“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...
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...