At 20 years old, Allan Houser, who had grown up on his parents’ farm near Apache, Oklahoma, noticed a poster at the Indian Affairs Office in nearby Anadarko. It invited artwork submissions to recruit students into a new art program at the Santa Fe Indian...
Among the vast collection of artwork and personal papers that artist Eugenie Frederica Shonnard bequeathed to the Museum of New Mexico system following her death in 1978 is a pair of ceramic candlesticks she created in the form of little squirrels. In old photographs, the...
Harry Jackson, the artist credited with revitalizing Western American bronze beginning in the late 1950s, reviving the lost art of polychrome sculpture, and writing a definitive book on Italian Renaissance lost-wax bronze casting, is also the man who, in an authentic cowboy voice, could sing...
He was still a kid, just 16 or 17, when Richard Serra spent an afternoon at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco’s North Beach. The future artist was working in a steel mill to put himself through school at the time. He used his fake...
If you feel any love at all for modern design of the past seven decades, chances are you’ve been moved by the work of Charles and Ray Eames. The husband-and-wife design team revolutionized not only the way furnishings looked but also how they felt and...
Of all the interactions between Native Americans and the U.S. government in the late 1800s, the experience of 71 Southern Plains warriors at Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida, was among the most unusual. The men were prisoners of war, but their three years of...
Decades before the term “New Age” achieved popularity in American culture and long before a fascination with Eastern philosophies brought yoga and meditation into the Western consciousness, an intensely inward-looking American artist was tapping into mystical, non-material reality and creating exquisite, ephemeral paintings from her...
There’s a story that art historian Michael R. Grauer tells about two co-founders of the Taos Society of Artists, the small group of painters who, beginning in 1915, were highly influential in popularizing realistic and romanticized images of the American Southwest. The first time William...
Rudolph Schindler’s house in West Hollywood doesn’t appear on any of the Hollywood star maps, yet it’s among the most important and revolutionary residences in America. While the likes of Lucille Ball or Liz Taylor never lived in the home, the stars of design and...
Early in his career, R.C. Gorman was staying at the Safari Hotel in downtown Scottsdale, Arizona, before the opening of his solo show at a nearby gallery when he realized there was nothing in the hotel lobby advertising the show. He called his teenage cousin...