Hansen Museum

Free Wi-Fi Hotspot in the Community Room!

Hours:

Monday - Friday:
9AM until Noon and 1PM until 4PM
Saturday:
9AM until Noon and 1 PM until 5PM
Sundays and Holidays:
1 PM until 5 PM
(Closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas
and New Years Day)

General Information
The Dane G. Hansen Memorial Plaza was conceived by the trustees of the Dane G. Hansen Foundation as a means of memorializing the Hansen Family in a way that would give Logan, Kansas, and the entire area, new cultural and social opportunities. The Foundation made a tremendous community improvement when it purchased and razed an entire square block of mostly unoccupied business buildings in downtown Logan to make room for the Memorial Plaza.

The five year project was completed in 1972 and deeded to the City of Logan. The Plaza was officially dedicated on April 10, 1973. The Plaza is a square block area, centered around a multipurpose building, and surrounded by beautiful landscaping. The building is designated into quadrants: one for the Trust and the Foundation; and one each for a Community Meeting Room, a Museum, and a Gallery. Designed by Kiene and Bradley of Topeka and built from pre-stressed concrete, the quadrants are divided by protruding sections of Neva Limestone, which was quarried near Junction City, Kansas. The building is fully carpeted and elegantly decorated, making it the finest structure of its type in the area.

The Plaza contains an all-purpose community room furnished with an organ, keyboard, a Kansas patchwork quilt from the Hansen Family, and paintings by Kansas artists. The Museum contains early American and foreign coins, European and Western guns, Mr. Hansen's office, the Hansen Family Biography, oriental art collected by Kate Hansen in Japan from 1907 to 1951, and art objects purchased by the Museum Association. The Museum also houses traveling exhibits and a monthly "Artist of the Month" exhibit.

Trustees of the Foundation have funded many projects which they felt met Mr. Hansen's intentions for the Foundation. Among these projects are: nursing and educational scholarships for students from Northwest Kansas, numerous cultural events, local and statewide educational programs and charitable projects, church building projects, and scouting. They paved the roads and installed a water system at the Logan Cemetery, provided funding for a local swimming pool and tennis courts, gave "seed money" for the construction of a low-cost housing project, built the Logan Medical Clinic, and support the Logan Nursing Home. The Foundation is one of the top contributing foundations in the State of Kansas.

Exhibition:

Gordon Parks: Crossroads
December 23, 2011 through February 5, 2012

"I picked up a camera because it was my choice of weapons against what I hated most about the universe: racism, intolerance, poverty. I could have just as easily picked up a knife or gun, like many of my childhood friends did . . . most of whom were murdered or put in prison . . . but I chose not to go that way. I felt that I could somehow subdue these evils by doing something beautiful that people recognize me by, and thus make a whole different life for myself. " --Gordon Parks

Parks was born in Fort, Scott, Kansas. In 1938 Parks purchased his first camera at a pawn shop. He pursued taking pictures with gusto and within months his probing portraits of African-American women were exhibited in the windows of the Eastman Kodak store in Minneapolis.

While Parks pursued numerous hard-hitting documentary assignments for Stryker, he also accepted commissions in fashion and glamour photography, initially for Midwestern department stores, and soon for Vogue and Glamour magazine. "The camera is not meant to just show misery," he explained. "You can show beauty with it; you can do a lot of things. You can show things you like about the universe, things you hate about the universe. It's capable of doing both."

In 1949 Parks became the first black staff photographer at Life magazine, where he would remain on the masthead for a quarter century. With his first two photo-essays for Life - on the gang wars of Harlem, and on the latest Paris collections - he announced his remarkable range, His intimate photo essays on the Black Panthers, the nascent Black Muslim movement, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death remain classics - "my sentiments lay in the heart of black fury sweeping the country," he later wrote - but equally classic were his extended photo-portraits of cultural icons as varied as Barbara Streisand, Langston Hughes, Alexander Calder, Ingrid Bergman, Duke Ellington and Muhammad Ali. "Success among whites never made Parks lose touch with black reality." Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography.

While Parks was alive he continued to challenge stereotypes and break through society's - and his own - barriers. In the process of this exploration, Parks blossomed into one of the 20th century's true Renaissance men. He authored four volumes of poetry. He helped found Essence magazine and served as its editorial director. In 1968 he became the first African-American to write, produce, direct, and score a major hollywood film, The Learning Tree, based on his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. Its success led to plum directorial assignments, most famously Shaft and its sequels, one of MGM's top-grossing film franchises of the 1970s. Parks also directed an autobiographical film for PBS, Moments Without Proper Names, as well as authoring four qutobiographical accounts - A Choice of Weapohns (1966), To Smile in Qutumn (1979), Voices in the Mirror(1990), and Half Past Autumn (1997) - the last of these being the catalog of a major retrospective organized by the Corcorn Gallery for Born beads.

The Gordon Parks: Crossroads features 45 memorable photographs drawn from all aspects of Parks' storied career.