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…
In a classic Sharon Bronzan painting you find a woman alone in a wilderness booby-trapped with daggered cactuses. She doesn’t look away but stares unflinchingly into danger. When she relaxes her hold on strict logic, her life-saving guardians appear: a…
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…
