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As the Duke City celebrates the centennial of Route 66 this year, the sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ��� Museum is rolling out a series of exhibitions exploring the cultural impact of the route and the history of tourism in New Mexico more broadly.

The first exhibitions in the series — “High Desert Ballyhoo,” opening Saturday, April 4, and “Fred Harvey’s Route 66,” opening Saturday, April 11 — highlight two historical figures who had an outsized impact on the development of New Mexico’s tourist economy.

“High Desert Ballyhoo” focuses on Ward Hicks, a prominent sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ���-based advertiser who helped found the New Mexico State Tourist Bureau in the early 1930s, while “Fred Harvey’s Route 66” shows how Fred Harvey, the 19th century railroad magnate, established a model of cultural tourism in the Southwest that had a profound influence on Hicks and others.

Harvey marketed New Mexico as an exotic locale to railway travelers, coming mainly from the Northeast. He invited guests at his hotels — which included the Alvarado in sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ��� and La Fonda in Santa Fe — to go on excursions he called “Indian Detours,” which were advertised as authentic cultural experiences.

“His Indian Detour couriers were women who were highly trained to act as tour guides … and take people on three-day-long tours, visiting different Pueblos, historic sites … and other areas they may not have explored on their own,” Alicia Romero, exhibition curator and sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ��� Museum’s head curator, said. “These were the predecessors to the tourist companies that take people around sightseeing on big luxury buses.”

Harvey died in 1901, a quarter century before the creation of Route 66, but his Harvey House restaurant chain — arguably the first restaurant chain in the United States — was integral to the development of the route. Not only does the exhibition explore the early history of the Fred Harvey Company, it also shows how Harvey’s hotels and restaurants continued to thrive in the early 20th century as the age of rail travel gave way to the road trip era.

“We have some letters (in the exhibition) that are really sweet,” Romero said. “One letter from 1934, written on the Alvarado Hotel stationery … is from a visitor remarking on how they’re ready to get out of sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ���, but they’re having some car trouble … and they’re just making sure their loved ones know that they’re safe.”

Although “Fred Harvey’s Route 66” occupies one of the museum’s smallest gallery spaces, it is packed with about 60 rarely-seen documents and ephemera from the museum’s archive, including postcards, pamphlets, maps and menus. Many of the objects show how Harvey reinterpreted and packaged New Mexican culture.

“It’s interesting to see how Fred Harvey was a very early promoter of the local culture, manufactured in such a way that it would be palatable to tourists outside of New Mexico,” Romero said.

“High Desert Ballyhoo,” curated by sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ��� Museum’s curator of digital collections, Jillian Hartke, picks up where “Fred Harvey’s Route 66” leaves off. It consists of 27 staged photographs made by the Ward Hicks Advertising Agency from the 1930s through the 1950s. These images were used in magazine advertisements, direct mail promotions and brochures as part of a long-running, state government-sponsored tourism campaign that used the phrase “Land of Enchantment” decades before it became New Mexico’s official state nickname.

“The Ward Hicks Advertising Agency sold ‘the Land of Enchantment’ for about 30 years,” Hartke said.

Hartke chose the 27 photographs in the show from thousands of Hicks Agency photographs in the museum’s archives.

“The pictures on view show what mid-20th century advertising looked like. They are all staged photographs. And they’re a little bit absurd when you look at them now, thinking that this is the expectation that was being given to tourists outside of New Mexico of things they would be able to see and experience here,” Hartke said. “We have pictures of somebody panning for gold. There’s a lot of cowboys and even covered wagons. These are the stereotypes that the Ward Hicks Advertising Agency and the New Mexico State Tourist Bureau decided Americans wanted.”

Because this tourism campaign was funded by a state gasoline tax, the goal was to keep people in the state for as long as possible.

“What they really needed was for all of these people to leave Route 66 and do scenic drives throughout the state, because the more times they might refuel, the more money would come back into funding this tourism campaign,” Hartke said. “If they just stayed on the route, they’d be out of the state and refueling in the next state. … So, the photographs that we’re showing come from all over the state.”

To that end, Hicks promoted cultural tourism much as Harvey had.

“There’s a picture of people from Taos Pueblo in ceremonial headdresses, christening a locomotive. It’s strange. … They were very much trying to sell New Mexico and the people here as strange and exotic or romantic,” Hartke said. “They hearkened back a lot to the romance of Old Spain … and really tried to lean into Hollywood and the popularity of Westerns on television.”

The agency’s images were meant to be convincing fictions, but their illusory, constructed nature reveals itself in the details, Hartke said.

“In one picture of a traditional 1950s nuclear family, there’s a dad who’s fishing in a stream, and his young teenage son is bringing some fish over to his mother, who’s going to put the fish into this cast iron pan that she’s got over what should be a campfire. But there’s no fire,” Hartke said. “It’s a dream. It’s an illusion.”

Hartke created a 12-track Spotify playlist, accessible by a QR code on the wall, to accompany the exhibition.

“It includes things like the advertising jingle, ‘See the U.S.A. in Your Chevrolet,’ and a public service announcement called ‘Duck and Cover’ (used in nuclear weapons drills at schools) … to set the mood of what the American public was experiencing at the same time that Ward Hicks was trying to attract them out here to New Mexico,” Hartke said. “My hope is that it helps create a mood for the show.”

Both exhibitions explore Route 66 from a local perspective, showing how New Mexico was sold to outsiders across generations.

“These shows were motivated by this really important centennial year of Route 66,” Romero said. “So, we wanted to offer different perspectives on what Route 66 means, not just for the country, but specifically for the state and, on a much more local scale, for our city.”

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the sa���ʴ�ý������ҳ���. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at .