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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
The Native Artists Dominating Museum Presentations in 2024
Artnet surveyed special exhibitions currently on view at more than 200 U.S. art museums producing a list of the contemporary artists most in fashion nationwide. At institutions, anyway. The rankings do not consider galleries or the secondary market. The highly respected art world publication found nearly 3,500 names appearing in solo and group shows at big and small...
Kim Wiggins' western vision stands out at Briscoe Museum in San Antonio
Once you see a Kim Wiggins (b. 1959/1960; Roswell, N.M.) painting, you’ll never mistake one for anyone else. Their radiating lines and near iridescent colors recall tropical bird wings. His pictures tell Western stories in a relatable, representational, graphic style. Four Wiggins paintings on view at the Briscoe Western Art Museum highlighted my March 2023 visit to San Antonio; I will focus on three of them. Kim Wiggins, Fiesta Day on the Plaza, 2003. Oil on canvas. Briscoe Museum of Western Art Fiesta Day on the Plaza (2003) Wiggins’ vision of a bustling Santa Fe Plaza...
Isabella Stewart Gardner's unsettling photographs from 19th Century New Mexico
What do your travels say about you? What about your travel albums? Remember those? Physical scrap books produced following trips in the days before everyone possessed hundreds of photos of even the most mundane experiences on their phones. Both reveal a great deal about Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), namesake of the Boston art museum converted from her one-time mansion. The simple legacy is what her travels tell us. Between 1867 and 1895, Gardner and her husband traveled the world extensively. Both were born into fabulous wealth and privilege. Though this status enabled them to freely cross countries and...
Step into the ring with luchadores at Arizona State University Art Museum
Installation view of “Lucha Libre: Beyond the Arenas,” October 2022–May 2023, Arizona State University Art Museum. Photo by Tim Trumble Performance, photography, paintings, prints, fashion, costume design, video. An exhibition at the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe has everything you’d expect from a thoughtfully researched, multi-media art exhibition with this unique differentiator: the backdrop is lucha libre, professional wrestling in Mexico. “Lucha Libra: Beyond the Arenas,” the first exhibition of its kind, goes beyond the performance sport’s popularity in contemporary culture to reveal its ancient roots, explore its influence on socio-political movements and link its relationships...
"The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans" at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
G. Peter Jemison (Seneca Nation of Indians, Heron Clan), Sentinels (Large Yellow), 2006 | Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has failed to represent its nation since industrialist Andrew W. Mellon gifted his art collection to the nation for the purposes of creating a world class museum on par with those in Europe in 1937. America’s art museum was mostly just a European art museum on American soil. Make no mistake, the collection was, and is, exquisite. Raphael’s The Alba Madonna (1510). Important, sublime paintings by Monet and Cezanne....
Faye HeavyShield's Indigenous Minimalism at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Faye HeavyShield 'I'll know you when I see you' | Courtesy of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation The art world has no walls. No floor. No ceiling. No matter which direction you travel in for however long you look, you’ll never see it all. You can dedicate your life to art and still be surprised by what’s escaped you. “It was through just pure happenstance of coming across her work that the project developed,” Tamara Schenkenberg, Curator at the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis, remembers about seeing Faye HeavyShield’s artwork for the first time. While well known in...
'We Are Still Here' Pomo Artists at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art
Meyo Marrufo with one of her dress designs at exhibition opening for We Are Still Here Pomo Artists and Our Cultural Landscape at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art Most of my writing centers on what I already know. I highlight artists I like who I want to see receive more attention and look for timely reasons to share histories familiar to me I want to broaden understanding of. Occasionally, as with this story, I enter with zero understanding. I enter with curiosity and the privilege of being able to ask my questions to people expert in the...
Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara celebrating 150th anniversary this month
The Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara. Photo credit Patrick Price Santa Barbara feels like a different country. It looks that way too. The aesthetic is by design – and by earthquake. In 1925, Santa Barbara suffered a devastating 6.3 magnitude quake destroying 85% of commercial buildings downtown. One of the only left untouched was the recently rebuilt Lobero Theatre. Originally founded in 1873, the then-flagging theater went dark in 1917. The old Lobero Opera House was demolished and in its place the new Lobero Theater built, opening on August 4, 1924, less than one year before the quake....
John Nieto documentary reveals the man behind the paintings
John Nieto triptych inside New Mexico State Capitol building John Nieto wasn’t solely responsible for sparking my interest in Native American contemporary art, although his work played a critical role. During my first ever visit to Santa Fe, I came across his Fauvist inspired paintings at Ventana Fine Art on Canyon Road. I was immediately taken by the electric color and imagery. A day or two later I found his massive triptych on a tour of the New Mexico State Capitol. Then, flying home, his Buffalo Dancer caught my eye prominently displayed in the Albuquerque Sunport airport....
Adaline Kent: "Addict of the High Sierra"
Adaline Kent in the High Sierra, c. 1950. Collection of the Adaline Kent Family “The mountains are calling, and I must go.” Surely, you’ve seen this saying printed on a t-shirt or coffee mug. Such souvenirs fill shops in ski towns across the West, proof positive of the innate lure mountains hold over millions of people. People like Adaline Kent (1900-1957). Kent was a self-admitted “addict of the High Sierra.” She grew up in the shadow of Mt. Tampalais, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County. She would share her love for peaks and...
Presentation at LACMA wraps up Transcendental Painting Group exhibition tour
Installation photograph, Another World The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dec 2022–Jun 19, 2023, photo © Museum Associates-LACMA Dusky, ethereal, extra-terrestrial. Celestial, cosmic, atmospheric. Hallucinatory, meta-physical, meditative. The Transcendental Painting Group strove "to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world through new concepts of space, color, light and design to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual,” according to their manifesto. Doing so was greatly inspired by where the attempt was made. The Transcendental Painting Group formed in New Mexico in 1938. The desert. High desert mountains. Ancient, sometimes sparse...