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The Barry & Peggy Goldwater Foundation, Arizona Highways and Salt River Project (SRP)  are proud to partner with Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, in presenting the museum’s first all-photography exhibition – “Photographs by Barry M. Goldwater: The Arizona Highways Collection”.  This exhibition is the premier public showing of this historic collection and will run through April 5th of 2020.  Sponsored by Charles F., Jennifer E., and John U. Sands, the exhibit brings the December 2018 edition of Arizona Highways magazine to life for locals and visitors alike and also features many of the Senator’s personal items.

Since its opening in January of 2015, Scottsdale’s Museum of the West has become a Smithsonian affiliate organization and is one of only eight affiliate partners in Arizona.  The museum is dedicated to telling exciting and compelling stories of the greater Western region to illuminate the past to enlighten the future.  The institution features regularly changing and permanent exhibits of Western and Native American art and artifacts, entertaining events and informative programs that bring the West’s heritage, culture and community to life.

Through the Lens of Barry Goldwater

This exhibition features prints made from Arizona Senator Barry M. Goldwater’s spectacular color slide collection, which in 1993 was generously donated to the Heard Museum by his son Michael Goldwater. This extraordinary and rare collection comprises nearly 1000 color slides and contains some of the earliest color landscape photographs of the Navajo and Hopi tribal lands, the state of Arizona, and geographical areas that have long disappeared since the creation of Lake Powell. Using primarily Kodachrome film introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935, Goldwater adopted the new technology and photographed and developed color slides for his personal pleasure as well as for lectures and publications. Visitors will travel along with a young Barry Goldwater and share in his wonder at the Grand Canyon during a sunlit snowfall and the power of a rainstorm over Monument Valley.

Also included is a rare showing of computer artist Robert Silvers’ photomosaic portrait of Barry Goldwater. Silvers utilized nearly a thousand of Goldwater’s images from the Heard Museum’s Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives collection to create a nearly life-sized image. These photographic memories underlie the rich life of Barry Goldwater as observer and adventurer and come together to let us marvel in the magic of this 21st-century art form.