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…
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…
Inspired by the recent California Desert Art article on Lynda Keeler’s maps, Michael Moore sent some of his own “imaginary topographics”. For decades, the widely exhibited artist has been exploring and mapping the northern Great Basin Desert. He grew up…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
