Charles M. Russell Center on Art and Photography of the American West Books

The definitive reference for scholars, collectors, curators, art dealers, libraries, and anyone who appreciates the art of Charles M. Russell Charles M. Russell is our most beloved artist of the American West. His paintings, sketches, sculpture, illustrated letters, and stories are an unequalled legacy. Lavishly illustrated with more than 200 color and black-and-white reproductions of Russell’s greatest works, this beautiful volume features essays by Russell experts and scholars who address important aspects of the artist’s life and career. Inside the book is a unique key code that allows purchasers to access a private online catalogue (www.russellraisonne.com) of more than 4,000 works Russell created and signed during his lifetime. Original owners of the book will have unlimited access to the site once a user name and password have been created. The online catalogue, which includes an enlargeable image of each work, is fully searchable. In addition, each entry includes the catalogue number, title, medium, dimensions, and, when available, the inscription, credit line, illustration, provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography. The catalogue will be updated on an ongoing basis as new information becomes available or additional works are found. The result of more than a decade of research and scholarship, Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné is published in cooperation with the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma and with the C. M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana.

This volume is the definitive work on Blumenschein's life and art, reproducing masterworks from a new exhibit along with additional works and historical photographs to form the most comprehensive assemblage of his paintings ever published.

When the U.S. government incarcerated 120,000 Japanese Americans as “domestic enemy aliens” during World War II, most other Americans succumbed to their fears and endorsed the confinement of their fellow citizens. Ten “relocation centers” were scattered across the West. Today, in the crumbling foundations, overgrown yards, and material artifacts of these former internment camps, we can still sense the injustices suffered there. Placing Memory is a powerful visual record of the internment. Featuring Todd Stewart’s stunning color photographs of the sites as they appear today, the book provides a rigorous visual survey of the physical features of the camps—roads, architectural remains, and monuments—along with maps and statistical information. Also included in this volume—juxtaposed with Stewart’s modern-day images—are the black-and-white photographs commissioned during the 1940s by the War Relocation Authority. Thoughtful essays by Karen Leong, Natasha Egan, and John Tateishi provide provocative context for all the photographs.

Charles Deas (1818–67), an enigmatic figure on the edge of mainstream artistic circles in mid-nineteenth-century New York, went west to explore new opportunities and subjects in 1840. From his adopted hometown of St. Louis, Deas sent his iconic paintings of fur trappers and Indians back east for exhibition and sale, briefly winning the recognition that had earlier eluded him. This handsome volume—featuring more than 150 illustrations, 70 in color—is the first book exclusively devoted to Deas. In two major essays, Carol Clark presents Deas’s haunting biography and complex art—works that embodied Americans’ uncertainty about the future of their rapidly expanding nation, especially in the contested spaces of the West. Ranging from Indian genre scenes to more violent and bizarre themes drawn from literature and his own imagination, Deas’s images reverberate with the racial tensions and cut-throat economic competition of the period. Three additional essayists examine the historical, political, and social context of Deas’s art and discuss in detail two of his major paintings, Walking the Chalk and Long Jakes, “the Rocky Mountain Man.” The volume also includes Clark’s catalogue of Deas’s paintings, watercolors, and drawings—the most extensive recovery and documentation to date of the work of this important but little-known artist. Charles Deas and 1840s America will constitute the definitive reference on the painter for years to come.

In the decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century, Charles M. Russell depicted the American West in a fresh, personal, and deeply moving way. To this day, Russell is celebrated for his paintings and sculptures of cowboys at work and play, his sensitive portrayals of American Indians, and his superlative representations of landscape and wildlife. This handsome book―a companion volume to the acclaimed Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné , edited by B. Byron Price―showcases many of the artist’s best-known works and chronicles the sources and evolution of his style. Here are iconic images that have defined the West in the popular imagination for more than a century. The volume boasts reproductions, most in full color, of more than 150 of Russell’s finest works in oil, bronze, and mixed media. Select examples of his drawings, watercolors, and illustrated letters as well as archival photographs place Russell’s paintings and sculpture in historic and artistic context. This sumptuous volume is an essential addition to the library of every aficionado of American western art. In its pages readers will discover the work of a man whose ideal vision of the American experience continues to stir the spirit nearly a century after his death.

