“Western art,” as in visual art about the Western United States, often conjures romanticized and myopic depictions of an imagined past: Charles Marion Russell’s illustrative fantasies about cowboys and Indians; sublime renderings of the Rocky Mountains by East Coast painters, idealizing the landscape in service of Manifest Destiny; or James Earle Fraser’s End of the Trail, a widely reproduced — and frequently bootlegged — 1894 sculpture of an exhausted Native American, spear tucked loosely under one arm, slouched atop his equally exhausted horse.
In the 21st century, these aesthetics feel formulaic, outdated and, at times, problematic. The West has long had diverse topographies, peoples and perspectives. Western artists tackle charged topics, including environmental exploitation and community displacement, and propose new ways to think about the region’s multiple pasts, presents and futures. Today, when ranchers fly drones and water protectors reach millions on social media, it makes sense that Western artists would integrate traditional ceramics, textiles and colorful patterning with sound, video and digital art, at times employing literary strategies of speculative fiction and historical revisionism.
Cowboy, a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, aimed to “break apart the homogenous ideal of the cowboy as a white, cisgender American male.” Curators recontextualized works by heavy hitters like Andy Warhol and Richard Prince alongside younger artists, including Oregon-based Ghanaian portraitist Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, Los Angeles interdisciplinary artist rafa esparza and Colorado pop-Western conceptual artist Grace Kennison.
And New York City, the cultural and economic center of American art, has started to pay attention.
Historically, the Whitney Biennial, a contemporary survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art visited by thousands of urban art enthusiasts and international tourists, has skewed New York-centric (with cursory nods to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago). It is notable, then, that more than a dozen of the 71 artists and collectives in this year’s Better Than the Real Thing, March 20-Aug. 11), live and work in the Western U.S.
New Mexico-based Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota), an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold, employs a science-fiction framework and upcycled materials to subvert and literally invert Western art tropes. At the Whitney, viewers crane their necks to examine the upside-down pink-mesh tipi that hangs suspended from the ceiling, its tip anchored to the floor by lustrous claws. Luger’s TIPI — an acronym for Transportational Intergenerational Protection Infrastructure — is a speculative technology that safeguards Indigenous knowledge while dislocating viewers in time. Its flipped cone references “space-time” diagrams, reinforcing Indigenous perspectives on nonlinear time that long predate the theory of general relativity. Titled Uŋziwoslal Wašičuta (2021), a Lakota phrase meaning “the fat-taker’s world is upside-down,” the Stargate-like sculpture is part of Luger’s ongoing series Future Ancestral Technologies, which buoyantly imagines post-colonial, post-capitalist timelines, frequently incorporating a multitemporal rallying cry: We Survive You.
Rose B. Simpson’s (Santa Clara Pueblo) installation Daughters gathers four larger-
than-life ceramic entities into a powerful circle. Bound by spatial orientation, their surfaces conspicuously marked by Simpson’s laboring hands, each body is unique in its earthen tones, accouterments and distribution of glyph-like markings. Presented as a tetralogy — a work made of four individual parts — the figures gesture to the four cardinal directions, earthly elements or seasons. Designated as daughters, they forecast future generations while honoring Simpson’s own matrilineage: Santa Clara ceramicists, including her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, and Pueblo scholars, like her grandmother, the late architect, historian and activist Rina Swentzell.
Both Simpson and Luger’s works create intentional boundaries between museumgoers and the art, hinting at a healthy skepticism of the Whitney’s sudden interest in contemporary Indigenous work. It wasn’t until late last year that the museum finally presented a retrospective by a Native American artist — Memory Map by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who is well into her 80s.
In Harmony Hammond’s four mixed-media paintings, all made between 2020 and 2022, the seams are visible. Alternately referencing quilts, folded garments and blood-soaked bandages, they evoke feminine or domestic interiors and the ongoing struggles of women. They also read cartographically, as if demarcating private property, borders or extraction sites — the territorial tools used by imperalists and industrialists to feminize landscapes as possessable or penetrable. Based in Galisteo, New Mexico, since 1984, Hammond, an early feminist artist who turned 80 this year, represents an elder queer voice in this biennial. A quarter-century ago in Santa Fe, Hammond curated Out West, an audacious, groundbreaking exhibition of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and two-spirit artists from New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.
