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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
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....
Shelburne Museum launching new Native American initiative
Artist formerly known [Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne)], Beaded Pannier, ca. 1880. Collection of Shelburne Museum, gift of Ogden M. Pleissner.1961-182.36.1. As 2022 rolled into 2023, the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT had exactly zero Native American items on view. The museum has possessed Native American artwork since its founding in 1947, but took all holdings off view roughly 15 years ago, rightly uncomfortable with its inability to appropriately display the material without a better understanding of it and its context. In a swift and stunning course correction prone to deliver the museological equivalent of whiplash, the museum has since made...
Terran Last Gun: Contemporary spin on ancient tradition
Terran Last Gun, 'Future Cosmic Energy.' 16x45 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Missoula Art Museum What do you see when looking at Terran Last Gun’s geometric abstraction ledger drawings? Do you see Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly? Hard Edge painting from the 1960s? Something else? Last Gun’s works prove an art appreciation Rorschach test. Different people will see different things, and what you see will reveal your background even more than the artist’s. “What I’m doing is not pulling from any European art history at all, it's from these painted lodges that we’ve been creating for thousands...
What can Artificial Intelligence tell you about Western Art?
Kim Wiggins, Fiesta Day on the Plaza, 2003. Oil on canvas. Briscoe Museum of Western Art | Photo by Chadd Scott What does artificial intelligence think of Western art? I asked. ChatGPT from Openai.com is the most widely used ask-and-answer artificial intelligence tool available online. It’s free to use with signup which requires an email address and phone number. I started by prompting ChatGPT to tell me, “what is Western art?” Not surprisingly, it responded with a history of art from Western Civilization beginning with ancient Greece and Rome. I modified my request to specify “Western American art.”...
Ben Aleck sharing his Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe heritage at Nevada Museum of Art
Ben Aleck, Kwe'naa'a (eagle), circa 2010, acrylic on canvas, 6 x 10 feet. Collection of the Reno Sparks Geometry and eagles seemingly have nothing in common. To members of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe (Kooyooe Tukadu/cui-ui fish eaters) like artist Ben Aleck, however, they have everything in common which is why both themes repeat throughout his work. “The geometrics come from the beadwork and basket designs of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe and Great Basin tribes,” Aleck explains. Pyramid Lake is located forty miles northwest of Reno within the boundaries of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation along Nevada’s...
San Antonio offers an introduction to artist Jesse Treviño
Jesse Treviño, Señora Dolores Treviño (1983). Acrylic on canvas. 53.5 x 85.5 in. Collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art| Photo by Chadd Scott “Locally famous” isn’t quite the oxymoron of “jumbo shrimp” or “organized chaos,” but when it comes to art, I always wonder what circumstances prevented “locally famous” artists from becoming just “famous” artists. I was pondering this again following a spring 2023 visit to San Antonio and introduction to “locally famous” artist Jesse Treviño (1946-2023). Jesse Treviño’s artwork is everywhere in San Antonio. A painting of his mother hangs prominently in the San Antonio...
Georgia O'Keeffe highlights Western artists at Art Institute of Chicago
Georgia O'Keeffe, Sky Above Clouds IV (1965) at the Art Institute of Chicago | Photo by Chadd Scott On any short list of the best art museums in the United States, you will find the Art Institute of Chicago. No museum in the world has more instantly recognizable paintings: Nighthawks, American Gothic, Monet’s haystacks, Van Gogh’s bedroom, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The best of the best. Only. The museum divides its permanent collection galleries into roughly 20 broad categories – Arts of Africa, Arts of China, Japan and Korea, Arms and Armor, Prints and Drawings, Impressionism,...
Norman Tait totem returning to view at Heard Museum thanks to conservation grant
Norman Tait painting Friendship Totem in 1977 | Courtesy the Heard Museum Each year, hundreds of cultural institutions from around the world vie for Bank of America’s Art Conservation Project grants hoping to secure funding for priority preservation needs on objects under their care. For 2023, 23 recipients representing a diverse range of artistic styles, media and cultural traditions across China, Colombia, France, Lebanon, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S. have been selected. Among them, the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Norman Tait’s (Nisga’a Nations, 1941-2016) Friendship Totem (1977) will be the beneficiary, with the...
Award-winning Earl Biss documentary released on streaming platforms
Earl Biss, 'Four Chiefs, a Dog and a Boy,' (1983). Oil on canvas, 60 x 84 | Photo Courtesy Chadd Scott My favorite artist is Earl Biss. Number two, Vincent van Gogh. When I say Earl Biss is my favorite artist, I’m not grading on a scale. I don’t mean my favorite American painter or Native American artist; I mean my favorite artist. Looking at his paintings – and this happened from the very first instance I ever saw one – I felt a spiritual connection to them, and him, unlike anything before or since. That first time...
See Julian Onderdonk's Texas bluebonnet paintings at San Antonio Museum of Art
Julian Onderdonk, Near San Antonio (1918) detail. San Antonio Museum of Art. Photo by Chadd Scott The bluebonnet paintings of Julian Onderdonk have always captivated me. Something of a dream, they are. I began visiting the Texas Hill Country where Onderdonk lived and painted in the 1980s. My maternal grandparents retired to Lago Vista, TX on Lake Travis outside of Austin, and family trips regularly took me there. This was long before I had an interest in art or knew who Onderdonk was. But I knew well who Julian Onderdonk was on a March 2023 visit to San...
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco publish new catalogue of Native American art
Ancestral Hopi artist, Sikyatki, Jar, ca. 1450–1500. Earthenware and pigment, 20.5 x 40.5 x 40.5 cm. Gift of the Thomas W. Weisel Family to FAMSF, 2013.76.140. Photograph by Randy Dodson, copyright FAMSF Not everything is meant to be seen. Even artwork. Even when it’s in a museum. Consider the Mimbres bowls and ancestral pottery – predating 1600 – in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. In its catalogue “Native American Art from the Thomas W. Weisel Family Collection,” published in April of 2023, numerous items are entirely obscured by a matrix of gold dots...