At the turn of the last century, prominent artists of the east coast art worlds in New York and Pennsylvania were drawn to embark on adventurous journeys across a growing United States. First hired as professional illustrators, artists documented stunning vistas for the marketing and tourism connected to new cross-country railway systems. Many of those initial artists would return to settle their own lives and establish artists' colonies in the region inspired by the beauty, color, and authenticity of the high desert in American's Southwest. More would make their own pilgrimages in the coming years to create art without the stylistic demands of academic training, seeking a non-industrialized landscape, removed from the sprawling urbanization of their big cities. American Artists in the Southwest invites you to reflect on the early drawings and etchings of the first generation of Anglo artists settling in an already established Southwest, the variety and technique in printed works produced by the Post World War I influx of a second-generation of artists from the coasts during the Depression era, through World War II. It is within this time period, America's evolution into Modernism, that artists traveling and making their homes in the Southwest explored themes of landscape and culture revealing transcendent desert light, remote lands, and extraordinary way of life, longing for connection to the boundless nature before them.
Image Credit: Pop Chalee (aka, Merina Lujan; American, 1908 - 1993), Untitled (Blue Horse), n.d. Silkscreen of gouache on paper. Collection of the Mennello Museum of American Art, Gift of Robert Melanson in memory of Frank Holt, Founding Director, 2018-005-009.