page_title: Bowers Museum
section_title: Collections
hierarchical_section_title: Bowers Museum / Collections
caption_attribution_description: English: Basket, Cahuilla, California
context_page_description: The Bowers Museum is an art museum located in Orange County, California. The museum's permanent collection includes more than 100,000 objects, and features notable strengths in the areas of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, Native American art, the art of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, and California plein-air painting. The Bowers organizes and hosts special exhibitions from institutions throughout the world, and travels exhibitions nationally and internationally. The museum has a second campus two blocks south of the main site, Kidseum, a children's museum with a focus on art and archaeology. The Bowers Museum and Kidseum are located in Santa Ana 6.4 km south of Disneyland.
context_section_description: "Spirits and Headhunters: Art of the Pacific Islands" highlights masterworks from the three cultural regions of Oceania: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Particular focus is placed on New Guinea, and the rich artistic traditions infused into daily and ritual life. Included are larger-than-life masks, finely crafted feast bowls, objects associated with the secretive Sepik River men's house, shell and feather currency, magic figures and tools of the shaman, objects related to seagoing trade routes, personal adornments, and weapons of warfare. The Bowers’ collection includes art and artifacts from many of the Pacific Islands.
  "Ancient Arts of China: A 5000 Year Legacy" features nearly 75 sets of objects from the Neolithic period (c. 3000 B.C.) to the Qing dynasty (AD 1644–1911). It is drawn from the Bowers Museum's permanent holdings, plus a small number of loans from private collections, and curated by the Shanghai Museum. The works portray the evolution of Chinese technology, art, and culture, and showcase examples of bronze vessels, mirrors, polychrome potteries, sculptures, porcelains, paintings, ivory carvings, and robes. Art from China and Japan make up the majority of the Bowers’ collection of Asian art and artifacts.
  "California Legacies: Missions and Ranchos, 1768-1848" features objects related to three historical eras: the settlement of Alta California through Spanish land grants, life at the California Missions, and the wealth and lifestyles of the first families who flourished under Mexico`s rule of the Ranchos of California.
  "Ceramics of Western Mexico" focuses on Pre-Columbian art from the western Mexican states of Colima, Nayarit, and Jalisco, with a particular focus on West Mexican shaft tombs and the cultures who used this means of burying their dead. A selection of the ceramic figures placed inside shaft tombs to accompany the deceased in the afterlife is on display. The exhibition also includes objects depicting imagery from daily life that show the intensity of West Mexican figurative work and that are naturalistic in form like the famously plump Colima dogs. The Bowers’ collection consists almost entirely of pottery, with some textile, stone and metal pieces. This collection is strongest in sculpture from the ancient cultures of West Mexico.
  "California Bounty: Image and Identity, 1850-1930" examines California's visual history, shaped by a unique mixture of Mexican and Anglo traditions as well as the state's position on the Pacific Rim. The exhibition shows how paintings of California's land, people, fruits, and flowers reflect the state's bounty and the massive advertising campaign by real estate developers, citrus growers, the railroads, and other boosters to bring people out West. Highlights of the painting collection are a group of forty works by William and Alberta McCloskey and California plein air paintings.
  "First Californians" is an extensive look at the indigenous peoples of California's art and artifacts from the collection, demonstrating the culture and history of the Southern California Coastal Indians. It explores the ways Indians of the region interacted with their environment for food, clothing, adornment, and religion. The Bowers Museum's collection is strongest in the cultures of the west and southwest but does represent native cultures from across the US. Objects in the collection include basketry, pottery, beadwork, stone and shell tools, weapons, and jewelry. These objects range in age from pre-historic to contemporary.
  The Historic and Decorative Arts Collections were the first focuses of the museum. This varied collection includes historic costumes, military uniforms and textiles, furniture, dolls and toys, tools, and house wares, many of which were collected from the founding families of Orange County. The Orange County history collection contains historic newspapers, magazines and other publications, as well as photographs, art, and objects relating to the early days of Orange County. Highlights of this collection include objects relating to Madame Helena Modjeska and memo
caption: Cahuilla Basket, c. 1900
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