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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
A Visit to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art
I made my first visit to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art in May of 2024. The modestly sized museum has fine holdings of mostly 20th century American art and boasts one of the largest collections of Dale Chihuly glass anywhere in the world. I found myself especially drawn to four Western landscapes. The museum doesn’t specialize in...
Latest characters in Virgil Ortiz' 'Revolt' series unveiled at History Colorado Center
Indigenous futurism in the artwork of Virgil Ortiz | Photo courtesy Virgil Ortiz Indigenous Futurism. Within the Native American art world, Virgil Ortiz (b. 1969; Cochiti Pueblo) virtually invented the genre. Around the year 2000, Ortiz began merging stories of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt heard since childhood with the science fiction imagery that has fascinated him since the release of “Star Wars,” another story of rebellion, in 1977. The latest and most dramatic expression of the artist’s vision of Indigenous futurism can be seen now through May of 2024 at History Colorado Center in Denver. “Virgil Ortiz...
Medicine Man Gallery to sponsor SWAIA Indian Market Best of Show award
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) Best of Category photograph from SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market 2022 awards ceremony | Photo by Chadd Scott The next 100 years of SWAIA Indian Market begin with Medicine Man Gallery sponsoring the event’s Best of Show Award. Celebrating it’s 101st edition August 18-20, 2023, the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Indian Market in Santa Fe brings together over 1,000 Native American artists from 200-plus sovereign nations and upwards of 100,000 attendees making it the largest Indigenous arts show in the world. Medicine Man Gallery founder and owner Mark Sublette attended his first...
11 Must-see paintings at Booth Western Art Museum
Installation view of Maynard Dixon 'Red Butte with Mountain Men' flanked by Jim Vogel paintings at Booth Western Art Museum | Photo by Chadd Scott With the largest exhibition space in the world for Western art, the Booth Western Art Museum 40 miles north of Atlanta in Cartersville, GA has hundreds of artworks on view at any one time. Most of the genre’s legendary figures are represented: Bierstadt, Moran, Remington, Russell, Dixon. The Booth’s permanent collection, however, primarily focuses on contemporary Western Art, post-1965, following the formation of the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa...
Rare chance to see O'Keeffe masterpiece at Harwood Museum of Art in Taos
Georgia O'Keeffe 'The Lawrence Tree' | Courtesy Harwood Museum of Art A rare and exciting opportunity presents visitors to the Harwood Museum in Taos through January 28, 2024, as Georgia O’Keeffe’s The Lawrence Tree, painted just outside the city, will be on view as part of the museum’s centennial celebration. O’Keeffe kept the masterpiece in her personal collection until selling it to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT at age 94 in 1981. The unusual picture with the ground-up, “worm’s eye view” perspective hasn’t been in New Mexico since. The tree is named after English writer and philosopher...
What makes Bror Nordfeldt’s Summer Dusk (Solitude) a masterpiece
Bror Nordfeldt "Summer Dusk (Solitude)" c. 1920 | Photo by Chadd Scott Those of us who love the West and Western art, but live “out East,” are often left eating our hearts out at Instagram posts of Sonoran sunsets or stories online detailing the latest museum exhibition 2,000 miles away for beloved artists. I say “our” because I live just outside of Jacksonville, FL. I make it “out West” a few times a year, always looking forward to my next visit. Imagine my surprise then upon entering “American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection” at the...
Shelburne Museum launching new Native American initiative
Artist formerly known [Tsitsistas/Suhtai (Cheyenne)], Beaded Pannier, ca. 1880. Collection of Shelburne Museum, gift of Ogden M. Pleissner.1961-182.36.1. As 2022 rolled into 2023, the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT had exactly zero Native American items on view. The museum has possessed Native American artwork since its founding in 1947, but took all holdings off view roughly 15 years ago, rightly uncomfortable with its inability to appropriately display the material without a better understanding of it and its context. In a swift and stunning course correction prone to deliver the museological equivalent of whiplash, the museum has since made...
Terran Last Gun: Contemporary spin on ancient tradition
Terran Last Gun, 'Future Cosmic Energy.' 16x45 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Missoula Art Museum What do you see when looking at Terran Last Gun’s geometric abstraction ledger drawings? Do you see Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly? Hard Edge painting from the 1960s? Something else? Last Gun’s works prove an art appreciation Rorschach test. Different people will see different things, and what you see will reveal your background even more than the artist’s. “What I’m doing is not pulling from any European art history at all, it's from these painted lodges that we’ve been creating for thousands...
What can Artificial Intelligence tell you about Western Art?
Kim Wiggins, Fiesta Day on the Plaza, 2003. Oil on canvas. Briscoe Museum of Western Art | Photo by Chadd Scott What does artificial intelligence think of Western art? I asked. ChatGPT from Openai.com is the most widely used ask-and-answer artificial intelligence tool available online. It’s free to use with signup which requires an email address and phone number. I started by prompting ChatGPT to tell me, “what is Western art?” Not surprisingly, it responded with a history of art from Western Civilization beginning with ancient Greece and Rome. I modified my request to specify “Western American art.”...
Ben Aleck sharing his Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe heritage at Nevada Museum of Art
Ben Aleck, Kwe'naa'a (eagle), circa 2010, acrylic on canvas, 6 x 10 feet. Collection of the Reno Sparks Geometry and eagles seemingly have nothing in common. To members of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe (Kooyooe Tukadu/cui-ui fish eaters) like artist Ben Aleck, however, they have everything in common which is why both themes repeat throughout his work. “The geometrics come from the beadwork and basket designs of the Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe and Great Basin tribes,” Aleck explains. Pyramid Lake is located forty miles northwest of Reno within the boundaries of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation along Nevada’s...
San Antonio offers an introduction to artist Jesse Treviño
Jesse Treviño, Señora Dolores Treviño (1983). Acrylic on canvas. 53.5 x 85.5 in. Collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art| Photo by Chadd Scott “Locally famous” isn’t quite the oxymoron of “jumbo shrimp” or “organized chaos,” but when it comes to art, I always wonder what circumstances prevented “locally famous” artists from becoming just “famous” artists. I was pondering this again following a spring 2023 visit to San Antonio and introduction to “locally famous” artist Jesse Treviño (1946-2023). Jesse Treviño’s artwork is everywhere in San Antonio. A painting of his mother hangs prominently in the San Antonio...