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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
Washoe Baskets Highlighted at Two Nevada Museums
Indigenous art supplies often come from the earth, not a store. Native American baskets are produced from grasses and shrubs and tree bark. Native American pottery literally originates from the earth, the ground. From clay. The Nevada Museum of Art explores the inseparable connection between maker and material with “Of the Earth,” highlighting how art, cultural legacy, and...
A 2,000 Mile Photographic Odyssey of the West
A London photographer and a Parisian photographer drive into the West. It sounds like the setup to a bad joke, one of those “a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar” kind of jokes. Iranian-born Maryam Eisler is the Londoner. American-born Alexei Riboud is the Frenchman. In 2024, they flew to Houston, embarking on a 2,000-mile, month long road trip taking them across Texas, north through New Mexico, west to the Navajo Nation in Arizona, and, finally, into Utah. Their pictures can be seen during “The New American West: Photography in Conversation,” on view at Pierre Yovanovitch Mobilier Gallery...
The West Comes East in 'Knowing the West' Exhibition
The Pomo feathered bowl circa 1877 composed of willow, bulrush, fern, woodpecker and quail feathers, shell, and glass beads. Short, tufty feathers. Feathers like branched fish gills. This bowl, too, looks like it could breathe. It looks like something out of the “Star Wars” production closet designed to imagine what bowls on alien planets not bound by the realities of Earth look like. I’ve never seen anything like it. To quote the great Western movie “Tombstone:” “I’ve never even heard of anything like it.” I have heard about the tiny Pima baskets, complete with removable lids, less than an inch...
Art Saves Lives, and a Cookie Factory, in Denver
Art saves lives. Sometimes more than once. Art has offered Amanda Precourt salvation throughout her life, first it’s creation, now its collection. “Around seven or eight, I started drawing all the time to try to manage my chaos, the chaos that I felt around me in the world,” Precourt said. “My parents got divorced and I was very young and so I started drawing and painting as a way to moderate my own mood.” Drawing. Painting. She worked in ceramics as a kid. She took art classes in college at Stanford and became an architectural designer. Born and raised in...
Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center Opens
A dream more than 20 years in the making becomes reality when the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians opens its new museum and cultural center to the public on Thursday, May 15, 2025. Costing approximately $32 million, the 14,000-square-foot facility located on the corner of Highway 246 and Edison Street in Santa Ynez – land owned by the tribe adjacent to its reservation – showcases historically significant cultural items, including baskets, musical instruments, hunting tools, ceremonial items, and regalia, all highlighting the richness and diversity of Chumash culture. At the museum entrance, visitors will be greeted by a monumental...
Charles Gaines' Arizona Cottonwoods
Cottonwood trees have been a favored subject for painters across the West and Southwest since the Taos Society of Artists arrived in northern New Mexico in the early 20th century. They’ve never been painted like this before. Charles Gaines (b. 1944) has been a leading figure in conceptual art since the 1970s. His artworks are best known for their use of an intricate grid and numbers system overlayed on photographs – thousands of tiny squares with numbers inside. Gaines was invited to visit the Sonoran Desert by the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. The Institute wanted to acquire an example...
Carmel Art Festival Returns to the Most Beautiful Place in the World
Artists have been coming to Carmel-by-the-Sea since the early 1900s. Early residents included authors George Sterling, Jack London and poet Robinson Jeffers who pitched tents in the woods. The tragic San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 brought more people. The refugees and early adopters decided to try making a permanent go of it. Their legacy is the town’s robust cultural community, highlights out of all proportion to a place counting fewer than 4,000 residents. The artists will come again for the 32nd annual Carmel Art Festival May 16th through 18th, 2025. Combining plein-air painting and live sculpting with exhibits,...
Remembering the Topeka Bottoms
The story of Topeka Bottoms is both typical and unique. What happened to the Topeka Bottoms neighborhood in the mid-20th century occurred in hundreds of other thriving minority communities across America, but when it happened here, the victims, the people, the families, the houses, they experienced the trauma as individuals. What happened was so-called “urban renewal.” Urban renewal was a widespread scheme throughout the country from the 1950s through the 1970s, imagined, designed, and carried out by white government officials, white engineers, white city planners, and white construction firms. Their stated intent was remedying “urban blight” and expanding the nation’s...
Rahim Fortune's Photographs Defy Categorization
Photographer Rahim Fortune (b. 1994) demonstrates the futility of categorization. In multi-cultural contemporary America and the art world. African American father. Native American mother. He’s an enrolled member of Chickasaw Nation. He split time growing up between Oklahoma and Texas. He considers home the 7-hour stretch of Interstate 35 between the Texas Hill Country around Austin and Oklahoma City. He lives in Round Rock, TX, but splits his time between there and New York City, where he went to college. He shoots the Black rodeo and Black cowboys. Does that make him a Western artist? The Black rodeos he began...
Carl Rungius, Wildlife Painter and Modern Art Master
I came to the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, WY looking for Carl Rungius. I came away believing he’s not merely the finest painter of North American wildlife ever, hardly a “hot take,” but more than that, a master of Modern art, unsurpassed in his genre and in a league with America’s great representational painters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries: William Merritt Chase, Winslow Homer, Childe Hassam, the Ashcan School, the Taos Society of Art artists, Georgia O’Keeffe. The German born Rungius (1869–1959) was first and foremost a wildlife artist, true. But the landscapes...