Weshoyot Alvitre is a Tongva and Scottish Comic Book artist and illustrator. Her piece TONGVALAND was created in 2019. This op-ed is written in response to the Desert X exhibition in Palm Springs, California, and installation of large oversized “INDIANLAND”…
Harry Bennett had been watching his back trail most of his life, but finally–atop a winding driveway on a high knoll in Desert Hot Springs–he could rest. He picked up his binoculars and scoped his kingdom. The long views in…
Lynda Keeler had been trying out different styles—figurative painting, hard edge—but nothing felt authentic. Contemplating her bedrock truths, she came up with this: I walk. I look. The artist walks miles each day through every neighborhood she’s ever lived in,…
Kevin Key grew up in the conformity of a San Diego suburb with a vigilant HOA. Naturally, as a young man he was drawn to the desert to the east where there were no rules and you could find old,…
New York artist Allan McCollum was having a run of bad luck. He’d been stiffed by a dealer, lost his studio and racked up his credit cards. Fed up with the commerce of art, he put everything in storage and…
During this sad summer of 2020, I’ve often looked south from my Palm Springs home, past the new burn at Araby, orienting myself by the twin horns of Toro Peak. Up there is the wild Anza country. To get to…
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…
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:…
