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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...
Pageant of the Masters returning to Laguna Beach following 2020 postponement
Pageant of the Masters / Festival of Arts Entrance “Unique” has become a greatly overused word. Inaccurately used, also. Events are described as “so unique” and “very unique.” Experiences promoted as “really unique” or “truly unique.” Something is either unique – one of a kind – or it is not, and most are not. The Pageant of the Masters is unique. After a one-year COVID-19 absence, The Pageant of the Masters returns to Laguna Beach, California July 7 – September 3. The nightly performance features elaborate set designs and costumed actors portraying figures in famous...
Highlights of Tulsa, Oklahoma's Philbrook and Gilcrease museums
Allan Houser, Prayer, 1994, Bronze, Philbrook Museum of Art (Left) Allan Houser, Sacred Rain Arrow, bronze. Gilcrease Museum (Right) The riches of old oil and gas money have provided Tulsa with numerous amenities beyond what’s typical for a city of 400,000 residents. Two of the best are its art museums: The Philbrook Museum of Arts and the Gilcrease Museum. Their collections and programming would be esteemed in cities 10 times this size. A pair of sculptures, along with their location, unite the institutions. A pair of paintings highlight them. Allan Houser Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1914-1994)...
Experience contemporary Native American Culture this summer in Rapid City, South Dakota
Crazy Horse Laser Light Show. PHOTO: Crazy Horse Memorial For collectors of Native American art, make this the summer you take your interest from observation to experience. Doing so serves as the best reminder that Native people in America are not an anachronism, locked away in time through painting and sculpture. Native people and Native cultures are contemporary, vibrant, continual. See this first-hand in and around Rapid City, South Dakota, beginning at the Crazy Horse Memorial 40 miles southwest of town in the striking Black Hills. The Crazy Horse Memorial is the world’s largest mountain carving in progress–an...
Agnes Pelton Returns To The Desert At Palm Springs Art Museum
Agnes Pelton, The Ray Serene, 1925. Oil on canvas. Collection of Lynda and Stewart Resnick. PHOTO: JAIRO RAMIREZ. Agnes Pelton’s artwork has returned to the desert. It was here where her singular artistic vision reached its peak. It was here where she spent the last 30 years of her life. It was here where her artwork was rediscovered–long after her death–and began receiving some small measure of the acclaim it is due. Fitting, then, that a widely-lauded, cross-country tour which has now recast early abstract painting with her as a central–not forgotten–figure, “Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist,” should culminate at the Palm...
An unlikely alliance and friendship: the lost pottery tiles of Awa Tsireh and Paul Saint-Gaudens
By Mark Sublette and Michael Horsley Nine tiles by Awa Tsireh (San Ildefonso) One of the most exciting moments in any art dealer's career is discovering new, important works of art. Usually, the find occurs in the form of a single unknown piece that is fresh to the market; however, on rare occasions when the stars align, the discovery can be in the form of a forgotten cache of artwork. If one is indeed fortunate, the find can also provide new insights into an artist's body of work and shed light by adding to their catalog raisonne; the...
Navajo Pictorial Rugs and Blankets
Navajo Pictorial weavings are the perfect marriage of artistry and engineering Collectors worldwide value pictorial Navajo rugs and blankets for their charm and the artistic vision needed to create them. All Navajo textiles are woven on simple, un-mechanized frame upright looms that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. To make a visually successful rug using such basic tools, a Navajo weaver must develop a highly attuned spatial sense to plan and execute the complex geometric patterns for which these weavings are known. Weavers that add pictorial elements to their textiles require great command of their craft as often these...
Four monumental figures greet visitors to Jane DeDeckerâs Loveland, Colorado studio. In life, the women were larger even than the near 10-foot height DeDecker sculpts them.
Jane DeDecker 'Ripples of Change' sculpture figures, Left to Right, Laura Cornelius Kellog, Harriet Tubman, Martha Coffin Wright (seated), Sojourner Truth | Photo Credit: Chadd Scott Ripples of Change depicts four activists whose work supported women’s suffrage: Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Harriet Tubman, Martha Coffin Wright and Sojourner Truth. Their contributions to the cause are vastly under-recognized. Most audiences will be familiar with Tubman and Truth. Kellogg, a Native American (Oneida), and Wright, a Quaker, are largely anonymous to the general public. Two Black women, an indigenous woman and a Quaker. You can connect the dots for yourself as...
Frist Art Museum in Nashville presents Western art alongside indigenous perspectives
Frist Art Museum exterior view | Courtesy of the Frist Art Museum An art exhibition can change history. Every year, from the hundreds of exhibitions hosted by museums and galleries around the nation, one – maybe two – deeply alter common perceptions not merely of art history, but American history. Our culture. Our civilization. Where we came from and how we got here. “Creating the American West Through Art,” on view now at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee through June 27, is not one of those exhibitions. But it was influenced by one that was. “Hearts...
Shonto Begay: 'Art Saves Lives'
Shonto Begay, b. 1954 (Navajo), The Gaagi'' Call, 2021. Acrylic on canvas 30” x 48” “Art saves lives.” –Shonto Begay. For Diné (Navajo) artist Shonto Begay (b. 1954), that’s more than a figure of speech. It’s autobiographical. “I was what they call a generation of the walking traumas, because of the 13 boys that I grew up with very closely, there's only three of us alive,” Begay told Forbes.com. Begay’s personal history reaches back into an era difficult to imagine in a contemporary world. He was born in a ceremonial Navajo hogan–a sacred home–to a mother who was a...
Iconic Charles M. Russell painting is the prize in a new fundraising effort in Great Falls
By Guest Writer Michael Clawson Charles M. Russell (1864-1926), The Hold Up, 1899, oil on canvas, 30 x 48 in. Petrie Collection, Denver, Colorado. One of the most important and famous paintings by Charles M. Russell is at the center of a new fundraising campaign at the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana. The painting, the 1899 masterwork The Hold Up, was unveiled as the key prize in a new initiative within the Art and Soul Campaign, a $25 million campaign to grow the museum’s endowment. The new initiative’s push is to raise an additional $2.5 million...