Writing
Inside the Circle | Cowboy Poetry
Cowboys & Indians | Travelogue
Dinner service at the Star Hotel has ended. Family-style spreads of spaghetti, chorizos, cabbage soup, beans, and garlic-smothered steaks have been cleared. Tables and chairs are stacked in the corners of the modest dining room. Concertgoers flow into every remaining space.
From the back of the room, you look over a sea of cowboy hats — a few with feathers and ribbons, many with real dirt and real sweat. There is no stage, but if you turn your attention to the same corner as everyone else, you might catch a glimpse of a familiar face or a lick of a favorite song.
California Country | Prix de West Society
Western Art Collector | Travelogue
If California brings to mind paper straws and palm trees, a West that’s simply about cities and strip malls and suburban sprawl—its Central Coast may surprise you. A hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles, California horse country begins to unfold. And depending on who you ask, it continues up El Camino Real to San Luis Obispo and all the way to Carmel Valley and Monterey Bay.
This part of California is The West in capital letters. It’s a West that had horse culture and a string of missions backed by the might of Spain before the United States Constitution was ratified a continent away. A West where team ropers, quarter horse reiners, thoroughbred breeders, and Prince Harry’s polo ponies all coexist today.
Yeah, I said coexist. So if you hadn’t guessed by now, I live in California. I wasn’t born here, but I got here as soon as I could.
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Pearl Aday | Profile
Music in SF
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Cowboying on the Sagebrush Sea
Cowboys & Indians
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Female Forces in Country Music
Cowgirl Magazine
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Jonathan Adler | Q&A
Yellowpop
Alex Ziv | Tailor Made for Today
Western Art Collector | Profile
Dialing in from Grass Valley, a Sierra foothill town where California’s hippies and cowboys collide, Alex Ziv curses his shoddy Zoom connection. Rural Wi-Fi is one tradeoff the artist made leaving the city for this, until recently, snow-burdened corner of the world. A tatted-up, bearded 30-something, Ziv sits in a lofty studio strewn with Navajo textiles, Western shirts, old toys, retro tattoo art and ephemera from across the ages.
As a collector of kitsch, he definitely has an aesthetic. These objects and ideas often make their way into his practice, although in altered forms. His art is a mashup of motifs lifted from his travels through the Southwest and his own take on life in the 21st century. An amalgam of corporate logos, pop culture references, ancient art forms and yesterday’s headlines, his paintings are beautiful, tense and as contradictory as America itself. READ MORE
Sophy Brown | Horse Power
Western Art Collector | Profile
Dripping spray paint. Lost and found forms. Dust, muscle, power and pain. Sophy Brown’s horses take you from chaos to calm and back again. Standing in front of one, it’s clear why they’re showstoppers. But as you spend more time with them, their glamor gives way to grit.
Patrick Dean Hubbell | On the Fringes
Native American Art | Profile
Hailing from Navajo, New Mexico, a small town in the Navajo Nation, Patrick Dean Hubbell brings an Indigenous perspective to the contemporary art world. Informed by life in reservation border towns and a couple hundred years of European expansion in his ancestral homelands, Hubbell’s work is poignant, cutting and clever.
From blind contour drawings of “cowboys and Indians” to works that literally deconstruct classical paintings and the tropes that go with them, Hubbell’s physical practice is wide-ranging. Cotton canvas removed from stretcher bars, painted, cut into fringe and rehung. Distorted portraits aggressively breaching gilded frames.
Eric Bowman | More to the Picture
Western Art Collector | Profile
Eric Bowman doesn’t care about details. His paintings are not meant to be a historical record of ranching. Or the American West. In fact, he’s not even a cowboy. From clouds and cliffs, figures and foliage, the Oregon-based artist is in it for the physical qualities of paint and the power of good design. To this end, his mark- making is rich and rhythmic, his forms gestural.
Working in oil, Bowman’s paintings are at once luminous and grainy—something akin to an old Polaroid, alpenglow, or the rosy hue of a long-spent memory just before it fades away.
Barbara Van Cleve | Accidental Feminists
Western Art Collector | Booth Museum
In her decades-spanning career, Barbara Van Cleve traveled through country where feminism was and still is a dirty word. Born into ranching herself, the intrepid photographer pointed her lens toward women who weren’t looking for labels. They were busy doing what needed to be done: Raising kids and cattle. Mending fence and mending clothes. Some lived hours from the supermarket. Some off grid. And not because it was cool.
For Van Cleve, photographing women ranchers was a way to add them to the historical record, to give a voice to their vital, often unsung contributions. Opening April 15 at the Booth Western Art Museum, Barbara Van Cleve: Women of the West celebrates these vignettes of rarely seen ranch life. READ MORE
Whitney Gardner | Mojave Rising
Western Art Collector | Profile
Whitney Gardner paints a desert unknown to most, including visitors to Joshua Tree National Park. Dotted with odd-looking vegetation—ocotillo, jumping cholla, and the Dr. Seuss-looking trees that give the park its name, her boulder-strewn stretch of the Mojave quickly gives way to dry lakebeds and spare landscapes that double as training ground for U.S. Marines headed to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Her nearest town is 29 Palms, the northeastern gateway to the national park. She lives in Wonder Valley, a small, unincorporated community of ranchettes and desert people doing desert things, another 20 minutes past town. Beyond there lies the kind of landscape that rattles the faint of heart, inspiring names like Skeleton Pass, Lost Horse Mine and Devil’s Playground. Keep diving east and you’re at the Colorado River. Cross it, and you’re in Arizona. READ MORE
Sean Michael Chavez | ICONS
Western Art Collector | Acosta-Strong
“There are metaphors about going from the frying pan into the fire,” Sean Michael Chavez laughs, recounting his plunge into the Western art world. Just three years since his first solo show in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his gritty portrayals of cowboys and the landscapes they call home have caught the eye of collectors and museum curators across the country. READ MORE
Doug West | Desert Solitaire
Western Art Collector | Blue Rain Gallery
At 75, Doug West is still chasing after that deep desert space. His latest show at Blue Rain Gallery, Chaco Canyon and Beyond, brings West’s vision of Arizona and New Mexico alive in oil. From White Sands to the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, the artist pairs desert landmarks with botanical elements in a design forward style that’s made him a New Mexico luminary. READ MORE
Sushe Felix | Rocky Mountain Modern
Western Art Collector | Manitou Gallery
Modernism is a loaded term. To some, it means the art of today. And to others, it’s a movement pioneered by bold new artists a century ago. For Colorado-based painter, Sushe Felix it’s a little of both. “It’s messing with it and turning it into your own interpretation,” Felix says of modernist landscape painting. “For some artists, that involved some cubism, for other artists, no,” she explains, referencing regionalist painters from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s who traveled west in search of fresh opportunities and inspiration. READ MORE
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Sarah Bahbah
Visual Artist
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Rich and Sarah Coombs
Joshua Tree House
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Susan Alexandra
Neon Sign Collab
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Swiss Artist Vicon
Neon sign collab