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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....
Navajo Pictorial Rugs and Blankets
Navajo Pictorial weavings are the perfect marriage of artistry and engineering Collectors worldwide value pictorial Navajo rugs and blankets for their charm and the artistic vision needed to create them. All Navajo textiles are woven on simple, un-mechanized frame upright looms that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. To make a visually successful rug using such basic tools, a Navajo weaver must develop a highly attuned spatial sense to plan and execute the complex geometric patterns for which these weavings are known. Weavers that add pictorial elements to their textiles require great command of their craft as often these...
Four monumental figures greet visitors to Jane DeDeckerâs Loveland, Colorado studio. In life, the women were larger even than the near 10-foot height DeDecker sculpts them.
Jane DeDecker 'Ripples of Change' sculpture figures, Left to Right, Laura Cornelius Kellog, Harriet Tubman, Martha Coffin Wright (seated), Sojourner Truth | Photo Credit: Chadd Scott Ripples of Change depicts four activists whose work supported women’s suffrage: Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Harriet Tubman, Martha Coffin Wright and Sojourner Truth. Their contributions to the cause are vastly under-recognized. Most audiences will be familiar with Tubman and Truth. Kellogg, a Native American (Oneida), and Wright, a Quaker, are largely anonymous to the general public. Two Black women, an indigenous woman and a Quaker. You can connect the dots for yourself as...
Frist Art Museum in Nashville presents Western art alongside indigenous perspectives
Frist Art Museum exterior view | Courtesy of the Frist Art Museum An art exhibition can change history. Every year, from the hundreds of exhibitions hosted by museums and galleries around the nation, one – maybe two – deeply alter common perceptions not merely of art history, but American history. Our culture. Our civilization. Where we came from and how we got here. “Creating the American West Through Art,” on view now at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee through June 27, is not one of those exhibitions. But it was influenced by one that was. “Hearts...
Shonto Begay: 'Art Saves Lives'
Shonto Begay, b. 1954 (Navajo), The Gaagi'' Call, 2021. Acrylic on canvas 30” x 48” “Art saves lives.” –Shonto Begay. For Diné (Navajo) artist Shonto Begay (b. 1954), that’s more than a figure of speech. It’s autobiographical. “I was what they call a generation of the walking traumas, because of the 13 boys that I grew up with very closely, there's only three of us alive,” Begay told Forbes.com. Begay’s personal history reaches back into an era difficult to imagine in a contemporary world. He was born in a ceremonial Navajo hogan–a sacred home–to a mother who was a...
Iconic Charles M. Russell painting is the prize in a new fundraising effort in Great Falls
By Guest Writer Michael Clawson Charles M. Russell (1864-1926), The Hold Up, 1899, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in. Petrie Collection, Denver, Colorado. One of the most important and famous paintings by Charles M. Russell is at the center of a new fundraising campaign at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. The painting, the 1899 masterwork The Hold Up, was unveiled as the key prize in a new initiative within the Art and Soul Campaign, a $25 million campaign to grow the museum’s endowment. The new initiative’s push is to raise an additional $2.5 million...
For the first time since 1992, a Western may attempt a high-profile coup for the best picture Oscar
By Guest Writer Michael Clawson With movie theaters shuttered, studios pushing and then re-pushing opening dates and an increasing number of movies foregoing theatrical releases in favor of streaming platforms, it’s safe to say there has not been a year at the movies quite like 2020. But one of the highlights from this disaster of a summer is Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, a film that has silently and with little fanfare, slipped into the running for best picture at next year’s Academy Award. Reichardt’s seventh feature film is about two on-the-run travelers in Oregon territory...
First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City preparing to open in September 2021
First Americans Museum Under Construction When the First Americans Museum opens in Oklahoma City in September of this year, it will represent the culmination of more than 20 years of planning, fundraising, waiting, construction and imagining what it would mean for Native people to tell their own story on their own terms. That seems like a long time. It is a long time. Contrasted against the story of Native people in Oklahoma, however, it’s, but a moment. The five tribes indigenous to the area that is now the state of Oklahoma were thriving there centuries before contact with...
Non-fungible tokens and blockchain technology are changing the way we buy and sell works of art
You have surely read or heard something recently about “NFTs,” “non-fungible tokens.” An artist with two million Instagram followers and no presence in the traditional gallery/museum world, who goes by the name Beeple, sold an NFT artwork through the Christie’s auction house for $69.3 million earlier in March of 2021. The sale represented global news covered by almost every major media outlet. It made Beeple the third most expensive living artist behind only Jeff Koons and David Hockney. So, what the heck are “NFTs?” Non-fungible tokens are “cryptographic assets on blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that...
What Zane Grey did with words in the early 20th century, Ed Mell has been doing with paint for the past 40 years.
"Riders of the Purple Sage" by Arizona Opera Both Zane Grey and Ed Mell are storytellers. Both capture a mythic West. A West of fantastic grandeur and possibility. They do so in a colorful, lyrical, romantic style. Arizona provides deep connective tissue between the two. Mell was born and raised in Arizona. He’s spent most of his life there. Grey spent the majority of his life “back East,” but visited Arizona regularly between 1918 and 1929. (Oddly enough, a dispute over bear hunting season with local officials in 1929 led him to vow never to return to the...
Calling back to his career as an illustrator, Dennis Ziemienski pays tribute to the Southwest with his newest work
By Michael Clawson, guest writer Click or Tap Here to See Dennis Ziemienski's Available Works Dennis Ziemienski "Desert Evening Ride" | Oil on Canvas | 48" x 36" Sitting in front of his easel in Northern California, Dennis Ziemienski is craving travel. Especially as he dabs at his newest works, which are throwbacks to old travel posters, complete with bold lettering announcing places like Monument Valley, Saguaro National Park and “Explore the Grand Canyon.” But, of course, travel is a luxury these days. A luxury that was easily taken for granted before 2020, when the pandemic swept...