Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture
Near Spokane, Washington
The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, known locally as the MAC, traces its roots to nineteen sixteen when local citizens founded the Eastern Washington Historical Society. The institution grew steadily until nineteen sixty, when the Cheney Cowles Memorial Museum opened as a dedicated exhibition hall. In two thousand one it was renamed the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, and today it stands as the oldest and largest cultural organization in the Inland Northwest.
Its collection spans eastern Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana, and it holds more than one million objects. Most remarkably, its collection of Plateau Indian art and artifacts is described by the museum as the largest in the world, preserving the cultural heritage of the Columbia Plateau peoples who lived here for thousands of years before European contact.
