Essential West Magazine
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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
Grizzly 399 Monument Unveiled at National Museum of Wildlife Art
Grizzly 399 was born in 1996. She successfully birthed 18 cubs in her lifetime including a rare four-cub litter during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her last cub was born when Grizzly 399 was 24, a record birthing age for the species. She represented more than numbers. Often seen with her cubs near roadsides across Grand Teton National Park and...
Smith, Cannon, and Scholder Artworks Enter Prestigious Museum Collections
Museums are the ultimate arbiters of taste. The most exclusive velvet rope. The final boss. Museums are concerned with collecting for time immemorial, not of the moment. Trends and fads don’t interest them, that’s why they still collect antiquities with relish. Museums acquire artworks today as much for the 22nd century as the 21st. By definition, anything worthy of being owned by or displayed in a museum is “good.” Ownership and display in the nation’s most preeminent museums are reserved for “masterpieces.” The best of the best of the best from 5,000 years of human creativity. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Confederated...
Speed Art Museum Repatriates Objects to Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes
On August 19, 2026, officials from the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY helped Chester Whiteman and Fred Mosqueda, representatives of the Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, carefully load sacred objects into their cars for the drive back to Oklahoma. The 24 items had been held by the Museum for nearly 100 years. They were finally returning to their rightful owners. This marked the Speed museum’s first return of sacred and cultural belongings to Native communities under the federal law known as NAGPRA – Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. NAGPRA is a federal law requiring museums and other...
William P. Healey Collection of Native American Art Going on View in Phoenix
William P. Healey grew up with Charlie Russell prints hanging in his bedroom. His Long Island bedroom. The universal allure of the West. Healy’s dad was a pilot for American Airlines and later assigned to its corporate office in New York. Along with his father, the boy would routinely visit the home of C.R. Smith, President of American Airlines. It was a home filled with Western art, particularly Charlie Russell. From the 1920s through the 50s, Smith was one of the handful of most prominent collectors of Western art in the United States. He eventually bought out the estate of...
Paul Burlin: A New York Modernist in Santa Fe
Paul Burlin first visited New Mexico in 1910. Like other painters occupying New York’s modern art community at the time, he was fascinated by the prospects of the Southwest. By the light. The Indigenous cultures. The vast landscape. Stories and paintings from other Eastern artists who’d been. This was also an era in which avant-garde American artists were looking to break from European traditions. They sought to create a distinct, American art. But nothing comes out of nowhere, so they looked west. To the mountains and canyons and plains. To the Indigenous people who had artistic traditions based on this...
Back to School Lessons for Budding Artists from Dwayne Manuel
Dwayne Manuel (b. 1984; On’k Akimel Oʼodham / Salt River-Maricopa Indian Community) has lessons for aspiring artists heading back to school. First among these lessons is the value of a traditional arts education. The value of teachers and peers and figure drawing classes and learning perspective and something of art history. “The experience of getting to work with not only your fellow students, who are also learning the same thing you're learning, but also working with these professors, these professional artists,” Manuel said. “People tell me nowadays you can learn it all on YouTube, but working with somebody who's a mentor,...
Art Helps Reconciliation efforts at Fort Lewis College
Reconciliation. A coming together. An understanding. An apology. Reconciliation with and for Indigenous communities in the United States aims to address the historical and ongoing legacy and impacts of U.S. settler colonialism on Indigenous communities, repair relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, and foster healing for Indigenous communities. Reconciliation at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO is a comprehensive process acknowledging the institution’s troubled origins while establishing respectful and reciprocal relationships with Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. Fort Lewis College began in the late 19th century as Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School, a site of violent, assimilative, and other harmful...
From Oklahoma to Philly and Everywhere in Between: Ron Tarver's Black Cowboys
Who remembers the old Barbara Mandrell song “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool?” It was her response to the Urban Cowboy craze of early 80s when city slickers nationwide were accessorizing with Nocona boots and Stetson hats. Mandrell wanted people to know she was about that life long before John Travolta rode a mechanical bull in the 1980 movie. Consider Ron Tarver (b. 1957) the Barbara Mandrell of Black cowboy culture. Before Beyoncé, before Little Nas X, before Jamie Foxx, Tarver was working to bring Black cowboy culture to the mainstream. It was 1993 when he first began photographing...
Contemporary Native American Art Goes Global at Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Having finally secured a place in American mainstream art and popular culture on its own terms, contemporary Native art is going global. Jeffrey Gibson’s representation of the United States with a solo show at the 2024 Venice Biennale – the every-other-year global Olympics of contemporary art – broke that layer of the “buckskin ceiling,” a term coined by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith for the historic limits placed on contemporary Native artists. Gibson was the first Native American so honored at the U.S. pavilion. Nicholas Galanin was featured in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial. Wendy Red Star had a gallery show in London...
Thomas Marcus: Wildstyle Graffiti Meets Tohono O'odham Basket Weaving
Public murals and petroglyphs. “Wildstyle” graffiti and woven baskets. Thomas “Breeze” Marcus’ (b. 1980) artworks bring these seemingly disparate worlds naturally together. Beautifully together. The Tohono O’odham artist observed the world around him, his Indigenous world from the Salt River Pima Maricopa Indian Community and the street culture he grew up in in Phoenix. He made a cultural connection. “In graffiti, it's about this form of communication in the public – unsanctioned, against the grain, all of those things – but regardless, it is a form of communication through symbols and visual storytelling,” Marcus explained. “To me, it was no...