The MAC: Spokane's Window on the Inland Northwest
Near Spokane, Washington
The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, known as the MAC, began as the Spokane Historical Society in nineteen sixteen, founded by settlers determined to document the Inland Northwest while living memory still held. A donation of a private home in nineteen twenty-four gave the society its first exhibition space for rocks, minerals, pioneer artifacts, and Native objects.
A century later the MAC has grown into the largest cultural organization in the Inland Northwest, one of Washington's five Smithsonian affiliates. Its collection of Plateau Indian art and artifacts is billed as the largest in the world, part of more than one million objects in the museum's care, many representing the cultures of the Columbia Plateau peoples who have called this region home for thousands of years. The museum serves over one hundred thousand visitors a year at its campus in Spokane's Browne's Addition neighborhood.
