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…
Art and Theosophy at Lomaland You don’t have to labor through Helena Blavatsky’s tomes to get a taste for Theosophy, an esoteric belief system that inspired Agnes Pelton and so many others. The teachings are notoriously opaque to modern minds,…
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…
September 7, 2019—On a June day in 1947, Agnes Pelton sat at her table in Cathedral City and drew a map of a place she knew as well as she knew her own backyard. There was the ancient stone wall…
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 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…
March 12, 2019–Millicent Harvey and I stood on the bank of Araby Wash and surveyed a gutted expanse. Some carcasses of smoke trees were snagged under the Highway 111 bridge, but the dense grove–a favorite of painters and photographers for…
March 7, 2019–When I last wrote about Desert X it was to warn you that the art carnival might be coming for your mountain. Little did I know they were coming for mine–the inviolate north face of Mt. San Jacinto.…
