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Learn about the latest Medicine Man Gallery happenings; all about our artist, see our educational videos about native American art and fine art, watch podcasts with your favorite artists and check out art and history-related links we think you'll enjoy.
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
Western Art Surprises Abound in 12th SITE SANTA FE International
The 12th SITE SANTA FE International isn’t a Western art exhibition, but it’s not not a Western art exhibition. That lineage runs too deep here. Too deep for International curator Cecilia Alemani, an Italian living in New York, to overlook. Thankfully. Among the city-wide presentation of artworks made by artists from India, and China, and Europe, are artworks...
Historic and Contemporary Western Native American Artists Added to Permanent Collection at SFMOMA
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced its acquisitions for the first half of 2025. Among the pieces entering SFMOMA’s permanent collection are a large number from western Native American artists. The additions continue encouraging trends of major American institutions uplifting Native artists, both mid-career contemporary Native artists working at the edge of the avant-garde as well as the elder and ancestor artists whose shoulders they stand on. Museums set the culture. Not the popular culture of any given moment in time. They aren’t – or shouldn’t be – swayed by the whims and tastes of the art...
Osage Artist Norman Akers Responds to Five Months in Philadelphia
Norman Akers (b. 1958; Wahzhazhi/Osage) completed the inaugural Edgar Heap of Birds Family Artist in Residence at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia at the end of May. Akers put aside his job as a professor of painting in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas, and starting on January 2, 2025, focused exclusively on his own painting. It was a rare opportunity. Most working artists work other jobs to help make ends meet. They’re teachers, gallery assistants, art handlers. They often balance this with kids and families, leaving available time...
Mary Sully Brought Out of the Shadows by First Solo Exhibition
With contemporary Native American art becoming more mainstream each passing day, America’s art museums – who’ve led this movement – are digging deeper. Having helped “break” living Native American artists like Jeffrey Gibson, Virgil Ortiz, and Cara Romero – to name just three – leading institutions are now working to bring new voices to the conversation, introducing audiences to rising figures and overlooked historical artists. One such overlooked historical artist is Mary Sully (Yankton Dakota, 1896–1963) – born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota. The little-known, reclusive artist was active between the 1920s and 1940s,...
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 environmental awareness converge in the production of Native American baskets and Pueblo pottery. The presentation marks the inaugural exhibition in a gallery space newly opened in March 2025. Also debuting are two transformative gifts to the museum’s permanent collection. The first is...
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...