“I found out that the sunshine in New Mexico could do almost anything with one,” wrote American arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan after moving to Taos in 1917. In the high-altitude village with an elevation of 6,969 feet, nestled beneath the Sangre de Cristo Mountains,...
Since its opening in 1926, the InterContinental Mark Hopkins Hotel has galvanized its position as a San Francisco landmark. Located atop the city’s celebrated Nob Hill neighborhood, the hotel stands in the footprint of a grand Gothic-style mansion built by Mark Hopkins, one of the...
The exploration of the Western frontier lasted only a few hundred years, but it dramatically shaped our national identity. As historian David Hamilton Murdoch writes in The American West: The Invention of a Myth, “No other nation has taken a time and place from its...
Taylor Crisp can pinpoint the moment she decided to become a painter. Seven years ago, soon after graduating from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts with the goal of writing for television and film, she went to the now-departed Leanin’ Tree Museum...
Mike Stidham may portray a wide variety of fish coveted by anglers, along with the land and waterscapes where the finny prey are found. But don’t mistakenly call him a fish artist. “I play with colors and masses and shapes,” laughs the ever-jovial painter, who...
Larry Yaw has always found his art to be an avocational outlet and also a dynamic creative tool, working as he does in architecture, a field in which most ideas “begin with a series of thumbnail sketches.” As one of the founding partners of the...
The cylindrical glass coffee table fabricated by Bullseye Studio seems magically lit from within. Yet, the sculptural object contains no internal source of illumination. Instead, any trace of natural light sets the elegantly streamlined, amber-hued structure aglow. The one-of-a-kind object, made for a private client...
Last summer, turn-of-the-20th-century photographer Royal W. (Roland) Reed Jr. finally received recognition for his imagery of Indigenous Americans at a permanent exhibit in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The Roland Reed Gallery has been a long time coming and honors an artist whose untimely death in 1934...
I remember having a conversation as a college freshman with a friend who was studying painting. It was early in her career, and she was wondering about the usefulness of an artist’s statement, perhaps a bit bothered with the “busy work” of having to write...
Don Siegel has spent his life surrounded by the beauty and elegance of historic Native American art, first as a collector and now, after opening his own private space in downtown Santa Fe, as a dealer. His specialty has always been vintage Navajo and Pueblo...