Editor’s note: This article by Steven Carlson suggests an entirely new school of desert art. While we’ve deemed the Coachella Valley painters the Smoketree School, Effie Anderson Smith (Steven’s great-great aunt) devoted much of her work to the misunderstood yucca.…
On a November day in 1961, Emma Lou Davis was returning home from an archaeology dig in her usual grunge attire: Shorts, heavy boots and work shirt. Her sweat-sculpted hair stuck out in all directions, her fingernails were grimy, face…
It seems the desert herself has elected an ambassador and sent her out into the world to represent us. Sharon Ellis–who works quietly in Yucca Valley–has a show, New Works on Paper, at the Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles through October…
Each day when she finished her shift at the Shadow Mountain Club in Palm Desert, Evelyn Chevoor swung by the base of the mountain where Fred Chisnall was painting beside the panel truck that doubled as his home. Chisnall was…
The Pleistocene shorelines that drew Sylvia Winslow are mostly off-limits now behind the gates of the million-plus acre Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. On a recent trip to research Sylvia’s life, I longed to duck behind those gates. Even…
The longtime Cathedral City Cove residents Cornelia and Irving Sussman entered my life in the early 1980s, when they contacted me to support my Staying Visible project, a grassroots collaboration that rediscovered underappreciated artists.[1] I welcomed the couple’s correspondence in…
In a bedroom tucked up as far as you can go against the mountain at the end of Arenas Road, Rose Gray Dougan lay dying. She could feel the cool shadows slide down Mount San Jacinto at night. From her…
Editor’s note: In the 1980s one of the most influential art dealers in the West decided that Palm Canyon Drive was destined to be an arts district and she was the person to make it happen. To that end, Elaine…
Eric Merrell shows widely in the West, but soon you’ll have a rare opportunity to see 35 works of the desert master right here in the Coachella Valley. Merrell completed the series of paintings–showing the “wonder and strength” of the…
When Lydia Sohlberg Deere took her sketch pad down to Palm Canyon in the 1920s, she was a mature woman with a career in hat making behind her. Born in 1873, she operated a millinery shop with her twin sisters…
