Imagined Wests: Explaining the Holy Cross, Half Dome and Disney diorama at the Autry Museum

The Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles contains a collection of more than 600,000 pieces of art and cultural objects in an attempt to bring together the stories of all people of the American West.

Included in the collection is the first known painting of Mount of the Holy Cross, Eagle County’s highest peak, which was created by Thomas Moran in 1874.

The painting was the first color image of the Mount of the Holy Cross and, according to the Autry, Moran “knew when he painted Mountain of the Holy Cross that the natural formation would be interpreted as divine favor for western expansion, a central tenet of European-American social and religious thought.”

In recent years, the painting has inspired a portion of another exhibit at the Autry, a diorama titled “Matterhorn, Mount of the Holy Cross, and Half Dome Mountain mashup,” which places a miniature model of Mount of the Holy Cross next to Yosemite’s Half Dome and the man-made Matterhorn mountain at Disneyland.

The mashup was created in 2020 by artist Erica Honles-Martin, one of several miniature diorama pieces she created for Autry’s “Once Upon a Place” section of its Imagined Wests exhibit.

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It might seem quirky or irreverent to place the natural beauty of Holy Cross and Half Dome next to the man-made monstrosity of Disneyland’s Matterhorn attraction, but a lot of thought went into that juxtaposition, Honles-Martin said.

“These iconic landscapes that we think of when we think of the West … a little bit of it has some man-made quality to it,” Honles-Martin said.

With Half Dome, those man-made qualities are obvious in the rock stairs and post-mounted steel cables which allow thousands of hikers to reach the summit every year. But at Mount of the Holy Cross, the man-made elements are less tangible.

“With Mount of the Holy Cross, it’s that religious iconography that people place over the mountain face,” Honles-Martin said.

The Matterhorn at Disneyland then completes the picture by being a man-made mountain, constructed by Walt Disney’s imagineers after Disney viewed the Matterhorn peak from Switzerland while filming “Third Man on the Mountain” in 1958. Disney, in awe of the peak, sent a postcard to imagineer Vic Greene saying “Vic. Build This! Walt,” and the rest is history.

“It’s interesting, this idea of how we manufacture things, and how we create this illusion or this certain narrative,” Honles-Martin said. “We had a good dialogue about a lot of these things.”

Honles-Martin said Autry’s former associate director of exhibit design, Eugene Wyrick, was the visionary behind her diorama.

“He played a pretty big part in envisioning how some of these things would be talked about and portrayed,” she said.

Wyrick and Josh Garrett-Davis, who was the curator, worked together to enlist the help of Honles-Martin, who had a background in not just fine art, but set work and dioramas for films. She worked with layers of foam to build up the thickness of the landscape before carving out the mountains and the negative space and hard coating it with a plaster mixture.

During the summer of 2020, as she was creating the piece, Honles-Martin said she did a lot of hiking to get a better feel for the colors and textures she would use in her diorama. That summer, as the COVID-19 pandemic was in full effect, outdoor recreation was seeing renewed interest in the U.S.

“We would see so many people out on the trails as more people were taking up hiking and outdoor activities,” she said.

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Witnessing that explosion of outdoor activity and tourism gave new meaning to the work, she said, because the piece is more about people than the natural landscapes on which they were recreating.

“We need these visuals, sometimes, that it’s hard to encapsulate with words,” Honles-Martin said. “But visually, if you represent it and show it, it’s a lot more of a conversation piece.”