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Essential West Magazine
Exploring Art, Literature, History, Museums, Lifestyle, and Cultures of the West
It amazes me that four letters - W-E-S-T - have the ability to evoke an instantaneous emotional image. Simply the act of reading these four letters has caused you to form a narrative of your west.
Can the West be distilled to its essence - a simple direction or region? I believe not; it is a deeper dive of consciousness. How America sees itself and the world defines us. Diverse cultures, strong individualism, open spaces, and raw natural beauty marinated in a roughshod history have formed this region’s unique milieu.
Our online magazine’s primary focus is to feature relevant topics in art, literature, history, museums, lifestyle, and culture; lofty goals for any publication. No single magazine can be the beckon of all things western; it is a diverse, evolving paradigm that cannot be pigeonholed. As the publisher, I hope to be the buffalo that grazes the wide expanse of western sensibility and relay to you a glimpse of how I perceive our Essential West.
- Mark Sublette
Featured Article
Rahim Fortune's Photographs Defy Categorization
Photographer Rahim Fortune (b. 1994) demonstrates the futility of categorization. In multi-cultural contemporary America and the art world. African American father. Native American mother. He’s an enrolled member of Chickasaw Nation. He split time growing up between Oklahoma and Texas. He considers home the 7-hour stretch of Interstate 35 between the Texas Hill Country around Austin and Oklahoma...
Carl Rungius, Wildlife Painter and Modern Art Master
I came to the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, WY looking for Carl Rungius. I came away believing he’s not merely the finest painter of North American wildlife ever, hardly a “hot take,” but more than that, a master of Modern art, unsurpassed in his genre and in a league with America’s great representational painters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, the Ashcan School, the Taos Society of Art artists, Georgia O’Keeffe. The German born Rungius (1869–1959) was first and foremost a wildlife artist, true. But the landscapes...
Mother and Daughter Nora and Eliza Naranjo Morse in Creative Harmony
Nora Naranjo Morse (b. 1953) and her daughter Eliza (b. 1980) have been collaborating as artists since the younger could walk, talk, and hold a pencil. “Eliza was four and I was traveling through Denmark and Germany, and I remember playing ‘Pass It’ with her,” Nora Naranjo Morse recalls. “It was basically a piece of paper and pencil. I’d draw a line and pass it over to Eliza, and so we’d go back and forth. We're still doing it.” The pair’s ‘Pass It’ creations are no longer limited to scrapbooks and refrigerator display, they are on view in museums now,...
Indigenous Fire Practices Explored Through Art in Exhibition on View in Los Angeles
The deadly Eaton wildfire began on January 7, 2025, raging uncontrollably to consume chunks of Pasadena and Altadena. As it was dying out, “Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art” was opening – January 22 – at the Fowler Museum at UCLA 25 miles west. The exhibition offering insights into Indigenous fire stewardship, ecological resilience, and climate change had been in the works for years. The Eaton wildfire, likewise, was no spontaneous occurrence. Its roots go back even further, to decades and centuries old colonial fire suppression beliefs and behaviors imported to Southern California. Those practices weren’t the reason...
Jody Folwell: Pueblo Pottery Revolutionary
Pueblo pottery has no equivalent in white culture or society. To Pueblo people, their pottery is functional, artistic, decorative, familial, and spiritual. It is teacher, friend, relative, ancestor. Pueblo pots tell stories and sing. Pottery permeates the lives of Pueblo people. No separation exists between the clay–the earth–and the maker. The pot and the potter are not merely connected, they are the same, in a different form. I write this as a white person. An outsider only introduced to Pueblo pottery in 2022. Since then, I’ve been able to regularly observe it, write about it, interview many of its legendary...
Sheila Nadimi Photographs of Student Murals Inside Intermountain Intertribal Indian School
When Sheila Nadimi moved to Logan, UT from Canada in 1991, the surroundings looked mostly familiar. Mountains, trees, churches, houses. One feature of the landscape, however, did not. “I saw those buildings, and they were not in my repertoire,” Nadimi remembers. “I'd never encountered architecture like that. They were also boarded up, so they were silent in a way.” “Those buildings” were the 27 structures comprising what was first the Bushnell Military Hospital before it was converted into the Intermountain Indian School opened in 1950. Originally populated solely by Diné (Navajo) children, in 1974, Intermountain began welcoming students from across...
A Contemporary Photographer's Response to Edward Weston
Two love stories separated by 80 years. Two photographers. Two models. Kelli Connell (b. 1974) brings them together during “Kelli Connell: Pictures for Charis,” an exhibition on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where admission is free, through May 25, 2025. Charis (pronounced CARE-iss) is Charis Wilson (1914–2009). As is often the case for women in art history with famous partners, Wilson’s contributions as writer, model, champion, and right hand woman have generally been reduced to that of muse. Research Wilson online and nearly every story, including her obituary, which ran in The New York Times, the Los Angeles...
Ya La'ford's Abstract Vision of Western Landscapes
Two years stuck at home during the COVID 19 pandemic had artist Ya La’ford (b. 1979) itching to return to her life of travel. When Ogden Contemporary Arts in Ogden, UT, an exhibition space and non-profit arts advocacy organization, contacted her with an offer to visit and participate in its artist-in-residence program in 2022, she was all about it. Her husband, not so much. “Why would we ever go to Utah,” La’ford remembers him asking. “What's there to see and why would you live there?” La’ford is a first generation American of Jamaican descent born in the Bronx who lives...
Eric-Paul Riege 'Earrings for the Big Gods'
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Good news for Eric-Paul Riege (b. 1994, Na’nízhoozhí/Gallup, NM; Diné) whose first solo institutional exhibition in New York can be seen at Canal Projects in Tribeca now through March 29, 2025. Even before receiving validation from the Big Apple, Riege has been “making it,” establishing himself in the last couple years as one of the most in-demand contemporary Native American artists. He had an exhibition at the prestigious Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2023, the same year the National Gallery of Art acquired one of his pieces. His...
'Masters of Drawing' Exhibition at Medicine Man Gallery
Drawing represents the “dribbling and shooting” of art to use a sports metaphor. It’s the foundational skill upon which all others are built. You’d be hard pressed to find a great artist from history who wasn’t an exceptional draftsman – the fancy word for drawer. Or woman. No matter where their art making took them, be that abstraction or minimalism or even sculpture, the greats could all draw. Picasso was brilliant with pen and pencil as a teen. Brilliant. His ability to successfully go on and break all the rules of painting stemmed from his mastery of the basics of...