Diorama gallery reopening set June 27 at Will Rogers Memorial

Jo Mora watercolor
Jo Mora is best known at the Will Rogers Memorial Museum for his dioramas of Will Rogers’ life. Peter Hiller, Jo Mora Trust Collection Curator, is seen here admiring a print of one of Mora’s Hopi Kachina watercolors. (Photo Courtesy Jo Mora Trust Collection)

 

WILL ROGERS MEMORIAL MUSEUM — Miniatures created in the 1940s, portraying the life of Will Rogers from his boyhood on an Indian Territory ranch to the crash in the icy waters of Alaska that claimed his life and that of pilot Wiley Post, have been relocated to a new gallery.

“A View Through The Life of Will Rogers” will be dedicated at 2 p.m., June 27, at the Claremore Will Rogers Memorial Museum.

All 13 of the Jo Mora dioramas will be displayed in a single room giving an overall view of his life, adventures and heritage as a Cherokee Indian.  “We’re excited to have together once again all 13 of Jo Mora’s superb, three-dimensional scenes from Will Rogers’ life, said Steve Gragert, Will Rogers Memorial Museums executive director. “The historical detail and artistry are phenomenal. No matter how many times a person studies them, something new comes to light.”

Peter Hiller, curator of the Jo Mora Trust Collection, will be in Claremore for the opening and will be guest speaker for a 2 p.m. dedication open to the public. Hiller and Gragert will tell about the exhibit — explaining the 13 eras of Will Rogers' life. A reception will follow a ribbon-cutting opening the exhibit to the public for the first time.

Dioramas, which originally were in a single room, in the past few years, have been relocated to various places in the Claremore museum and birthplace ranch. The new gallery was constructed and prepared by museum staff, under direction of Jennifer Holt, curator.

Hiller taught elementary and middle school art more than 30 years, the most recent 28 at All Saints’ Day School in Carmel, Calif.

He said he “comes to Oklahoma as he strives to bring the competent and diverse, yet largely unknown, artistic talents and accomplishments of Jo Mora to the attention of the American public.”

He began his latest career with a major exhibition of “Jo Mora Artist and Writer” at the Monterey Museum of Art in 1998. He has continued to exhibit the artwork of Mora in other venues including the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and The Monterey Maritime and History Museum in Monterey. He has written and published numerous articles about Mora’s accomplishments, including publishing “The Written Words of Jo Mora.”

The miniature reproductions are of still life, each with its own central theme or representative period. Everything is done to scale, one-inch to a foot. Mora told a newsman in 1941 “the greatest attention was given “to the diorama which shows Rogers riding along the main street of old Claremore with actual stores of the period reproduced in miniature.”