Works in the Haub Family Collection span 200 years and represent a variety of media.
Some 50 pieces are still in the possession of the Haub family, headed by matriarch Helga Haub. Her husband, Erivan Haub, died on March 6, 2018 at age 85. One month later on April 7, the couple’s eldest son and co-chairman of the family’s Tengelmann Group, Karl-Erivan Haub, went missing while skiing near the Matterhorn in Switzerland. He was declared legally dead in 2021. His brother Christian is now CEO of the company.
The $8.5 million endowment from the family combines with TAM’s annual donors and granters to support exhibitions, programs, collections care, staff and building operations related to the Haub collection, Maus said.
“The Haubs are just the most incredible donors ever,” Wilks said.
Maus said TAM and the Haubs maintain a strong connection and communicate frequently but they don’t tell TAM how to run the museum.
“They’re not curating shows,” Maus said. “They’re not telling, directing us what to do. The agreements that we have with them are really good, healthy, flexible agreements that allow us to care for and also utilize the collection in really interesting ways.”
Curators
The last several years have seen curatorial and executive changes at TAM. Currently, the museum has a curatorial staff of two along with Wilks and Maus, who also curates.
When TAM first began exhibiting the Haub Collection in 2014, they weren’t sure what the public response would be, Wilks said.
“But we’ve had just incredible support from the community,” she said. “Anytime we have the galleries closed down, we get emails and letters that say: ‘When are you bringing that back?’”
Current exhibition
For the next two years, visitors to the Haub Wing won’t be greeted by cowboys and Native Americans. Instead, they’ll see “Finding Home: Chinese American West” and “Blackness is…the Refusal to be Reduced.”
In “Finding Home,” the show focuses intensely on Tacoma.
The two shows use art to portray contributions to the West by those who didn’t get credit for it. Chinese laborers, for instance, were instrumental in building the transcontinental railroad. Later, they were expelled from some Western cities, most infamously from Tacoma.
The story of the West, officials point out, has often been one of displacement beginning with Native Americans, later the Chinese, and during World War II, Japanese citizens — even if they were American-born.
One painting shows an Asian cook in a cowboy camp. A piece in the “Blackness is…the Refusal to be Reduced” show highlights how iconic blue jeans were to the 1800s West whether they were worn by loggers in Washington, miners in Nevada or cowboys in Arizona. But it was Black Americans who were picking the cotton and indigo for the jeans.
“It’s an exciting moment for us to kind of think through,” Wilks said. “Whose voices are there and whose voices are not? What are myths about? What is the actual history?”