In the decades bracketing the turn of the twentieth century, Charles M. Russell depicted the American West in a fresh, personal, and deeply moving way. To this day, Russell is celebrated for his paintings and sculptures of cowboys at work and play, his sensitive portrayals of American Indians, and his superlative representations of landscape and wildlife. This handsome book―a companion volume to the acclaimed Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné , edited by B. Byron Price―showcases many of the artist’s best-known works and chronicles the sources and evolution of his style. Here are iconic images that have defined the West in the popular imagination for more than a century. The volume boasts reproductions, most in full color, of more than 150 of Russell’s finest works in oil, bronze, and mixed media. Select examples of his drawings, watercolors, and illustrated letters as well as archival photographs place Russell’s paintings and sculpture in historic and artistic context. This sumptuous volume is an essential addition to the library of every aficionado of American western art. In its pages readers will discover the work of a man whose ideal vision of the American experience continues to stir the spirit nearly a century after his death.

German Impressionist artist Julius Seyler had already made a name for himself in Europe when America beckoned. While in St. Paul, Minnesota, he encountered Louis Hill, head of the Great Northern Railroad, who wanted to encourage travel to Montana’s newly created Glacier National Park. To that end, Hill enticed the adventuresome Seyler to visit this majestic landscape and to see the Blackfeet Indians who lived there. This book marks both an appreciation of Seyler’s unique art and a fascinating glimpse into the promotion of a national park in its early years. William E. Farr has written the first biographical portrait of Seyler, focusing on his two summers at Glacier in 1913 and 1914, his special relationship with the Blackfeet, and the magnificent art he created in the Northern Rockies. The book features more than one hundred images―many in color―including Seyler’s major works from Glacier, other paintings from his European years, and historic photographs from the park. Seyler enjoyed wide recognition in Europe in his day, but the wartime destruction of his European works has since relegated him to obscurity. This lavish volume shows the stunning visual impact of his art and secures his place as one of the paramount portrayers of a place we still call the Crown of the Continent.

From the Wind River Range to the Canadian border, the northern Rocky Mountain West is an outsized land of stunning dimensions and emotive power. In Visions of the Big Sky , Dan Flores revisits the Northern Rockies artistic tradition to explore its diversity and richness. In his essays about the artists, photographers, and thematic historical imagery of the region, he blends art and cultural history with personal reflection to assess the formation of the region’s character. The volume features 140 color and black-and-white illustrations, ranging from prehistoric rock art to modernist painting, and from charismatic wildlife scenes to classic landscape. They demonstrate the preponderance of Indians and wilderness in the region’s art and explore the work of individuals as diverse as Edward Sheriff Curtis and Ansel Adams. Focusing on those whose art has defined the region, Flores tells how painters like Maynard Dixon interpreted the Northern Rockies and describes the contributions of women artists Fra Dana, Evelyn Cameron, and Emily Carr. A final essay, “What Was Charlie Russell Trying to Tell Us?” critically examines the legacy of Montana’s cowboy artist. Conversational in tone and as informative as they are entertaining, these essays provide rich vistas of their own. Visions of the Big Sky does for the region’s art what The Last Best Place did for its literature.

