Photographs and an interview from high peaks of the Alaska Range.
Arts & Culture
Posted inNovember 10, 2014: Fallout
Speaking art to power
Review of ‘Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and And Art in the Changing West’ by Lucy R. Lippard
Posted inOctober 27, 2014: Defuse the West
Review of “The Color of Being Born” by Michael Cadieux
Paintings that depict the precarious relationship between humankind and the natural world.
Posted inSeptember 15, 2014: Books & Essays
Michelle Huneven writes about place, addiction and love
This California author examines lost years and life in the mountains.
Posted inSeptember 15, 2014: Books & Essays
A painter and writer uses her art to overcome trauma
Author profile of Japanese-American Lily Havey.
Posted inSeptember 15, 2014: Books & Essays
Encouraging more ‘nerds of color’
A conversation with L.A. writer Jervey Tervalon.
Posted inSeptember 15, 2014: Books & Essays
But wait, there’s more
Lit-touring in California and beyond.
Posted inArticles
Fracking Georgia O’Keeffe Country
Drill rigs pop up near Navajo communities, Chaco Canyon and the iconic Black Place.
Posted inJune 9, 2014: Border Out of Control
Tainted Revelations: The Art of Bill Ohrmann by Joe Ashbrook Nickell
Tainted Revelations: The Art of Bill Ohrmann Joe Ashbrook Nickell, 140 pages, hardcover: $45. Missoula Art Museum In Tainted Revelations: The Art of Bill Ohrmann, author Joe Ashbrook Nickell provides a glimpse into the psyche of a 95-year-old artist still grappling with his place in the world. Tension is palpable in the oeuvre of this […]
Posted inMay 12, 2014: Parks for All?
Look, Ma – a real Indian!
A performance artist tackles stereotypes of Native Americans in public.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
International Car Forest of the Last Church
For a strange trip, check out Nevada’s otherworldly Stonehenge of wildly painted abandoned vehicles.
Posted inApril 14, 2014: A landscape of surprises
How to save your town from the interstate
Tourists flocked to Winslow, Ariz., back in the golden era of cross-country rail travel, and later along the classic two-lane highway, Route 66. But now the old Valentine Diner sits empty and rusting, having long given up on luring customers off Interstate 40, which sidestepped the town in the 1970s. It’s a symbol of all […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
The legend behind Salvation Mountain
At the entrance to the self-proclaimed “last free place on earth” – Slab City, a squatter camp in California’s Imperial Valley – stands Salvation Mountain, its slopes painted with biblical quotations and its peak topped with a giant white cross. The candy-colored hill is just a few stories high, but to the drifters, dreamers and […]
Posted inMarch 3, 2014: Fallon’s deadly legacy
Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art: 1775-2012
Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012Barbara C. Matilsky, 144 pages, paperback: $39.95. Whatcom Museum, 2013 When intrepid artists first ventured to the poles two centuries ago, they returned with paintings and sketches that made the region’s otherworldly starkness seem elegant and timeless. More recently, artists portray a landscape that is running out […]
Posted inFebruary 17, 2014: The Gila $olution
The first comic book with an all-Native American superhero team returns
Conversation with Jon Proudstar about the return of his comic book series, ‘Tribal Force.’
Posted inDecember 23, 2013: Beauty or Beast
Art and the atomic age
Radioactive disposal sites and other residuals of the bomb era.
Posted inOctober 28, 2013: Lifeblood of the Delta
O pioneer: A filmmaker explores how we find home in the West
L.A. transplant Vera Brunner-Sung’s first fictional work tackles displacement, transience and belonging in Montana.
Posted inJune 25, 2012: Special travel issue
Exploring the West’s land sculptures — made by artists and industry
“Art erodes whatever seeks to contain it and inevitably seeps into the most contrary recesses, touches the most repressed nerve, finds and sustains the contradictory without effort.” — Robert Morris in a 1979 essay in which he suggested hiring land artists to reclaim spent industrial sites and open-pit mines. When I first see them, fuzzy […]
Posted inSeptember 9, 2008: Reclaiming the low country
The creation of wholeness
Finding Beauty in a Broken WorldTerry Tempest Williams416 pages, $26.Pantheon Books, 2008. When asked to accompany artist Lily Yeh to Rwanda to help create a memorial to the country’s genocide victims, author Terry Tempest Williams initially refused. Perhaps best known for her book Refuge, which draws a profound emotional parallel between her mother’s losing bout […]
Posted inNovember 27, 2006: The West: A New Center of Power
Conspiring with caddisflies
“He hath ribbons of all the colours i’ the rainbow; inkles, caddisses, cambrics and lawns.” —from The Winter’s Tale, by William Shakespeare Name Ferg (no first name, no last name, just Ferg) Vocation Father of two, a Renaissance man who draws, paints, sculpts, composes poetry, plays music, and makes jewelry from beetle carcasses. Age 40 […]