American Indian Cultural Center & Museum update by the Oklahoma Gazette
Construction is set to resume on the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum later this year. A long-delayed museum will resume construction this year.
By Miguel Rios:
https://www.okgazette.com/oklahoma/center-staged/Content?oid=5406462 The total construction budget is $37 million, Wilson said. The interiors of the building have not been constructed and some of the exteriors remain unfinished, so ADG is looking for companies that can fully complete the facility.
Located at the crossroads of America, where four interstate highways intersect, the American Indian Cultural Center and Museum is expected to be a world-class facility with hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
The building was designed nearly 20 years ago, so Pepper Henry and his team looked at the design and made changes to modernize the facility and make it more efficient.
“We took a little time to kind of refresh the interior and rearrange some things to make the user experience much better and to help us on the operational side,” he said.
Lighting systems were upgraded to LED lights, phone booths were removed and replaced with water bottle filler stations, and all major exhibits were moved to one area.
The Mezzanine Level gallery will be for changing and touring exhibitions. The first exhibition will be a 10-year loan from the Smithsonian Institution, which will essentially serve as a time capsule of 100-year-old native items.
“This will be the most important project I’ll work on in my professional career because I’m a member of one of the tribes here in Oklahoma. I’m an enrolled member of the Kaw Nation; I’m also Muscogee Creek. Every one of us that works here is an enrolled member of a tribe in Oklahoma and this means so much to us because we’re telling our story,” he said. “I’ll never have an experience like this anywhere else where this means so much personally.”
Construction on the cultural center is set to resume sometime around March.
