Art and soul: Museum keeps LC’s heart of history, art repeating

Published 8:32 am Thursday, July 31, 2025

Ashley Royer, interim director of the Imperial Calcasieu Museum, puts the art in he(art). She thrives on the enrichment it brings her life and wants to pass on that experience to each patron who walks through the museum’s doors.

“I love talking about art and teaching history,” Royer told members of the Kiwanis Club of Lake Charles recently. “We get a lot of students who, when they come through and hear something, their eyes sparkle. Stories are impactful, they encourage, they strike imagination but they also open out-of-the box thinking and creativity.”

Over the school calendar year of 2024-25, Royer said the museum hosted more than 560 field trips — made up of both school classes and visitors from retirement home outings.

The museum also impacted 648 artists during that same time period. The organization works daily to showcase the talent of local, national and international artists while providing the seat of historic heirlooms and documents from across the span of the city’s history.

“We’ve been working hard, not only in our education and our arts but also in spreading the good word about our history,” Royer said. “It doesn’t seem like there is enough appreciation for our humanities. It slips away very easily.”

To prevent that from happening, one of the newer programs the museum team has launched is the Historical Walking Tours.

“We learned very quickly not to do them at 2 p.m.,” Royer said with a laugh. “We have a thing for the heat so the next ones will all be at 9 in the morning.”

The tours —led by Anna Alamond, the museum’s creative program manager —encompass downtown Lake Charles and tales of the city’s early pioneers, architecture, the devastating toll of the Great Fire of 1910, and how residents rose from the ashes to rebuild and thrive.

In the fall, six haunted candlelit tours will be added.

“Haunted history, which is one of my favorite exhibits, is the best excuse to talk about history with people,” Royer said. “People come in the door with the tales of hauntedness and then we teach them history.”

The museum is also hosting the “El Nuevo Constante: Shipwrecked” exhibit which features never-before-displayed artifacts from the 1776 wreckage of the merchant ship that crashed off the coast of Cameron Parish during a hurricane.

 “Right now you can see artifacts from that wreckage and you can see the different natural dye they had onboard and some of the ‘allegedly illegally’ untaxed metal signets,” she said.

The exhibit is on display through Aug. 9. It will be followed by “Seeing Nature, Through Eyes Open Wide” by Sue Zimmerman Aug. 21-Oct. 25; then “Picture the Power: A Project of the Power Coalition Arts Framework”Sept. 11- Oct. 9; and then “After the Eye: The Wake of Hurricane Laura” featuring the photography of Chad Moreno Nov. 6-Jan. 3, 2026.

“Really great things are happening at the museum,” Royer said. “I’m really excited.”

Royer, who has been serving as interim director for eight months, said though the museum is a small nonprofit, they are trying to make a big impact on the community.