Phoenix Art Museum's 'West Select' opens up new territory
Exhibit replaces cowboys with wider range
Is the West a place? An idea? A nostalgia?
Is the West urban, now that more people live in cities than in rural areas? Or are cities the antithesis of a West that remains in the interstitial areas of rock, cactus and dry gulches?
Certainly the West, where we all live, is central to our lives. Even in Phoenix, most of us have a sense of ourselves as Westerners. We live with the dryness of the region, the sense of independence fostered by the Western myth, the vastness of the land and the heat. Our salsa should not be made in New York City.
For decades, the Phoenix Art Museum has had an annual show of Cowboy Art, which had a singular vision of what the West was. It was cowboys and Indians, it was horses in bronze and it had more to do with Hollywood Westerns than it did with the world we inhabit today.
Now, the museum has taken a new path. With the departure of the Cowboy Artists of America, the museum has begun a replacement October ritual with "The West Select," an invitational show with more than 100 artworks by 31 artists who specialize in Western subject matter. But the range of styles, subject matter and vision are greatly expanded from the narrow range previously displayed.
The first thing you see entering the show are three large paintings by Ed Mell.
"This is not your father's cowboy show," says Jerry Smith, curator of American and Western American art for the museum.
It's as if someone opened a window and let fresh air in. This is still Western art, but it is open to many things the previous occupants were closed to: women artists, abstract techniques, contemporary subject matter, still life, photography -- irony.
The annual Cowboy Artists show had a uniformity of style: It was sometimes difficult to tell which artist painted which campfire with a remuda in the dusk behind it. There was a centripetal style they each converged upon.
That is perhaps the biggest change in "West Select." You can see the artist's vision and style behind the work. There is much greater variety to be seen. You don't respond to the work only by its subject matter, but also by its individual style.
The doors have not exactly been flung open wide: There are still limits. Most of the imagery remains rural. There are no cityscapes here, even though the majority of Arizonans live urban lives. There is no video art, no installation art, no performance art. No James Turrell, no James Luna.
The idea is to be familiar enough to appeal to the traditional cowboy audience, while being fresh enough to draw in a wider crowd.
"We wanted a show that would open up people's awareness a little, but without making it foreign to those who loved the Cowboy show," Smith says.
"Maybe we'll add videos in upcoming years."
So, you have such paintings as Don Stinson's "Emerson's Puddle," which at first seems like a standard Western snowscape. There is a barn, lots of whiteness and the low hills in the background. But there are also high-tension power lines running across the horizon and a boy shooting hoops in the distance.
Or, in Stinson's "Around the Fence: Sedona," with its high blue sky and red-rock buttes, there are also several small private airplanes taxiing and ready to take off. In Stinson's "The Roll Back: A Greener Speculative Reality Along the Edge of the Colorado Plateau," there is a land developer's paved street, installed before any housing construction has begun.
This is the reality of even the rural West, and the inclusion of these human infiltrations does not diminish the beauty of the land -- or what photographer Robert Adams calls the "redemptive" quality of landscape -- but in fact enhances it. This is our experience of the West, not a fantasy of it.
