New exhibit uses futuristic technology to give Cowboy museum visitors a feel for the past

When Pat Fitzgerald toured the blockbuster traveling exhibition "Immersive Van Gogh" during its late 2022 Oklahoma City stop, he didn't just see large-scale depictions of the iconic artist's masterworks like "Irises," "Sunflowers" and "The Starry Night."

Among the eye-catching projections, he also saw a vision of the future for the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, the venerable OKC landmark where he had recently been appointed president and CEO.

"This is going to change the way we look at the West, the way we see the West, and it will change the way that we engage with the West. ... This is going to leave a legacy for our museum," Fitzgerald said at the recent grand opening celebration for the National Cowboy Museum's new immersive exhibition "Find Your West."

Now open in The Cowboy's West Hallway, the floor-to-ceiling, projection-mapped permanent exhibit "Find Your West" is the first museum project for Lighthouse Immersive, a Toronto-based company that creates, produces and distributes "Immersive Van Gogh" and other digital immersive art experiences, including "Immersive Disney Animation."

"When we launched 'Immersive Van Gogh' ... we did it in 21 cities across America. In every city we went to, the press would ask us, 'Well, what about the museums?'" said Lighthouse Immersive co-founder Corey Ross.

"I thought, 'Wow, so why don't we start working directly with the museums?' So, we started to do some outreach to see who would be interested, and it was a challenge. Museums move slowly: They don't want to be the first to do anything; they don't necessarily have the space. ... But what you're seeing today is just the first part of what we're planning to do here."

What will people see in the OKC museum's new 'Find Your West' immersive exhibit?

A giant replica of a compass points visitors into the "Find Your West" exhibit, which indeed takes them west from the main lobby into the museum's galleries.

"We made a thing that is the entrance to the museum; it's also the exit of the museum, which is a challenging thing. So, we talked a lot about, 'This is not the main event.' ... It's really like a trailer, like a movie trailer," said David Korins, Emmy-winning creative director and principal designer of New York City-based Korins Studio.

"You make a trailer, saying, 'Here's a character, this is a crazy thing that's going to happen to them, we're not going to tell you what happens. You have to go watch the movie.' Same thing here: You start your journey to the West, we ask a bunch of big-idea questions ... and then you go into the hundreds of thousands of square feet of extraordinary artifacts and stories."

With his studio, Korins, who also has worked on projects like "Immersive Van Gogh," the Tony-winning musical "Hamilton" and 2016 Fox musical "Grease: Live!," collaborated with the Lighthouse Immersive team as well as The Cowboy's staff, which now includes the museum's own imagineer, Bob Miller, to create the set design for "Find Your West."

Boasting 27 projectors and 768 LED tiles made up of more than 23 million LED lights, the "Find Your West" exhibit boasts four vignettes: a covered wagon, a teepee, a set of barn doors and a rodeo chute.

Projections play over the entire 3,000-square-foot space, including these touchstones of real-life Western traditions. Images of a turtle and a bear dissolve into smoke that billows across the plains behind the teepee; a cowboy on a bucking bull bounds out of the chute, while another rodeo rider on a rowdy bronc makes his way back in; and the barn doors open onto a prairie dotted by longhorn cattle, bison and a distant windmill.

"We're really interested in telling the best version of the story that we have to tell, and in this instance, it felt like we never had a moment ever at the beginning in this where it was just going to be projections. It was always going to be more tactile ... with real built things," Korins told The Oklahoman.

"There was an added pressure to us, when you build things intentionally to scale in a museum, and they look like artifacts, but they are not, in fact, artifacts. There was a lot of trying to strike that balance of what feels really real and what feels successful scenographically."

Questions and facts about the origins of the cowboy's tools and skills, about the history of rodeo and about the diversity of Native American tribes fade in and out against the majestic scenery.

"There's really five things that had to work together in a very small space: The audio, which progresses as you move through; the lighting; the scenic, which they're incredible, these four scenic stations; but also the LED screens and projections. And we've never done all of that together. So, this was, fittingly, pioneering. So, this was a leap to try all those things together, and it's really working marvelously in this space," said Ross, while touring the exhibit during the grand opening.

The exhibit ends in a dazzling sunset before visitors pass into the museum's main galleries.

How does the new immersive exhibit fit in the museum's ongoing $40 million capital campaign?

Part of the museum's ongoing $40 million "Live the Code" capital campaign devised to improve and modernize the almost 60-year-old institution, the new state-of-the-art "Find Your West" exhibit was made possible through donations from the Harold Hamm Foundation, Continental Resources and Larry and Polly Nichols.

"One thing I like to do is travel, so I wind up going everywhere. And the first thing somebody'll ask is, 'Where are you from?' 'Well, I'm from Oklahoma City,' and I say it with a lot of pride. ... We do represent the West," said Hamm, the Oklahoma oilman who is founder and executive chairman of Continental Resources.

"I think of the technology that's embodied here, with this move into the new era ... and relating to the young people. We've got to tell these stories, and we've got to do it in a way that they get it."

Larry Nichols said it's exciting to see how the "Find Your West" creative team incorporated many of the museum's real artifacts, from iconic photographs to vivid paintings, into the projections that play across the exhibit walls.

"We have the best artifacts to tell the story of the West, but for a long time we've told the story in the same way we did 30, 40, 50 years ago. As we rejuvenate this museum, with exhibits like this, we'll tell the story in an engaging way so that it will attach to the hearts and souls and minds of young kids, of old people that come here," said Nichols, who is a member of the museum's board as well as the chairman of the capital campaign.

"This does a great job of introducing you to what this museum's about."

The Cowboy staffers plan to work again with Lighthouse Immersive to open an immersive theater experience in one of the museum's larger galleries in late 2025.

"Especially when we're doing the immersive shows in the gallery, once it's all mapped out and we get the grid system up, we can change the content very easily," Miller said.

"The hope is ... we'll run it for nine months, and then we'll have our 'Prix de West' art show. Then, the next nine months, it'll be a different story. That way, for the schoolkids and everybody coming back, they're seeing something different every year. And we're building those stories of the West."

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum debuts immersive exhibit