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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
Sheila Nadimi Photographs of Student Murals Inside Intermountain Intertribal Indian School
When Sheila Nadimi moved to Logan, UT from Canada in 1991, the surroundings looked mostly familiar. Mountains, trees, churches, houses. One feature of the landscape, however, did not. “I saw those buildings, and they were not in my repertoire,” Nadimi remembers. “I'd never encountered architecture like that. They were also boarded up, so they were silent in a...
Presentation at LACMA wraps up Transcendental Painting Group exhibition tour
Installation photograph, Another World The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dec 2022–Jun 19, 2023, photo © Museum Associates-LACMA Dusky, ethereal, extra-terrestrial. Celestial, cosmic, atmospheric. Hallucinatory, meta-physical, meditative. The Transcendental Painting Group strove "to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world through new concepts of space, color, light and design to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual,” according to their manifesto. Doing so was greatly inspired by where the attempt was made. The Transcendental Painting Group formed in New Mexico in 1938. The desert. High desert mountains. Ancient, sometimes sparse...
Lucinda Hinojos bringing Indigenous representation to Super Bowl LVII
Artist Lucinda Hinojos | Courtesy of the NFL I was excited to be contacted by the National Football League to announce its choice of Lucinda Hinojos (Pascua Yaqui, Chiricahua Apache, White Mountain Apache, and Pima (Akimel O'Odham)) as the marquee artist for Super Bowl LVII being played this February in Glendale, AZ. She is the first Chicana, Native American artist to work with the league. Her painting will be featured on an array of design activations for the event, including game tickets. “I felt like I got drafted for the NFL because my family was right here and...
National Museum of Wildlife Art knee-deep in Carl Rungius catalogue raisonné
Carl Rungius (Germany, 1869-1959), Northern King, 1926. Oil on canvas. 42 x 60 inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art. © Estate of Carl Rungius Catalogue Raisonné is the fancy, French, art world term for a book detailing a complete listing of an artist’s work over an entire career, or of a particular aspect or period of their production. Compiling one often requires a decade or more of arduous, dogged, eye-blurring research and writing. They are often produced in multiple volumes. Pablo Picasso’s catalogue raisonné sprawls out over 33 volumes, each more than an inch thick,...
New York becomes the capital of Native American art for 5 days in July 2023
The MET in NYC Mark your calendars for the week of July 9, 2023. For a brief window of time between that day and July 13, New York City, not Santa Fe, not Albuquerque, not Denver, nor Phoenix will be the best place in America to see Native American with a Western emphasis. On July 9, Bard Graduate Center’s “Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest” closes as the first exhibition showcasing the American Museum of Natural History’s historic collection of Navajo textiles. That museum is a 10-minute walk south on Central Park West from...
2022: Contemporary Indigenous photography's breakout year
'Speaking with Light' exhibition view. Courtesy the Amon Carter Museum of American Art Is this the “golden age” for contemporary Indigenous photography? Yes and no. Institutionally, it seems so. Museums have never displayed contemporary Indigenous photography with the spotlight or volume they are now. This extends well beyond museums traditionally exhibiting Native American or Western artwork. Within the past year alone, Will Wilson (Diné) has had solo shows at museums in Delaware and Orlando. Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) placed second in the prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, hosted every three years by the National Portrait Gallery. It is the...
Harwood Museum of Art introduces visitors to Black cowboys
Alexander Harrison, Beyond the Horizon (2021). Acrylic on canvas. Private collection | Photo Credit: Chadd Scott As an arts writer, I view dozens of artwork images every day on social media, in news articles and press releases. Most of them pass my attention after a momentary glance, instantly forgotten. One in 100 stick. These stop my scroll despite their digital miniature format. I contend a powerful piece of art maintains its impact whether seen on Instagram or hanging in The Met. That was the case with Beyond the Horizon (2021). Alexander Harrison’s painting of a crouching, sneering, gun-wielding...
IAIA's Native Artist Files receiving support through Hauser & Wirth Institute grant
IAIA campus view | Photo Credit IAIA The Institute of American Indian Art’s efforts toward modernizing its voluminous Native Artist Files received a boost through receipt of a Hauser & Wirth Institute grant announced in November. The support will primarily be used in hiring an additional archivist to reappraise and reorganize the Files according to IAIA Archivist Ryan Flahive. What are now the Native Artist Files were initiated by longtime IAIA Museum Director and Museum Studies faculty member Charles A. Dailey in 1971. Dailey tasked students with adding whatever materials could be found on contemporary Indigenous artists —...
'The New West:' Steamboat Art Museum examines origins of Contemporary Western art
Steamboat Art Museum in Steamboat Springs, CO | Courtesy Steamboat Art Museum. “Contemporary” art gets a bad rap. Visions of haughty, white cube Chelsea galleries. Inaccessible, conceptual, incomprehensible to anyone without a Master of Fine Arts degree. A banana duct-taped to a wall. Contemporary art can be that. It can also be Michelangelo. And Rembrandt. And O’Keeffe. All art, of course, is “contemporary” at its making and much of it, even that which culture worships today – Manet, Van Gogh, Pollock – was ridiculed by commentators of the period. That comes with the territory. Great art routinely challenges...
Seeing Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West through new eyes
Southwestern pottery on display at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, AZ | Photo credit Chadd Scott I last visited Taliesin West in 2010. I met my future wife the month previous. I was still a decade removed from changing careers to enter arts writing. I was comfortably short of 40. On that trip to architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home in Scottsdale, AZ I was most taken by the desert surroundings. The McDowell Mountains which backdrop the property. Stately saguaro cactus which I’d never seen before. This was my first time in Arizona. Spiney cholla. Chubby barrel cactus. The...
Cannupa Hanska Luger's latest artworks on view at Amarillo Museum of Art.
Cannupa Hanska Luger - Transmutation (2022), installation view | Courtesy Amarillo Museum of Art Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota; b. 1979) is everywhere. His artwork, anyway. Presently, he has a piece on the High Line in New York City. He’s featured in a group show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – that’s a big deal. Other group shows include the Berkeley Art Museum in California, the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. A continuing series of exhibitions with Marie Watt can be...