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...
Stephen Datz retraces artistic footsteps in new exhibition "New Perspectives: The Landscapes of Stephen Datz
Stephen Datz 'Coffee with the Gossips' |30" x 60" | Oil Stephen Datz has been here before. Echo Park inside Dinosaur National Monument. Colorado National Monument and the Book Cliffs area near the artist’s home in Grand Junction. Arches National Park. Escalante, Utah. He previously saw these places through the eyes of a young man, figuring out his way in the world and what the artwork that would take him through it should look like. In his latest exhibition of new paintings on view at Medicine Man Gallery beginning January 22, collectors will find Datz, now 25...
Lessons on life and art from Western landscape painter Stephen Datz
You can learn a lot from an artist. Sure, the artistic life of freedom, risk and inspiration appears completely separate from the 9-to-5, workaday existence of most collectors. Their unapproachable talent and our reverence for it tends to make them seem likewise unapproachable. While some artists do exist on totally different planes of existence – it’s doubtful many people ever found Andy Warhol particularly relatable – most are more like the rest of us than we think. Take Stephen Datz for instance. During a recent conversation in advance of his upcoming show of new work at Medicine Man Gallery,...
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...