At an exhibition a few years before the end of his life, Denver-based artist Vance Kirkland was standing next to his painting Unknown Space Mysteries 9 Billion Years B.C. (1979), part of his Dot Paintings series, when a scientist walked up and stood beside him....
In the 2002 film about Agnes Martin, produced by Mary Lance when the artist was 90, Martin looks mischievously at the camera and delivers this classic line: “Somebody once asked me what was my happiest moment painting? And I told them, ‘When they go out...
In 1944, Frank Mechau’s painting, Tom Kenney Comes Home, was part of an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago and included in a catalogue for the show. When Mechau received the catalogue, he got on his horse and carried it six miles down the...
Bailey Placzek, curator of collections for the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, was relaxing at home one day a few years ago, listening to instrumental, ambient music with her eyes closed. “All of a sudden, one of Still’s paintings popped into my mind. I wondered,...
When visitors to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco stood before James Earle Fraser’s End of the Trail, they would have experienced the towering sculpture as a reflection of certain beliefs about Native Americans and the Western frontier. But no single perspective represented...
“I will overcome every barrier to success,” Susie Barstow wrote in her journal in 1856, “and soon, with the sun rising above every Earthly conflict, make myself a name and position that will influence the whole world.” An aspiring artist, Barstow was 20 years old...
Effie Anderson Smith [1869–1955] had a theory about the lovely hues of atmospheric haze in the Arizona desert, a landscape she loved and painted for more than 50 years. She believed that microscopic particles of mineralized dust were suspended in the dry desert air, changing...
On the surface, Oscar Howe [1915–1983] was a thoughtful, quiet, patient man, dedicated to his work as an artist and teacher and to his people, the Yanktonai band of the Dakota tribe in South Dakota, where he grew up and spent most of his adult...
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...