Ben Steele came to Helper, Utah, in 2002, lured by the opportunity to apprentice under retired professor and artist David Dornan. He arrived in the former mining and railroad town equipped with a BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Utah and accompanied...
Hunt Slonem’s New York City studio is an explosion of color, art, and objects, from antique furniture to top hats, harps, framed photographs, plants, and rugs. Though I can’t see his collection of 10 rescued exotic birds, their chatter periodically floats up through the breaks...
Patricia Michaels moves through the world like silk through light: with a gentle grace that belies a structural integrity stronger than steel. She is Taos Pueblo, a mother, a teacher at Parsons School of Design, and one of the most singular fashion designers working in...
Livingston, Montana, is a place of contrasts. It’s a railroad town with a hint of grit, a crossroads where the road from Yellowstone meets the interstate, and the closest sizable town from Bozeman on the other side of a pass just high enough to cause...
Chaos. That’s what comes to mind in painter/woodcarver Gregory Lomayesva’s living room — aka studio — in the South Capitol neighborhood of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Even Lomayesva calls his routine chaotic, complete randomness. “You bounce around a bunch of things and suddenly it’s, ‘I’m going...
Grain elevators have been landmarks of the West since the heyday of their construction in the 1920s and ’30s. With their tall, shouldered silhouettes and industrial cylindrical shapes, these architectural icons have long acted as beacons signaling from afar the location of the next settlement...
In her studio not far from the famous Santa Fe Opera, Roseta Santiago is painting a Native American figure clad in regalia. “I am drawn to Native people and I’m drawn to the energy of the Southwest,” she says. “I found it to be a...
With Jeff Legg’s still-life Divine Balance, you cannot avert your eyes because the longer one looks, the more mesmerizing the subjects become. They don’t defy reason, but they do defy gravity — the same as the composition dares to challenge what the mind expects to...
For Comanche artist Nocona Burgess, the studio is not only a creative workspace but also a container of memory, identity, tradition, and community. “It’s full of stuff,” Burgess says. “Just kind of off-the-wall stuff that I’ve collected. It’s art and objects from friends and former...
Jim Vogel was always known as the artist among his 11 sisters and brothers. As children, they’d be playing outside their home in Roswell, New Mexico, when an idea would pop into Jim’s head, and he’d run inside to craft his latest vision. Once, it...