For almost three-quarters of a century, the study of Plains Indian art has been shaped by the expertise, wisdom, and inspired leadership of John Canfield Ewers (1909–97). Based on years of field research with Native Americans, careful scholarship, and exhaustive firsthand studies of museum collections around the world, Ewers’s publications have long been required reading for anyone interested in the cultures of the Plains peoples, especially their visual art traditions. This vividly illustrated collection of Ewers’s writings presents studies first published in American Indian Art Magazine and other periodicals between 1968 and 1992. Tracing the history of the pictorial art of Plains peoples from images on rock surfaces to the walls of modern museums, the essays reflect the principal interests of this pioneering scholar of ethnohistory, who was himself a talented artist: the depiction of tribal life and ritual, individual war honors, and aspects of sacred power basic to traditional Plains cultures. Chapters are devoted to particular tribal arts—Blackfeet picture writing and Assiniboine antelope-horn headdresses, for example—as well as the work of particular artists. Ewers also traces interactions between Plains Indian artists and Euro-American artists and anthropologists. Available for the first time in book form, the influential cultural and historical studies collected here—together with all 140 illustrations that Ewers selected for them, including many now in full color—remain vital to our understanding of the Native peoples of the Great Plains.

On the morning of July 30, 1883, President Chester A. Arthur embarked on a trip of historic proportions. His destination was Yellowstone National Park, established by an act of Congress only eleven years earlier. No sitting president had ever traveled this far west. Arthur’s host and primary guide would be Philip H. Sheridan, the famed Union general. Also slated to join the expedition was a young photographer, Frank Jay Haynes. This elegant—and fascinating—book showcases Haynes’s remarkable photographic album from their six-week journey. A premier nineteenth-century landscape photographer, F. Jay Haynes, as he was known professionally, originally compiled the leather-bound album as a commemorative piece. As only six copies are known to exist, it has rarely been seen. The album’s 104 images are accompanied by captions written by General Sheridan’s brother, Colonel Michael V. Sheridan, who wrote daily dispatches that were distributed by the Associated Press. In his informative introduction, historian Frank H. Goodyear III provides background about the excursion and explains the historic and aesthetic significance of Haynes’s photographs. He then re-creates Arthur’s journey by reintroducing Haynes’s stunning images—along with Sheridan’s original captions—including views of the Tetons and other landmarks; portraits of President Arthur, General Sheridan, and fellow travelers engaged in activities along the route; and images of the Shoshone and Arapaho leaders who gathered to greet the visiting party. Published on the occasion of the reopening of the Haynes Photography Shop in Yellowstone, A President in Yellowstone offers a unique entry into the park’s storied past.

Less than thirty years after Lewis and Clark completed their epic journey, Prince Maximilian of Wied—a German naturalist—and his entourage set off on their own daring expedition across North America. Accompanying the prince on this 1832–34 voyage was Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, whose drawings and watercolors—designed to illustrate Maximilian’s journals—now rank among the great treasures of nineteenth-century American art. This lavishly illustrated book juxtaposes Bodmer’s landscape images with modern-day photographs of the same views, allowing readers to see what has changed, and what seems unchanged, since the time Maximilian and Bodmer made their storied trip up the Missouri River. To discover how the areas Bodmer depicted have changed over time, photographer Robert M. Lindholm and anthropologist W. Raymond Wood made several trips over a period of years, from 1985 to 2002, to locate and record the same sites—all the way from Boston Harbor, where Maximilian and Bodmer began their journey, to Fort McKenzie, in modern-day western Montana. Pairing sixty-seven Bodmer works side by side with Lindholm’s photographs of the same sites, this volume uses the comparison of old and new images to reveal alterations through time—and the encroachment of a built environment—across diverse landscapes. Karl Bodmer’s America Revisited is at once a tribute to the artistic achievements of a premier landscape artist and a photographer who followed in his footsteps, and a valuable record of America’s ever-changing environment.

