Western Art & Architecture

By the 1970s, the cotillions and debutante balls that had graced Seattle’s Olympic Hotel since it opened in 1924 were things of the past. The hotel’s ornate Italian Renaissance Revival structure, with its crimson and gold interior, was suddenly considered garish and out of place amid downtown Seattle’s new brutalist skyscrapers. Worse yet, guest room bookings had plummeted. A...

There is more than meets the eye in the layered paintings, prints, and murals of celebrated Chicano artist Tony Ortega. Pieces by this artist reflect a mythmaker and man of many roles, talents, and cultural traditions (Mexican, American, and the distinctive cultures of the American Southwest).

After earning undergrad and graduate degrees in fine arts, a bachelor’s in c...

The summer after high school, lifelong New Mexican Eric Romero and a few friends were backpacking in Spain. It was during what he calls his bohemian period, and they were “crazy and irresponsible and completely broke after three weeks.” In San Sebastián one day, they got a whiff of something familiar and followed the enchanting smell. “A sense of querencia,” Romero rem...

George Phippen changed sculptor Bill Nebeker’s life. Twice.

The first time came when Nebeker attended a Phippen art show in Prescott, Arizona, in 1964. “My wife Merry says I had an epiphany and my life changed direction that day,” Nebeker recalls.

George Phippen (1915-1966) died two years later of cancer, but not before he and a handful of other Western artists ...

Mitch Blake can’t remember what attracted the clients for the ChaChe Residence to the architecture firm he and Tom Ward founded in Jackson, Wyoming, in 1996. There are numerous possibilities, like Ward|Blake’s distinctive modern designs. Or maybe the firm’s biophilic philosophy, which drives them to unite clients with nature, disturb the natural character of a site as little ...