There are three locations for the museum:

• Downtown

• North

• West

This article summarizes the Heard Museum Downtown location at 2301 N. Central Avenue (Central & Encanto), Phoenix, Arizona 85004, telephone: 602-252-8848

Hours of the museum are daily 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. If you decide to add these vacation ideas to your plans, keep in mind that the museum is closed New Year’s Day, Easter, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

General admission prices are:

• $10 for adults

• $9 for seniors (65+)

• $5 for students with a valid student ID

• $3 for children (6-12)

• Children under 6, Heard Museum members and American Indians are free

• Free Public Guided Tours daily at noon, 1:30 and 3:00 p.m.

The Heard Museum of Native Cultures and Art strive to educate the public about Native peoples’ heritage and living cultures and arts. The museum’s main focus is the peoples of the Southwest.

The Heard Museum in Phoenix Arizona was founded in 1929 in a small southwestern town and since has grown in size and stature to now become recognized internationally for the quality of its collections, its educational programming and its festivals. If you like to learn about the peoples of the Southwest, add the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona to your list of vacation ideas when your vacation time rolls around.

The Heard Museum is also home to the Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives, which is a comprehensive research facility. The library and archives contains extensive information about indigenous art and cultures from around the world as well as an unparalleled resource collection on more than 23,000 American Indian artists.

Exhibitions include:

• Cultural objects

• Fine art

• Jewelry

• Fashion

• Traditional and contemporary American Indian art

Exhibitions specific to the Heard Museum in Downtown Phoenix include:

• HOME: Native People in the Southwest: This is an ongoing exhibition that is $7.6 million 21,000-square-foot of the finest works from the museum’s permanent collection, which marks the culmination of the museum’s 75h anniversary as well as the beginning of a new signature experience for visitors.

• Draw Me a Picture: Steven Yazzie, Navajo artist, situates himself in a most enduring American West landscape: The Monument Valley. He creates urgent landscape drawings-in-motion that reclaim the iconic landscape from decades of Hollywood-inspired racist depictions of American Indians.

• Life in a Cold Place: Arctic Art from the Albrecht Collection: Exhibition examines the ways that Inuit artists depict their lives and survival in the Arctic through a selection of prints, drawings and sculpture.

• Sole Stories: American Indiana Footwear: Traces the history of shoes in American Indiana culture.

• Around the World: The Heard Museum Collection: The exhibition’s focus is upon more than 75 years of collecting and preserving Native art and culture in the Southwest and beyond.

• Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience: Explores the federally run boarding school system began in 1879 designed to assimilate, Americanize and “civilize” American Indian children. It is said that this groundbreaking, extremely powerful exhibition will you leave you “speechless.”

• Every Picture Tells a Story: This is an interactive, family-friendly exhibition exploring the meanings of designs and symbols depicted in American Indian artwork.

Key collection areas feature:

• Textiles

• Katsina dolls

• Pottery

• Jewelry

• Baskets

• Cradleboards

• Paintings

• Sculpture

• World cultures materials