There is an old argument that the oil painting was never innocent. The landscape genre grew up beside private property, and to have your fields painted was a way of owning them twice, once in law and once on the wall. The American West reached our eyes the same way. Remington’s cavalry, Russell’s drovers, a sunset dragged across a valley someone already meant to fence: these were pictures of possession wearing the costume of romance. For most of a century the West was a thing looked at, and the looking belonged, overwhelmingly, to the men doing the taking.
What is happening in Santa Fe this month quietly reverses that sentence. In the days after Indian Market, where more than a thousand Native artists from over two hundred Tribal Nations filled the plaza, the galleries hang the West not as an inheritance but as an argument still being had. Six artists, scattered across mediums and bloodlines, are all attempting a version of the same audacious thing. They are taking the brush away from the man on the horse.
The material carries the meaning
Start with Preston Singletary, because his work makes the whole shift visible in one object. Singletary is Tlingit, and the visual language he was born into, the flowing black-and-red grammar of Northwest Coast formline, lived for centuries in cedar, in argillite, in the horn of a mountain goat. Singletary blows it in glass. He learned the craft the unglamorous way, handling production ornaments in a Seattle studio in 1982, then trained under the Murano masters at Pilchuck before carrying home a certain Scandinavian coolness of line. Now he sand-carves raven and salmon and shaman into surfaces that hold light rather than block it. The politics of that switch are worth sitting with. Cedar is warm and mortal, the stuff of a living forest. Glass is the museum’s own material, cold and transparent, the vitrine turned inside out. By moving his ancestors’ imagery into the very substance the collector reveres, Singletary refuses the tidy box marked preservation. His current show, The Good, the Bad and the Raven at Blue Rain, is not a rescue mission for a dying tradition. It is a tradition catching a new light and finding it suits her. Slow down here and simply look. Stand in front of one of Singletary’s ravens. The bird is trickster and creator both, the one who stole the sun and handed us daylight. In glass he glows from within, as if he kept some of that stolen light in his chest. You do not need the wall text. The pleasure is right there, warm and immediate and a little mischievous, the way a good secret is.
How it actually feels
Some of this work does not want to be contemplated. It wants to grab you. Poteet Victory has taken his paintings outside. Victory, born Robert Lee Poteet in Idabel, Oklahoma, Cherokee and Choctaw on his father’s side, spent his early years selling canvases out of the back of a car and now owns one of Santa Fe’s historic houses. His paint goes on thick, dug and dragged with a palette knife, oil and enamel piled into glossy, high-voltage slabs. As the first featured artist of Santa Fe Celebrates, he has had that work projected at architectural scale onto the city’s own adobe landmarks. Consider the nerve of it. An Indigenous painter’s abstraction, four stories tall, crawling across the walls of a colonial city built on the question of whose land this was. After dark the whole town becomes his canvas. Whatever you think of spectacle, you feel something, and that is the point. The picture is no longer a collectible you can quietly own. It is weather. It happens to you. Tony De Luz works the same nerve from the opposite direction, small and warm and human-scaled. A Boston commercial hand turned Sedona painter, De Luz spent years making images for Absolut and USA Today and even a U.S. postage stamp, and that graphic precision never left him. His subject is the West nobody prints on a calendar: the neon motel, the Deco diner, the retro car parked in front of a fading sign. His Street Level paintings glow with roadside pink and desert gold. This is Americana in its most honest register, not Monument Valley but the things Americans actually built beside Monument Valley, the vernacular clutter of the twentieth century treated with the tenderness we usually save for cathedrals. A dead neon sign at dusk turns out to tell the truth about how it feels to be alive here, which is most of what you can ask of a painting.
Who was left out of the picture
There is a colder question worth asking of any picture. Not only what do we see, but who was cropped out before we ever arrived? Put that question to this group and the omissions light up. Gregory Lomayesva is celebrated for scrambling categories. Hopi and Hispanic, folk carving crossed with pop irony and graffiti, sacred motifs turned into deliberately un-devotional objects that provoke arguments about what counts as authentic. Fair enough. But notice the lineage. His father was a Hopi carver. His mother was Marie Romero Cash, a distinguished santera, a maker of saints. A woman’s craft tradition sits at the root of a son’s contemporary fame, and her name deserves to be said aloud rather than folded into the family myth. The question sharpens with the two painters this season’s copy keeps calling contemporary voices in Western art, a genre whose founding figures were, to a man, men. Adrienne Stein trained in a classical atelier from the age of eleven and paints with a magical realist’s license, laying luminous lavenders and turquoises straight into her figures’ skin so her subjects seem lit from somewhere else. Her new show, The Enchanted West, opening today in Kerrville, moves her out of the lush garden and into the desert. She reaches it through Georgia O’Keeffe, and through Agnes Pelton, the visionary desert modernist the canon spent decades pretending it had never met. Stein does not document the West. She dreams it, and she dreams it down a line of women the textbooks kept quiet about. Kathryn Stedham makes that argument almost physical. She sold her first painting at eight, kept a studio at fifteen, trained in East Coast realism, and then, the detail I cannot stop turning over, she climbs. An accomplished rock climber, she has scaled cliff faces on several continents, and she paints geology from inside the encounter rather than from the scenic overlook. The classic Western landscape is the view a man takes from the saddle: distance, mastery, the country spread below him for the taking. Stedham has had her hands in the actual rock. Her West: Reimagined opens at the end of the month, and the title is nearly the thesis of the whole season. What does the West even mean once the person painting it stops trying to conquer the view and starts trying to belong to it?
The bigger picture
Here is the essay these six were quietly writing together. For a hundred years the American West was a way of seeing that flattered the people who claimed it. It was oil paint as ownership. This August in Santa Fe, with the market barely packed up and a museum a mile away examining a century of shifting definitions of Indigenous excellence, the ownership is changing hands. A Tlingit man is casting his ancestors in the collector’s own glass. A Cherokee-Choctaw painter is wearing the city like a coat. A Hopi and Hispanic carver dares you to say which half of him is the real one. And two women are walking into the most masculine mythology American painting ever produced and repainting it from the inside, one down a hidden line of forgotten modernists, the other with rope burn on her palms. None of them is documenting the West. All of them are deciding what it gets to mean. And the real pleasure of it, the gladness rather than the argument, is that the West turns out to be far more alive as a question than it ever was as a possession.