Until 2014, outside researchers had little access to the Gilcrease Museum Library & Archive, which held more than 100,000 rare books, documents, maps, and manuscripts in a less-than-ideal area on the lower level of the museum. That all changed when The University of Tulsa’s Helmerich Center for American Research, often shortened to “HCAR,” was built to exacting specifications.
The university has managed the city-owned museum for more than 15 years. Shortly after assuming stewardship of Gilcrease, the plan to better preserve and present the archives was put into action.
The $15 million Helmerich Center, constructed on Gilcrease’s grounds, includes state-of-the art climate control, fire suppression technology, tornado protection, and even electrochromic windows that can be darkened with the press of a button to shield fragile documents from sunlight. Before the declining museum building was torn down in 2022 to make way for a new Gilcrease, the two facilities were connected by an underground tunnel to allow the archives to be moved back and forth in total security.
With 25,000 square feet of space, however, HCAR provides more than just safe storage for irreplaceable pieces of history, including an early handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence. The Helmerich Center was always intended to encourage scholarship and teaching, as well as facilitate access to the archives.
“To this very day,” said William Smith, associate director of HCAR, “the center’s mission has been to care for the Gilcrease collections housed here, connect The University of Tulsa’s community to the collections, and make these accessible to the larger community of researchers.”
The center has pursued those goals through museum exhibitions, public programming, and scholarly events as well as offering visiting research grants and fellowships, Smith said.
HCAR’s founding director, Duane King, launched a series of special symposia that continued after he died in 2017. The events included the Art and Artistry of Plains Indians Communities, Cherokee Removal and Rebirth, the Life and Art of C.M. Russell, Gender and Identity in the American West, and the History of Colonialism in Mexico and the Americas.
Losing King presented the center with one of its biggest challenges. “His original vision and leadership helped make HCAR what it is today,” Smith said, “and his vast expertise and personal connections as an eminent scholar of Cherokee history and culture were deeply felt.”
In 2018, Susan Neal, then-executive director of Gilcrease Museum and HCAR, worked with UTulsa faculty and center staff to develop a new strategic plan. As a result, HCAR no longer relies on an invitation-based visiting research program tied to large, marquee events. Instead, the center opens worldwide fellowship applications every year and organizes smaller, more frequent scholarly programs to foster interaction between researchers at the museum, the university, and the wider academic community. UTulsa graduate and undergraduate students also take classes at HCAR, where they gain hands-on experience working with collections and are taught by Gilcrease staff.
“This pivot,” Smith said, “has helped HCAR become a dynamic force for bringing external and internal researchers into wide-ranging conversations about the stories of the Americas.”
The center has hosted six Duane H. King postdoctoral fellows since 2019 and kept its annual works-in-progress seminar program going, even through the pandemic when it shifted to a virtual format.
In 2023, HCAR inaugurated a new public event called the Cultures of the Americas Seminar, focusing on a different book each year dealing with a topic related to the history of the Americas and Gilcrease’s collections. The seminar invites the authors and two other scholars to discuss the book in front of a public audience.
Kristen Oertel, the Mary Frances Barnard chair in 19th-century American history at UTulsa and a founding partner of HCAR, described the seminars as “some of the most intellectually stimulating and successful programs the center has ever produced.”
And seeing the Helmerich Center’s mission fulfilled truly offers a new view of the term “American dream.”