Contemporary Visions: Legacies of the American West: On View at The Owings Gallery on Palace Ave.

The inhabitants of the West, both old and new, have captivated the attention of artists since the first Euro-American explorers and settlers traversed the Mississippi River. Here indigenous peoples survived with greater vitality and in sheer numbers than anywhere else in the republic, and well-established Hispanic settlements with distinctive folkways constellated the Rio Grande River Valley well before the advent of the Anglos. The works that follow collectively demonstrate the enduring place of native peoples in the West and in giving shape to notions of what "the West" is. Robert Duncan's The Root Gatherer and John Moyers's The Tempest both emphasize the persistence of Indigenous lifeways in the Intermountain West, a region identifiable as much by its inhabitants as its mountainous terrain. Logan Maxwell Hagege's dignified Against a Blue Sky, featuring a resolute horseman and his no less plucky horse, is even more pointed in its assertion of native resilience.

The "American West" perhaps most readily evokes notions of densely forested mountain ranges, torrid deserts, deep canyons, and seemingly interminable plains. Although depicting different locations across very different seasons, each of the following works is quintessentially Western. 

Frank Croft's Angle of Repose, Ghost Ranch offers a highly naturalistic view of Georgia O'Keeffe's storied Ghost Ranch, while Ed Mell's Desert Tributary, set in Arizona, exemplifies his tendency to vacillate between realism and abstraction. Other artists-such as Dean Mitchell in Snow Hills, William Sharer in Arturo's Sheep Company, and Chen Chi in Winter Trees in Snow-have pared down their compositions to their most essential elements so as to capture the immensity and solitude of the Western landscape.