Art is a team sport. Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive, but in reality, the cliched vision of the tortured artist working alone in a bleak, drafty studio is a bit more Hollywood than true life. Yes, the seeds of creativity need quiet space to take root,...
For more than 50 years, Perry Null has been trading artwork and jewelry with American Indians from different tribal nations. He began learning the business in 1970 when he started buying and selling jewelry from Navajo, Zuni, Hopi, and other Indigenous silversmiths. He worked along the...
Tradition is a term that is used frequently as a statement, ending discussions instead of starting them. But such reluctance does not apply to traditional Western and Native American art. In that context, it refers to generations of experts who sought and, in some instances,...
If a picture says a thousand words, then Hopi potter Nampeyo [c. 1859 – 1942] has shared many great tales. Widely known as the most remarkable Pueblo potter of all time, Nampeyo was a prolific artist, and her legacy upholds its place in the world...
Bridgette Meinhold paints large-scale landscapes inspired by the Mountain West she calls home, imbuing these artworks with an almost trancelike quality through the medium of encaustic. She applies as many as 20 separate thin layers of pigment-colored beeswax and three to four coats of milk-based...
Kathleen Frank’s oil paintings portray the natural world with lively patterns inspired by her training in woodblock printmaking; exuberant color rooted in a love of Mexican and Central American culture; and a heightened sense of drama derived from her familiarity with the geography and weather...
Steve Latimer has legitimately considered himself a fine artist of Western scenes for most of his 77 years. Yet, for the past four decades, he has lived in the Central Florida city of Lakeland, and it was only three years ago that he experienced the...
For as far back as he can remember, Ken Williams Jr. has loved collecting artwork made by Native peoples, including those of his and his mother’s tribe, the Arapaho of Wyoming, as well as his father’s Seneca tribe, on whose reservation he grew up near...
Paul Rochford, who grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was one of those unusual kids whose parents never had to ask him to clean his room. He always kept it “just so,” he says. Meanwhile, in Chicago, Michael Violante’s parents allowed their young, art-enamored...
The art world is famously opaque. Let’s face it, obfuscation is, well, arty. And fun. Really fun. This is why I love writing “Collector’s Notebook”: the art world provides an endless well of secrets from which to draw. And the price of art is one...