Western artists tackle charged topics, including environmental exploitation and community displacement, and propose new ways to think about the region’s multiple pasts, presents and futures.
For Placitas, New Mexico, painter Maja Ruznic, duality is key. After spending her adolescence in refugee camps during the Bosnian War, Ruznic dived into Jungian psychoanalysis. Jung saw trauma as two-pronged: painful, always, but also a potentially cosmological vehicle. Ruznic’s two kaleidoscopic paintings at the Whitney feel ominous, like the conspicuous coloring of a venomous octopus. Figures eerily advance and recede, violating academic color theory; geometric patterns emerge, twitching the viewer’s eye. The dislocating effect echos Luger’s floating tipi.
This sense of dislocation may also invoke migration or the West’s ongoing legacy of displacement. In the 1950s and ’60s, labor programs brought Central Americans and Mexicans to Los Angeles, while Southern California imported liquidambar trees for urban beautification. Later, in a temporal coincidence, President Dwight D. Eisenhower deported even the legal migrants, while Los Angeles removed the trees because their roots were destroying sidewalks.
Within a freestanding wall of modified pine sap titled Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly, Los Angeles artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio embedded archival documents on immigrant rights from largely white nonprofits and activists. Drenched in sunlight through large windows and already buckling, the wall will eventually collapse; meanwhile, the history hidden in the documents is both obscured and temporarily preserved in amber. The work, which also raises questions about solidarity and privilege, appears simultaneously futuristic and ancient, implying the possibility of timelines in which xenophobic and ecologically ignorant policies are less predictably circular.
Six years ago, as the sun set through the Whitney’s enormous windows overlooking the Hudson River, Diné artist Demian DinéYazhi’ read An Infected Sunset, an epic poetic meditation on settler violence, Indigenous community, queer sex and the politics of death and survival. In March, DinéYazhi’, who was born in Gallup, New Mexico, and lives and works primarily in Portland, Oregon, returned to the Whitney, installing a neon text sculpture glowing westward out fifth-floor windows over the Hudson. An homage to the late Navajo activist Klee Benally and a critique of the Eurocentric “addiction with the apocalypse,” it’s a seditious but sanguine spin on Route 66 signage, reading in part: we must stop imagining destruction… and genocide… we must stop predicting… capitalist hierarchies… we must imagine routes toward liberation! Indigenous communities, museumgoers might recall, have already survived an apocalypse.
During an early March preview event, an Artnet News writer noticed a hidden message in the neon’s flickering letters that even the curators had missed: FREE PALESTINE. A New York Times article broadcast the dispatch globally, despite the paper’s documented bias in favor of Israel — an object lesson in speculative art as a potent, future-casting technology.
The 21st-century West is increasingly interconnected, from interstate wildfire smoke and constant tension over Colorado River claims, to cross-cultural recognition with global movements resisting colonialism, extractive industrialism and the asymmetrical impacts of climate change. As Western demographics, ecosystems and discourses continue to shift dramatically, Western aesthetics should be constantly renegotiated. If the 2024 Whitney Biennial is any indication — and it usually is — artists in the West can anticipate increased attention. It’s about time. Still, it remains to be seen just how authentically the art world, whose progressiveness routinely feels performative, will embrace Western artists who are slippery, unpredictable or confrontational.
Contemporary Western art is complex — alchemical, even — as artists critically compound traditional materials and knowledge that resonate from Taos to Tacoma while theorizing about more equitable global futures. Such material and intellectual time travel challenges the view of time as a linear arrow and the continuing American fetishization of perpetual growth. By reinterpreting the past, formulating parallel presents, and predicting new and exciting futures, Western artists are transforming our Doomsday addiction into a habit we just might kick.
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This article appeared in the June 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Dislocating Western aesthetics.”
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