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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....
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Opens in Los Angeles
Aerial shot of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Copyright Academy Museum Foundation Hollywood’s latest blockbuster is the movies themselves. When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened to the public on September 30, it did so following a proven script – so to speak. Big stars. The museum’s campaign committee featured Tom Hanks, Annette Bening and Disney Chairman Bob Iger. Hanks also sits on the museum’s Board of Trustees along with Laura Dern. Inside the seven-story, 300,000-square-foot museum at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in the heart of the Miracle Mile, public spaces are named after Sidney...
The Kinsey Collection at the Tacoma Art Museum exhibits a combination of artworks and artifacts related to Black history in America
Kinsey Collection Opening at Tacoma Art Museum | Photo by Amber Trillo Black History rarely features in America’s Western History. The Louisiana Purchase, Manifest Destiny, the Transcontinental Railroad, cattle drives, sod busters. Black faces are mostly absent from these stories. Not because they weren’t there. Black cowboys, doctors, farmers, artists and others from all walks of life played integral roles shaping the West’s history. They’ve been written out. The Tacoma Art Museum is working to correct that omission and using the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection to do so. The CollectionConsidered one of the most comprehensive...
Escape to midcentury modern in Palm Springs for Modernism Week Fall Preview
Mod Evening at Miralon Pool | Photo by Miralon Cadillac tail fins, the Rat Pack at the Sands, “Mad Men.” Midcentury modern has always been cool. Cool design and architecture. Cool parties. Cool fashion. Not always trendy, but always cool. The aesthetic, broadly referring to a period from the early 1930s to the mid-60s, reaching its apex in the 50s, feels as hip as ever with a full immersion in the movement available October 14-17 during Palm Springs’ Modernism Week Fall Preview. No place is as synonymous with midcentury modern as Palm Springs. That’s cool, too. The four...
Detroit Institute Of Arts Acquires Kathleen Wall's "Create Our Future - Honor Our Past," Ceramic Figures
Kathleen Wall’s, ‘Create Our Future—Honor Our Past,’ 2021. Ceramic. PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON S. ORDAZ, INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS (IAIA) Headdresses. Horses. Teepees. When considering the country’s indigenous people, American popular culture loves smushing the hundreds of distinct tribes and nations which occupied the continent prior to European contact together. America wants a monolithic “Indian.” A “cowboys and Indians” Indian. A Western Indian. A Plains Indian shooting arrows at buffalo, wearing turquoise. Art history has done this prominently. Indigenous people occupying Florida’s thick brush and oppressive heat shown wearing large headdresses by Thomas Moran. Appeal to the Great...
'Yellowstone Revealed' Returning Indigenous People to Park on 150th Anniversary
DOI Secretary Deb Haaland Visit: Media availablity remarks with Mike Reynolds, Regional Director, and Cam Sholly, Superintendent | Photo Credit: NPS / Jacob W. Frank As the American Serengeti, Yellowstone National Park bustles with bison, elk and bear. No place on earth contains more geothermal features such as geysers, mudpots and thermal vents. Something is missing, though. People. Not the tourists who pack the park each summer to admire those animals and Old Faithful, but the park’s Indigenous inhabitants whose persons and history have been scrubbed from both the land at Yellowstone and the storytelling around it. Shane...
'Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo' at the MET in NYC explores the intercultural exchange between Tavernier (1844-1889) and the Indigenous Pomo community of Elem
Jules Tavernier, Dance in a Subterranean Roundhouse at Clear Lake, California, 1878. Oil on canvas, 48 × 72 1/4 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acquired through the Marguerite and Frank A. Cosgrove Jr. Fund, 2016. When thinking of the best places to see Western art in America, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York doesn’t typically jump to mind. It should. As with every other collecting area featured at the Met, its selection is exemplary. Nocturnes by Fredric Remington highlight the collection in my opinion. Another Western painting from the Met’s collection which has...
'Convergence Station' brings third permanent Meow Wolf installation to Denver
Meow Wolf Denver, Ice World | Photo Credit: Kate Russell “It’s like Meow Wolf.” What “Die Hard” is to action movies or Disney World to theme parks, Meow Wolf has become to immersive, room-filling – building-filling – wildly imaginative, multi-media, entertainment-driven art spaces, the standard against which all others are measured. In fact, Meow Wolf probably deserves credit – or blame – for the art world’s currently most overused adjective: immersive. Meow Wolf didn’t create the first immersive art experience, but when 10 friends shut out of the Santa Fe gallery scene convened in 2008 and hatched the...
Completely renovated Mingei International Museum reopening in San Diego's Balboa Park
Architect Jennifer Luce with metal fabricator A. ZahnerZahner Labs, Hedgerow, a sculptural fence outside Mingei International Museum. | Courtesy Mingei International Museum After a three-year closure for a transformational renovation, Mingei International Museum reopens September 3 with a dynamic slate of exhibitions, commissioned artworks and public programs. Located in San Diego’s historic Balboa Park, featuring the largest concentration of museums and arts organizations west of the Mississippi River, Mingei International Museum’s grand reopening will reveal a compelling new museum of over 50,000 square feet. Enhancements include 10,000 square feet of additional exhibition and programming space along with a...
Indigenous Fashion Show Again Highlighting SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market
Pamela Baker Designs ©SWAIA Native American fashion. For some, the phrase might recall traditional–often stereotypical–images of 19th century regalia. Moccasins. Buckskin. To others, Native American fashion mirrors the jeans, t-shirts and sneakers worn by everyone in the United States. A third group, Indigenous fashion designers, are looking to their cultural past and creating clothing, jewelry and accessories honoring that history while forwarding it for contemporary wearers. Among the dazzling array of pottery, paintings, textiles, sculpture and jewelry from hundreds of Native American artists on display each August at Santa Fe Indian Market, haute couture from Indigenous fashion designers...
How to make the most of a visit to Santa Fe Indian Market
Santa Fe Indian Market “It means everything.” Ask Eric Tippeconnic what Santa Fe Indian Market means to him and his response is instantaneous. Following a one-year interruption due to COVID-19 after 98 in a row on the Plaza in Santa Fe, the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) Indian Market returns August 21 and 22 for its 99th in-person event. The Super Bowl of Indigenous art. Tippeconnic, a Southern California painter, has been participating more often than not for almost 20 years. “A Comanche artist like myself is going to have very different work than a Pueblo...