When you think of the American West, what immediately springs to mind?

Your answer might include any number of things, but chances are they were influenced or shaped by popular representations in film, television, novels and other caricatures. A new exhibit at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art aims to challenge those perceptions, add back some necessary historical context and hold historic art and periods accountable.

“Knowing the West” a new traveling exhibition that celebrates the American West as a culturally rich, complex and reflective of diverse voices will open Sept. 14 and be on view until Jan. 27. Following its Bentonville run, it will travel to Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Fla. and North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.

Mindy Besaw, curator and director of research, fellowships and university partnerships at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, co-curated “Knowing the West” with Jami Powell, a citizen of the Osage Nation and associate director for curatorial affairs and curator of Indigenous art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College.

Besaw moved to Northwest Arkansas from Cody, Wy. and said she’s been thinking about the art of the west for a long time. A few years ago, she got the idea for this particular exhibition and called Powell to see if she would help her head it up.

Powell’s expertise is in Native North American art, specifically in material culture and historic collections of the plains region, as well as contemporary Native and Indigenous art.

“This project that has been challenging and exhausting in a really good way, it’s an exciting moment for us but also our field to kind of dig into these complicated questions around what American art means, and redefine it in different ways,” Powell said by Zoom. “To expand the conversations we’re having within museum spaces.”

The two curators joined forces with a seven member curatorial advisory council that was influential to shaping the themes of “Knowing the West.” Conversations with the council helped them think through the big ideas and create a checklist for what all the exhibition should hold. One member told the curators that there was no way around the myth of the west — that they should simply embrace it.

“Everybody knows the west to some extent,” from pop culture or books, Besaw said. “There are so many different ways of knowing the west, and we wanted to start there, to embrace all of the preconceived notions and then add on to that.”

What has bothered her to an extent is that those ideas are taken out of context.

Artists who journeyed to the west in the 1850s and ’60s would go back to New York and paint their perceptions of the west, or what audiences thought was the west. Albert Bierstadt, an American born in Germany, was one of those. He collected Native American art, likely from people he met at trading posts and brought them back to his studio, but the works were never presented in the context of Native American art.

When it came to Bierstadt’s own paintings, such as “Sierra Nevada Morning,” his landscapes tended only to include an animal or two but not any human figures, which gives the impression that he was either the only person, or one of the few people, in the places he traversed.

Besaw and Powell want to help visitors understand that when Bierstadt and others went to the west, they were engaging with a lot of people. They might have taken train rides for part of the journey and enlisted the help of others to get to these locations.

To draw more attention to the fact that these were not unpopulated spaces, the curators selected objects to pair with those more typical or well known works, like landscape paintings of Yosemite. Among them is a basket by Elizabeth Conrad Hickox, borrowed from Powell’s collection at the Hood Museum. It’s placed strategically, in front of Bierstadt’s painting.

As a result, “it’s difficult to see one without the others, without thinking about the people who lived in this space,” Besaw said. It’s a way to “repopulate those landscapes and create the context for even the way that (Bierstadt) saw the actual landscape … he wasn’t by himself in the wilderness.”

It’s beautiful to see these works in conversation, Powell said, because it forces the viewer to think about the other people who are living at the same time, spending time in the same landscapes and the different works that were produced from those places based on their own individual knowledge, experience, training and the relationship with the land.

“We wanted to disrupt the binary of cowboys and Indians and also the idea of the west as a masculine place that was built by men,” Powell said. “Women were vital to the creation of not only the west, but of the nation.”

More than 120 objects are housed within the exhibit, a collection that the pair calls rich and varied. It includes textiles, baskets, pottery, paintings, prints, bead work, sculptures and saddles. More than half of the works were made by women artists and half are by Native American artists. A total of 21 authors contributed to the exhibit’s catalog to showcase the different perspectives and pieces of relevance.

Despite the fact that most of the objects in “Knowing the West” were made more than 100 years ago, Besaw said they are “lively, full of life” today. Running throughout the exhibition are designs in bright purples, shades of rose and some unexpected, like one that’s “almost a tutti fruity.”

Whether considered in the special pairings and combinations on display, Besaw believes each of the 120 works stand well on their own and that it will leave visitors with a sense that we’re still part of these histories, that it has relevance to what’s happening today.

Powell said a goal of the exhibit is not to change someone’s mind but to add to their understanding of the west and American art in general.

“We can all come to an interaction with a work of art and have a unique experience that is based on our lives and our understandings of the world and our place within it,” she said. “That doesn’t take away from what the artist meant, but adds to it … and expands your own knowledge.”