In the last couple of years I’ve feasted endlessly on 2,000 historic photos of the unexplored desert east of the Salton Sea. Taken by 1930s Mecca postmaster Susie Keef Smith and her cousin Lula Mae Graves, the collection offers an…
Category: Desert Artists
Rudolph d’Heureuse: The Earliest Photographs of the Wild Mojave
Collecting on the Edge: George Wanlass Travels to the Outer Limits of Western Art
King of Bohemia: Sadakichi Hartmann in the San Gorgonio Pass
Hazel’s Garden: Outsider Art Discovered in Wonder Valley
Unexpected Beauty: Robert Cole Caples’ Nevada
Jim Trolinger and the Magnificent Six: Showdown at Joshua Tree
Desert Devotional: The Anza-Borrego Paintings of Jane Culp
Editor’s note: Many people paint the desert but only a few embody the ur-qualities of the early desert artists. Jane Culp is one. She lives in an off-grid straw bale cabin perched above the Anza-Borrego desert. From this solitary outlook,…
Collecting Arizona: How Gary Fillmore and David Picerne Tracked Down the State’s Greatest Paintings
Harry and the Giants: The Geoglyph Photographs of Harry Casey
Editor’s note—One morning in the 1980s when I was working as an LA Times reporter, I hopped in an airplane with archaeologist Jay von Werlhof and pilot Harry Casey. Flying out of Brawley, we cruised low over a sandy expanse…