The Autry Museum of the American West is helping communities across the West identify and preserve items of historical and cultural significance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Starting April 22, the Autry is launching its Collecting Community History: A Regional Collections Initiative of Exploration and Preservation. It is the first in a series of efforts to support communities in the West collect, catalogue, and preserve moments of history—past and present.

They invite you to share an aspect of your creative practices and ways of staying connected during this time, such as journal entries, recipes, and pictures of face masks during this quarantine. Particular objects of interest include face masks, photographs, and recipes. They will be highlighting some of these different objects, images, and experiences on their blog, The Autry Files.  In the case of photographs of physical objects, please note that—at some point in the future—they may get in touch to see if you would be interested in donating the objects to their collections.