What is “Western American” art?
As early as the 1700s Euro-American artists from the East Coast, Midwest, and elsewhere were drawn to the American West and Southwest, well before the federal government employed artists and purchased fine art to fill libraries, courthouses, post offices, and other public buildings. Artists recorded the so-called Western “frontier” during government expeditions in the 1700s, painters captured the grandeur of America’s natural wonders and the customs of its Indigenous people throughout the 1800s, and by the early 20th century, artists’ colonies such as the Taos Society of Artists were firmly established in northern New Mexico.
Many Western American artists trained in formal fine art academies on the East Coast and in Europe. As the paintings in this exhibition illustrate, artists depicting Native peoples and Southwestern landscapes often did so using a traditional, European visual language.
More than Meets the Eye
The title of this exhibition—“Views on the Southwest”—suggests the range of perspectives that Western American artists brought to their subjects and canvases. Their works reveal multiple experiences in, and interpretations of, this region, its people, and its history. As you explore the exhibition, notice the creative choices each artist employed to express their individual perspectives and styles.
Though Western American artists celebrated and found inspiration in the people and landscapes of the Southwest, their views and painterly interpretations were not without complications or contradictions. As artists flocked to New Mexico, tourism to the region increased, and an appetite grew for scenes of the Southwest in the art market. Many images presented a romanticized, mythic view of the region from an outsider point-of-view. The conflicting impacts of tourism and detrimental government policies on Native American lives typically remained outside of these paintings’ frames in favor of a growing taste for picturesque scenes of the Southwest. Joseph Traugott, a former curator of the New Mexico Museum of Art, described such imagery of New Mexico as coming from a “southwesternist” point of view, “an apt name for exoticized descriptions of Native peoples and the region’s landscape.”1
