With previews of gallery exhibitions, museum shows and auctions, Western Art Collector is the premier monthly magazine for collectors searching for works by talented living and past artists who depict the West in paintings and sculptures.
I’m sure most of you have met Michael Clawson. He was last seen on our Western Art Collector Instagram dressed as Charlie Russell for Halloween. If you haven’t seen it yet, take a quick social media scroll through and check it out. Something you may not know about Michael, though, is that before he joined the magazine he was a film and music critic and as such interviewed many famous personalities in both of those fields. Well, something we didn’t know about Michael until he joined the team is that he not only writes about films but he makes them as well. Hopefully, you have seen some of his work before. Michael travels to many of the Western art events we all love that take place across the country, films…
The National Endowment for the Humanities, the independent grant-making agency of the United States government, has awarded the Autry Museum of the American West a grant totaling $400,000 to re-envision its current popular culture gallery as Imagined Wests, a new exhibition designed to expand public conceptions of the American West in mass media and the arts. The exhibition will feature hundreds of objects from across the Autry’s collections. It will open in the 5,000-square-foot space in the Ted and Marian Craver Imagination Gallery. For 30 years the Imagination Gallery has focused on how Western film has evolved as a response to social and cultural changes taking place throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. “The new exhibition will weave the historic Imagination Gallery spirit together with new ideas and themes thoroughly…
When early visitors to Glacier National Park visited the Glacier Park Lodge they immediately saw wonderful murals that decorated the lodge walls. When the lodges were remodeled in the 1950s, some of the murals were cut from their moldings, removed from their panels, rolled up and thrown away—seemingly lost forever. But 15 of the murals were saved and stored at the home of Leona and Robert Brown, who passed them down to their granddaughter Leanne and her husband Alan Goldhahn. In September of 2012, Leanne donated the murals to the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell, Montana, in memory of her grandparents, Leona and Robert. Now seven of those murals have been restored and are now on view at three locations in Montana: three are on permanent display at the…
Arizona’s Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West has been open for more than three years, but already it’s bringing tremendous amounts of interest to Western art with a series of long-term collection loans and traveling exhibitions. Those two aspects of the museum will collide in a big way in early 2019 when three major, and very unique, exhibitions will be on view at the same time. Two of the exhibitions are already open: New Beginnings: An American Story of Romantics and Modernists in the West, which draws from the Tia Collection, opened in October and continues through September 22, 2019; and Charles M. Russell: The Women in his Life and Art, which travels from the C.M. Russell in Montana, opened November 20 and continues through April 14, 2019. The…
Prior to the October 6 opening of the Cowboy Crossings exhibition at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma, the Cowboy Artists of America quietly met for an annual member meeting in one of the museum’s halls. In addition to CAA business, the group also viewed artwork and voted on new members. This year one artist made the cut, Utah painter Chad Poppleton. “I don’t know how else to really say it, but I was blown away,” says Poppleton. “I’ve known the CAs since I was a little kid. I always wanted to be a CA—it was a childhood dream.” Poppleton, who is primarily a wildlife painter who also paints cowboy subject matter, will be the most prominent wildlife artist in the group. During the interview process, the…
What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why? As our current decade comes to an end in 2019, we thought it would be interesting to reflect on illustrations from the 1960s to see how times have changed, or stayed the same, over the last 50 years. Opening at the NMAI this spring, the exhibition will give visitors a glimpse of world leaders, the conflicts they faced and the events that shaped the public, including the first landing on the moon. What are you reading? Currently I am reading Abigail Adams by Woody Holton. Her opinions and work towards women’s equality during the Revolutionary War and through the turn of the 18th century is truly remarkable. She was a brilliantly…
