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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
Art and Heartbreak in Taos, NM
There are heartbreaks. Teenage heartbreaks. First love heartbreaks. The kind of heartbreaks everyone should experience as essential to the human condition. The kind you get over. And then there are heartbreaks. Destroyers. Those that obliterate the soul. The kind you don’t always get over. I know both. On a recent visit to Taos, NM, I learned about a...
Broadening Western history, and Western art, to include Asian American perspectives
Achieving a more comprehensive understanding of the American West will necessarily involve incorporating more stories and storytellers from Asian perspectives. Historic and contemporary artists should serve as key figures in doing so. Along these same lines, for Western art to remain relevant into the future beyond niche nostalgia for gunfights and cattle drives, forwarding Asian American artists into the genre should be a priority for every museum, gallery and collector. Imagine a diverse and robust contemporary Western art scene where Black, Mexican, Indigenous and Asian voices have equal representation to their white counterparts. In the words of John Lennon,...
Exhibition of National Geographic's best wildlife photography at National Museum of Wildlife Art
Photo by PAUL NICKLEN, Leopard Seal (Huge Female). From the exhibition "National Geographic: 50 Greatest Wildlife Photographs." Millions of tourists visit Yellowstone National Park each year hoping for a glimpse of a grizzly bear, a wolf, a moose. Capturing a photograph of these charismatic animals makes for the ultimate souvenir. Some visitors pull it off, many others don’t, all, however, can eat their hearts out at an exhibition of the world’s greatest wildlife photography in the shadow of Yellowstone at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, WY which exhibits “National Geographic: 50 Greatest Wildlife Photographs” through...
Witte Museum in San Antonio correcting historic erasure of Black Cowboys
E. Smith (1886–1947) - African-American Cowboys with Their Mounts Saddled Up, Posed in Connection with a Fair in Bonham, Texas, in the Interest of Interracial Relations. | c. 1911-1915 | Nitrate negative | 5" x 7" By now, most everyone with an affinity for the history of the American West recognizes how contributions of Black people have been largely excluded from that history’s retelling. No surprise there. The extent of that erasure is surprising. For example, a full 25% of men who labored on the ranches of Texas and participated on cattle drives before the Civil War through...
Artist Patrick Martinez asks what has changed in 20 years since Rodney King beating
Patrick Martinez 'Look What You Created' Interior Wall| Nathan Lothrop/Tucson Museum of Art Patrick Martinez was 11-years-old when he, along with the rest of America, watched Rodney King viciously beaten on television by a pack of Los Angeles police officers in 1991. By that time, the cops who attacked King were beginning to reinforce a new narrative forming in popular culture about law enforcement. Growing up in the 80s, Martinez (b. Pasadena, CA, 1980) remembers police being presented to him as positive role models. Examples of civic pride. Cops would come to his school in suburban Los Angeles...
See the beauty of Northern New Mexico at National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City
Theodore Van Soelen, Fall in Northern New Mexico, (1922). Tia Collection Art can save lives. It can open minds. It can tell history. It can also be, simply, beautiful. Art has never been more beautiful than the New Mexico landscapes on view now at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City during its exhibition of “New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West” through January 2, 2022. The paintings’ beauty is only exceeded by the real thing. Drawn from Santa Fe’s Tia Collection, “New Beginnings” includes portraits, sculptures, still lives and...
Mark Sublette on THE COWBOY UP! Podcast
Dude rancher Russell True and cowboy H. Alan Day team up in Tucson, Arizona to talk all things Western. They'll share adventures from the range, from the seat of a plane's cockpit, from the back of a horse. (You may wonder how they lived to tell their tales!) And they'll have a roundup of guests, Western writers, horse lovers, chuckwagon chefs, ranchers, nature lovers. It's the West now and then. This episode is about art. The Southwest is filled with iconic images, from saguaro cacti to adobe homes to brilliant sunsets. Thousands of artists have captured these images. Mark...
Tanya Aguiñiga receives Heinz Award for the Arts for work along U.S.-Mexico border
Tanya Aguiñiga in her studio | Photo credit: Katie Levine To the people who live there, who cross it, when it bisects your life, the U.S./Mexico border and border wall are not abstractions. They aren’t lines on a map. They aren’t talking points. They are real. They are unforgiving. Tanya Aguiñiga’s humanitarian art practice personalizing the border wall, border region and, most importantly, the people living with these constructions along Tijuana, Mexico where she was raised has been recognized with a Heinz Awards for the Arts. The accolade, which she shares for 2021 with Sanford Biggers, includes an...
Social justice, 'survivance,' exhibition craft guide Denver Art Museum's reinstalled Indigenous Art Galleries
Installation image, 2016. Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), Massacre in America: Wounded Knee, 1972. Gift from Vicki and Kent Logan to the Collection of the Denver Art Museum. A massive, multi-year, $175 million upgrade to the Denver Art Museum campus featuring a total renovation of the eight-story Gio Ponti-designed Lanny and Sharon Martin Building (formerly referred to as the North or Ponti Building) opened to the public on October 24, 2021. The Martin Building restoration includes expanding gallery space and now offers visitor access to stunning city and mountain views. The transformed building – one of the few high-rise art...
Glenn Dean brings 20 New Paintings to Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, AZ for 'Echoes from the West'
Glenn Dean 'Taos Drummer' | 40" x 40" | Oil on Linen Glenn Dean combines the familiar with the unexpected in an exhibition of new work, “Echoes From the West,” a solo show at Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, AZ opening November 20. Familiar are images of a serene, vast Western landscape. Lone silhouetted cowboys look contemplatively into the expanse. New are his interpretations of Pueblo Indians. Here, the figure, not the landscape, takes preeminence. Dean returns to his time spent living in Santa Fe and personal experiences visiting the Pueblos for inspiration in these paintings. “The color...
Cutting-edge technology brings your voice into view at Canal Convergence in Scottsdale
What does a human voice look like? What does your voice look like? What does it look like projected as artwork? Answers to those questions can be found at Canal Convergence | Water + Art + Light festival in Scottsdale, Arizona November 5th through the 14th. MASARY Studios, in partnership with Scottsdale Arts and leveraging Epson Pro Series laser projectors, will install a monumental public artwork at the annual event allowing people to see their voices transformed and abstracted into animation projected on 50-foot sails suspended over the Arizona Canal. “Say What You Will” listens to what one says...