Art in the Desert

While on holidays this past Christmas, I visited the Palm Springs Museum of Art. Most of the collection was fantastic (aside from a few misplaced money pieces - Monet and Dali, how did you get into this modern art sculpture gallery???) but what was the most impressive were two of the travelling exhibits.

The first was a collection of Maynard Dixon's paintings and sketches from the Hays collection. Dixon's work is breathtaking to look at. He was a visionary when it came to capturing the American West in all it's glory. Wide vistas, rolling plains, big skies, Native American villages, cowboys at work - all of these elements can be found in Dixon's work. American author Thomas McGuane describes Dixon's art: "The great mood of his work is solitude, the effect of land and space on people. While his work stands perfectly well on its claims to beauty, it offers a spiritual view of the West indispensable to anyone who would understand it." Originally, Dixon sketched cartoons for a variety of newspapers depicting the American West in caricature. He eventually grew jaded with the fake representation of his subject and began painting the West as he truly saw it: unlimited, uninhibted, open, free. Of further personal interest to me was Dixon's 15 year marriage to WPA photographer Dorothea Lange. Having studies Lange and other WPA photographers in my undergrad gave me another frame of reference for Dixon's work.

The second exhibit that caught my eye was by Enrique Chagoya, titled Borderlandia. Chagoya was born in 1953 in Mexico City and studied art in Mexico and the U.S. His work is a great mix of humour and serious political commentary. Borderlandia is a collection of prints, sketches and collage pieces that comment on current U.S. immigration and foreign policy. One of the details that attracted me to Chagoya's work is that he 'updates' other artists' work, that is he takes political art from other artists and modernizes it in relation to the modern political climate. The other aspect of Chagoya's art that makes it quite approachable is that he uses familiar pop images in his work. For me, seeing familiar images that have been reworked gave me multiple points of reference for observing and internalizing Chagoya's art. From the various biographies I have seen, it would appear that the majority of Chagoya's work is in various American and a few Mexican collections. I would love to see Chagoya do a show here in Canada; I think it would be quite eye-opening for many Canadians who don't understand the implications of U.S. immigration policy on the huge population of Latin American immigrants.