Artists of the Pacific Coast and American Southwest are explored in a new exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West.
By James D. Balestrieri
The New Exhibition Desert Dreams and Coastal Currents at the Autry Museum of the American West from February 14 through March 29 makes manifest an idea that, at first, might not seem intuitive. The artists of the Pacific Coast and the artists of the American Southwest have a great deal in common. But many artists of the American West have worked and live—and still work and live—in both realms.
Coast and desert; desert and coast—a shared vastness, the arc of the sky reaching down to touch the crests and troughs of waves and rocks alike. In each environment, the elements are plainer, bolder, subject to tempers and tempests, and utterly disdainful of human endeavors and scales of time.
Desert Dreams and Coastal Currents is the brainchild of Dr. Amy Scott, the Marilyn B. and Calvin B. Gross Curator of Visual Art at the Autry. She describes the genesis of the exhibition as follows: “I wanted to use the Autry’s collections of historic New Mexican and California art—Taos Society, Maynard Dixon, some of the California impressionists, etc. (we have collections of both that are not often seen)—to explore the formation of regional art and identity in the West, beginning with the art colonies that arose simultaneously in both regions.
“While not identical, these were complementary impulses that shared certain tenets: a rejection of East Coast/industrial modernism and the desire to create a more ‘authentic’ American art based on regional environments and the experience thereof,” continues Scott. “From there, the show explores or charts how these phenomena shift in relation to 20th- and 21st-century changes, such as the rise of tourism as well as Indigenous voices in the Southwest, and the urbanization of the Los Angeles basin.”
In a way, Maynard Dixon epitomizes the spirit of the exhibition. Dixon lived and painted in a variety of places in the West, from San Francisco to Tucson. His facture—that is, his style, technique and approaches to his subjects—moves seamlessly between the coastal realm and the landscapes of the desert West. His 1922 oil IESAKA WAKEN depicts a robed Indigenous man—the model was a member of the Winnebago tribe, George Whitewing, who was an extra in early Hollywood films—holding a peace pipe as he stands on a rise. Blue sky behind him gives way to an oncoming storm: Is the weather an indication that the medicine of the peace pipe is working or failing? The man literally and figuratively links the elements of earth and air. The dark clouds hold water, and the peace pipe holds fire. Dixon paints the robe in a red rocks hue, making the man seem to be part of the element earth, thrusting upwards to rebalance the natural world.
Scott advises that visitors look for varieties in artistic approach as they move through the different kinds of landscapes, stating that “There are a wide range of tactics and strategies on view when it comes to landscape, from figuration, impressionism and romanticism to modernism, abstraction and even video. These strategies combine and recombine in different and often unexpected ways throughout the exhibition, depending upon the place and point of view of the artist.”
There are, as well, similarities to note. Dixon’s angular modernism and Guy Rose’s California impressionism are markedly different in terms of style, yet Rose’s LAGUNA EUCALYPTUS, painted circa 1917, shares something of Dixon’s desire to link the elements. Only here, it’s nature in the form of the eucalyptus trees that connects earth to sky and air. Rose’s painting lingers as a witness to a repetition of forms in nature, in a congruence, however temporary, between the crowns of the trees and the shapes of the clouds.
Color, it turns out, is a principal connection between the desert dreams and the coastal currents, and this connection, with an artist’s eye for the arrangement of forms, leads to some interesting pairings in the exhibition.
James Doolin’s 1993 monumental oil PRIMAL LANDSCAPE and John Valadez’s 2004 LOW TIDE, a very large pastel, are, at first glance, quite different works of art. Doolin’s painting envisions a pure desert landscape, a world without any trace of humanity, any trace of us, while Valadez’s pastel foregrounds the human element in a realistic beach scene. Where Doolin creates an atmosphere of absence in geological time, Valadez paints the environment as a background, one that we appreciate, and enjoy. Further, something in the gaze of the man at right, as he appraises the beautiful young woman—who, turned away, does not seem to see him, or pretends not to see him—suggests a desire and appetite not unlike the desire and appetite for beautiful places. What connects them is composition. Both works are open to the right—vista in Doolin’s painting, open ocean in Valadez’s—and narrow to the left—cliffs in Doolin’s, shore in Valadez’s. Blue sky dominates the triangle in PRIMAL LANDSCAPE; ocean and sky dominates that same area in LOW TIDE. Windswept, eroded sands mark PRIMAL LANDSCAPE; roiling, turbid waters characterize LOW TIDE. The shifting timelessness of Doolin’s desert eerily matches the swirling restlessness of Valadez’s sea.
A final pairing—and I encourage you to visit the exhibition and draw parallels between and among the works yourselves—of Ed Mell’s 2021 work CASCADING CANYON STORM and Peter Alexander’s 1988 painting CLOVERFIELD I leads to some interesting observations.
Mell’s trademark jagged forms become repeated yet varied bolts of lightning that fracture the sky; they also mirror the forms of the mountains below. Mell’s intention, it would seem, is to deliberately obscure earth and air, landscape and skyscape, lightning bolt, thunderhead, and peak. Still, all the elements are present here, present and at their most elemental. Seeing the angle as the dominant shape in nature—in the nature of the American West, at any rate—Mell reduces and thereby unites the elements. His angles, then, become atoms writ large, across land and sky. The fractured becomes the fractal in a kind of music that repeats on different scales, like cascading octaves playing out across the landscape.
Just as Mell places the viewer at a horizontal distance from his subject in CASCADING CANYON STORM, in CLOVERFIELD I, Alexander places us high above the coastline he paints, offering an aerial view. Fractal, dendrite clouds race as if to meet and fill in the fractal irregularities of the coast. Hearkening back to Dixon, the elements are all at work and in play in this painting: water and earth seem poised, awaiting the air, while fire is represented in the points of light that emanate from the human habitations below.
In each painting, a deep blue and deep purple night is illuminated by some other aspect of the natural world, revealing, even only for an instant, whatever night seeks to hide.
Dreams and currents are central to the exhibition. Dreams of places, currents of energy, transformations of the experience of place, of the elements that form a place into the forms of imagery, forms that transform place into dreams. It all might seem convoluted at first and yet it’s quite easy to understand once you look, really look, at the artworks in Desert Dreams and Coastal Currents.
Desert Dreams and Coastal CurrentsThe Autry Museum of the American WestFebruary 14-March 29theautry.org
This story appeared in the February/March 2026 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.
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