When Carl Bray and I used to drive to Oak Glen for pie, it was always a thrill to hear him talk about the artists he’d known in the desert–everyone from Maynard Dixon to John Hilton, Sam Hyde Harris and…
In a classic Sharon Bronzan painting you find a woman alone in a wilderness booby-trapped with daggered cactuses. She doesn’t look away but stares unflinchingly into danger. When she relaxes her hold on strict logic, her life-saving guardians appear: a…
When he was a 9th grader living in a desert outpost, John Emerson needed help with his science project–the use of thermocouples to generate electricity. Most people in 1960s Cathedral City wouldn’t know a thermocouple from a thesaurus. But Emerson…
In Mari Coates’ new novel, real life characters Billie Prigge Seaman, Christina Lillian and the Hillery family are reanimated, as is the beloved little hamlet of Cathedral City itself. I’ve been living with Agnes’ story for more than a decade…
Editor’s note: No one captures the action-adventure ethos of the early desert artists better than Marjorie Reed, best known for her paintings of the Butterfield Overland Stage. You can learn more about Reed from Gary Fillmore, author of All Aboard:…
Art and Theosophy at Lomaland You don’t have to labor through Helena Blavatsky’s tomes to get a taste for Theosophy, an esoteric belief system that inspired Agnes Pelton and so many others. The teachings are notoriously opaque to modern minds,…
