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,…
Editor’s Note: For those wishing to go deeper into Peltonia we’re pleased to present this essay by Jan Rindfleisch. A former director of the Euphrat Museum of Art, Rindfleisch was involved in the earliest days of Pelton’s rediscovery. Here she…
During a fifth grade field trip in 1966, Sharon Ellis’ class shuffled into the San Diego Museum of Art and listened dutifully as a docent told the children why they should admire a painting featuring a young girl as the…
September 7, 2019—On a June day in 1947, Agnes Pelton sat at her table in Cathedral City and drew a map of a place she knew as well as she knew her own backyard. There was the ancient stone wall…
In 2019, the Phoenix Art Museum published Agnes Pelton, Desert Transcendentalist, a 220-page hardcover book about the illustrious paintings of Agnes Pelton (1881–1961). This impressive volume, which will accompany the traveling exhibition, contains magnificent full-page reproductions of her art and…
June 22, 2019–In the days when the Palm Springs Art Museum included desert in their name, they featured an exhibit spotlighting three dune systems: the Salton Sea, the Coachella Valley and the Algodones Dunes. One of the artists starring in…
May 24, 2019–When I walked into the La Quinta Museum one day recently the place was abuzz over an unlikely topic. Staff members too young to remember Woodstock were chatting excitedly about the Hog Farm–a 1960s commune founded by peace…
May 11, 2019–The star-maker machinery, as Joni Mitchell called it, is working hard for Agnes Pelton. The current exhibit at the Phoenix Art Museum positions her as the next Hilma af Klint. An ethereal wisp high on metaphysics, Pelton touches…
March 31, 2019–Art auctions seem to be geared toward sophisticates, people who drive Aston Martins and have helipads in the backyard. But these events also open up worlds of information to the rest of us. The Bonhams California and Western…
March 12, 2019–Millicent Harvey and I stood on the bank of Araby Wash and surveyed a gutted expanse. Some carcasses of smoke trees were snagged under the Highway 111 bridge, but the dense grove–a favorite of painters and photographers for…
