In 1991, just as his career was about to take flight, Tucker Smith created a 10-by-12-inch painting of a scene he’d observed at the Kentucky Derby. Capturing the commotion before the post parade, Derby Day depicts horses and riders entering the field in front of...
A Wyoming dude ranch experience is a gift that keeps on giving throughout the year. The riding, the fishing, the hearty family-style meals, the grandeur of the mountains, and the smell of the sagebrush — these are things one dreams about when the visit is...
When Wendy Red Star talks about her work, she describes the way things click. Sometimes when she’s driving. Almost always when she’s home. For Red Star, the art is a result of the process: the right medium arises from the concept, which emerges after she...
You have to really want to find the Big Hat Ranch. After a long drive past fields of baled hay, turbulent rivers, and charming old barns, you eventually turn onto a dirt road heading deeper into a box canyon surrounded by craggy peaks. While dust...
At rare moments in the art world, the planets seem to align, bringing together a theme, a setting, a celebration-worthy occasion, and an artist or benefactor in an exhibition of singular distinction. Such occasions all but demand that art lovers drop everything and make travel...
One day a few years ago, Thomas Blackshear II got an email out of the blue from a friend — painter Morgan Weistling — whom he hadn’t seen for quite a while. Weistling didn’t know it at the time, but Blackshear was going through a...
Paul Pletka is drawn to the mysterious. Filled with masked figures and enigmatic rituals, his work is characterized by an obsessive attention to textures and details, from splintered wood and delicate beadwork to human flesh and bones. This tension between sensual surfaces, visible bodies (or...
When I first met and interviewed Dan Brunn, founder of Dan Brunn Architecture in Los Angeles, for an article I was writing in 2016, he was happily ensconced in his house, No. 9 Dream. The project was an ingenious remodel of a nondescript mid-century structure...
Dancing Light is an arresting sculptural home at the base of Camelback Mountain in Arizona’s Paradise Valley community. Rammed earth, metal, and glass join the desert terrain below, while a floating roof is almost imperceptibly anchored by a glass clerestory above. To the rear, facing...
On a sticky, hot afternoon in July 2016, painter Dean Mitchell arrived at the White House at the appointed time, made his way through security, and into the air-conditioned foyer where curator William Allman greeted him. Genial and welcoming, Allman guided Mitchell past portraits of...