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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...
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...
'Migrant Mother' and more, Dorothea Lange photographs at Eiteljorg Museum
Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration photographer, in California, 1936. Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress) Consider it the Mona Lisa of photography. Perhaps not the greatest picture ever taken – although undeniably powerful – but the most recognizable. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother has appeared in countless textbooks and on a U.S. postage stamp. No one recalls where they first saw the picture, it seems programmed into the factory settings of the American mental image vault. Taken in 1936 at a migrant-worker camp in Nipomo, CA, the image distilled human suffering on a national scale...
Après-ski with art in Breckenridge, CO
Exterior of Portfolio Gallery in Breckenridge, CO | Photo by Chadd Scott The Breckenridge, CO gallery scene has yet to recover from the closure of Breckenridge Fine Art in 2016. Owner Jim Tylich had galleries throughout the mountain towns across the West for decades before consolidating the business into a non-descript industrial plaza in Edwards, CO serving mostly existing collectors on an appointment basis. Breckenridge Fine Art gallery was the spark which lit my passion for art. Immediately upon entering, despite having zero background in art, I knew something was different. The paintings better, somehow – that was...
Second Annual Mvskoke Art Market Taking Place in Tulsa April 22-23
George Alexander (Mvskoke) standing next to his piece ‘Don't Call My Name’ at the 2022 Mvskoke Art Market | Photo Credit Darren DeLaune, Muscogee (Creek) Nation Office of Communications. The second annual Mvskoke Art Market takes place April 22 and 23 at the River Spirit Casino Resort in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “Mvskoke” is the traditional spelling of Muscogee, both are pronounced the same. The event opens at 10AM each day running through 5PM with free admission. Eighty-two Native American artists will be featured, up from 60 a year ago, selected from more than 100 applicants. Enrollment in a federally...
'California Stars' on view at Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe
James Luna (Luiseño, Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican; 1950–2018) used his body in performances, installations, and photographs to question the fetishization, museological display, and commodification of Native Americans. Luna’s Take a Picture with a Real Indian, first presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1991, was his most interactive work. Individuals originally posed with Luna himself or with three life-size cutouts of the artist, two wearing varieties of traditional Native dress and the third in chinos and a polo shirt. Luna reprised the performance artwork in 2001 in Salina, Kansas, and in 2010 on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, formerly...