From the new parking lot, visitors would stroll along a walkway designed by landscape architect Walter Hood to evoke a canyon lined by native trees.
Once inside the museum, visitors would move through a central hallway, 50 yards long, where displays would focus on the region's role as a crossroads where different cultures have met, sometimes violently.
The hope, Gray said, is that Convergence Hall, as the main corridor has been dubbed, would induce museum-goers to focus on "the convergence" of peoples that shaped today's West, and "not on the separateness."
The hallway would branch into separate galleries representing the two independent permanent collections that were brought together when the Autry subsumed them into a single institution in 2003: the Museum of the American West and the Southwest Museum of the American Indian.
The Southwest Museum's historic-landmark original building in Mount Washington remains closed for seismic strengthening; its full renovation depends on further fundraising by the Autry that is not included in the campaign for the Griffith Park facility.
Native American input
Gray said the planning process included "enormous outreach" to local and national Native Americans. A key message from those discussions, he said, was that the building and grounds should harmonize with their surroundings.
Paula Starr, executive director of the Southern California Indian Center, gave the Autry high marks for including Indians during the planning.
"We're always an afterthought in every other arena, and it's refreshing to have people who think of us first," Starr said.
Historians have debated the Spanish missions' treatment of native peoples and whether mission life brought improvements or hastened their decline.
But Paul Apodaca, a Chapman University sociology professor and former Bowers Museum curator of American Indian art who is of Navajo and Mexican descent, doubts that the Autry's architecture has bothered Native Americans.
"They don't have a negative gut reaction at the sight of missions," he said. "At every one, you'll find California Indians working as docents. They honor them, because their ancestors built them."
Randy Reinholz, a Choctaw Indian who since 1999 has been artistic director of the theater company Native Voices at the Autry, said he'd never heard complaints about the architectural style from the 200 to 300 Native American artists he works with each year. Nevertheless, said Reinholz, who doubles as director of the School of Theatre, Television and Film at San Diego State University, the Autry's proposed new look seems like an improvement.
"It has a contemporary feel," he said, "and I think it says that even though old ideas and history will be explored, they'll be explored in a new and contemporary context."
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mike.boehm@latimes.com
