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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
Historic "Grounded in Clay" Pueblo Pottery Exhibition Wraps Up Nationwide Tour in Albuquerque
“Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” debuted in July of 2022 at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe. Over the preceding four years, the stunning exhibition traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Saint Louis Art Museum. The nation’s most elite...
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...
Oldest known pair of moccasins highlights collection at Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West
Quilled moccasins circa 1725 | Courtesy Western Spirit: Scottsdale's Museum of the West Every museum holds surprises. How could anyone entering Western Spirit: Scottsdale‘s Museum of the West ever think they were about to see the oldest known pair of Native American moccasins in existence. Yet, there they are. Quilled Moccasins. Dakota (Eastern Sioux), Minnesota. 1725. Think about that. Fifty years prior to the Revolutionary War. Three-hundred years old. Don’t forget, this is organic material. The moccasins are made from tanned hide, porcupine quills, colored pigments, red dyed deer hair, string, thread. Stuff that disintegrates as it ages....
Maynard Dixon's "forgotten men" on view at BYU Museum of Art
Maynard Dixon, Forgotten Man (1934) | Courtesy BYU Museum of Art Hard times. Maynard Dixon knew them. During the Great Depression, he and his wife Dorothea Lange shared the experiences of millions of Americans. Hunger. On the verge of homeless. Out of this trauma came an exceptional and little-known body of work from the artist dedicated to what he called “the forgotten men,” casualties of the Depression like himself. Dixon’s “forgotten men” are among 70 artworks on view at the BYU Museum of Art for the exhibition “Maynard Dixon: Searching for a Home” through September 23, 2023. “When...
BYU Museum of Art opening historic exhibition of Maynard Dixon paintings
Maynard Dixon, A Lonesome Journey, 1946 | Photo Courtesy BYU Museum of Art Violence defined the West of Fredric Remington and Charlie Russell. Gunfights. Animal slaughters. Stolen land. Dash for the Timbers. Cowboys shooting Indians. Cowboys shooting each other. Cowboys killing wildlife. All of what they painted and sculpted happened, of course, but their artwork goes beyond simple observation. Their artwork mostly glorified this barbarism. Russell and Remington were Manifest Destiney artists, romanticizing white settler colonialism’s take-by-force and divine right approach to the West. Whoever was abused or robbed or died along the way, well… all in the...
Highlights from the Whitney Western Art Museum at Buffalo Bill Center of the West
Frederick Remington recreated studio installed at Whitney Western Art Museum | Photo Courtesy Chadd Scott With the world’s greatest natural wonders outside – the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park is an hour’s drive – the attractions inside the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, WY need to clear a high bar to make them worth your while. They do and they are. The Center’s manmade objects don’t compare to mountains, geysers and grizzly bears, but if the weather’s crummy or you find yourself with extra time, dropping into the Center of the West will provide...