When Thomas Penniston wrote to ask if Agnes Pelton might have painted the painting he’d found online, of a fisherman in an Eastern stream, I doubted that she did. Would Hilma af Klint have painted a bear hunt in the…
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…
Eric Merrell shows widely in the West, but soon you’ll have a rare opportunity to see 35 works of the desert master right here in the Coachella Valley. Merrell completed the series of paintings–showing the “wonder and strength” of the…
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…
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…
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…
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…
