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…
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…
Ed. Note: Don Juan Matus was a Yaqui sorcerer who helped launch the New Age movement. He may have been an invention of author Carlos Castaneda, but even so he helped teenagers everywhere believe they could turn into blackbirds and…
Ed. note: Like many museums in the pandemic era, the Palm Springs Art Museum (formerly Desert Museum) has been struggling of late. When things are wobbly, it often helps to return to bedrock. What did we first love? What was…
If Cathedral City was an unlikely place to nurture groundbreaking artists like Agnes Pelton, Virginia City, Nevada, is even more unlikely. Twenty-six miles south of Reno, the frontier boomtown rests on a mountainside at 6,200 feet. It’s riddled with abandoned…
Postcards from Mecca is a hero’s journey. Pioneer photographer Susie Keef Smith triumphed over heat, disability and roadless wilderness to document the 1920s desert east of the Salton Sea. But every heroic tale requires a villain. For Susie, it was…
Never underestimate the benefits of publishing on the California Desert Art website! A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of having my article, “Smoke Tree George: The Fabled Life and Times of George Frederick Gleich,” posted, and, over…