This book is a rich record of life in small-town southeastern Alaska in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It is the first book to showcase the photographs of Vincent Soboleff, an amateur Russian American photographer whose community included Tlingit Indians from a nearby village as well as Russian Americans, so-called Creoles, who worked in a local fertilizer factory. Using a Kodak camera, Soboleff, the son of a Russian Orthodox priest, documented the life of this multiethnic parish at work and at play until 1920. Despite their significance, few of Soboleff’s photographs have been published since their discovery in 1950. Anthropologist Sergei Kan rectifies that oversight in A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country , which brings together more than 100 of Soboleff’s striking black-and-white images. Combining Soboleff’s photographs with ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, Kan brings to life the communities of Killisnoo, where Soboleff grew up, and Angoon, the Tlingit village. The photographs gathered here depict Russian Creoles, Euro-Americans, the operation of the Killisnoo factory, and the daily life of its workers. But Soboleff’s work is especially valuable as a record of Tlingit life. As a member of this multiethnic community, he was able to take unusually personal photographs of people and daily life. Soboleff’s photographs offer candid and intimate glimpses into Tlingit people’s then-new economic pursuits such as commercial fishing, selling berries, and making “Indian curios” to sell to tourists. Other images show white, Creole, and Native factory workers rubbing shoulders while keeping a certain distance during leisure time. Kan offers readers, historians, and photography lovers a beautiful visual resource on Tlingit and Russian American life that shows how the two cultures intertwined in southeastern Alaska at the turn of the past century.

Since he first dreamed of a career in photography, Guy Gillette has traveled regularly to his wife’s family’s ranch, located outside the small town of Crockett, Texas. When Gillette first came to the Porter Place, as the ranch has always been known, he began to photograph the Porter family and their land. Thanks to Gillette’s sense of composition, these wonderful black-and-white photographs, dating from the 1940s, led to his career as a magazine photographer. Collected here for the first time, they document small-town life in East Texas, where Guy Gillette’s sons, the musical duo the Gillette Brothers, still run cattle. A Family of the Land offers a portrait of a community over a half century during which remarkably little has changed. Midway between Dallas and Houston, the Porter Place is where the South meets the West. The pastures began as cotton fields carved out of piney woods, and the cowboys use southern curs to control the cattle. One of the photographs presented here, of a boy and his dog at the veterinarian’s office, is said to have moved Museum of Modern Art curator Edward Steichen to tears. Gillette also captures cowboys at work and at play, branding and marketing their animals, enjoying a game of dominoes, driving trucks with “2-50” air conditioning—two windows down, fifty miles an hour. “Though photography is often called art,” says Gillette, “I have wanted to be artless: to be a documentarian, not an artist. . . . Telling a story was always the attraction of photography for me.” The story ends with the outdoor wedding of Guy Porter, one of the Gillette Brothers, at the Porter Place. Family, labor, and land remain, inseparable.

The opening of the West after the Civil War drew a flood of Americans and immigrants to the frontier. Among the liveliest records of the westering of the 1870s is the series of prints collected for the first time in this book. Chronicling the West for Harper’s showcases 100 illustrations made for the weekly magazine by French artists Paul Frenzeny and Jules Tavernier on a cross-country assignment in 1873 and 1874. The pair―“Frenzeny & Tavernier,” as they signed their work―documented the newly accessible territories, their diverse inhabitants, and the changing frontier. Historian Claudine Chalmers focuses on the life and work of Frenzeny and Tavernier, who were accomplished and adventurous enough to succeed as “special artists,” the label Harper’s Weekly gave the illustrators it sent into the field. The job required imagination, courage, and adaptability, not to mention expert draftsmanship. Frenzeny, a skilled artist who accepted his adopted country’s many cultures, was also a superb horseman. Tavernier had been trained to work fast in a variety of media. Both men had the advantage of viewing America with fresh eyes. They began their artistic record in the East with An Emigrant Boarding-House in New York . Their journey ended in San Francisco, where they sketched the city’s bustling Chinatown and pastoral Marin County suburbs. Along with each illustration, the artists sent Harper’s a description; those captions are reproduced here. Frenzeny and Tavernier documented the frontier as it evolved. They depicted the hazards of travel and settlement, from fires to destitution, and presented disconcerting subject matter―such as the Sioux Sun Dance―in relentless detail. Their skill has made some of their drawings, among them The Strike in the Coal Mine, classics of American culture. With pencil and woodblock, Chalmers shows, these intrepid Frenchmen shaped public perceptions of the West for decades to come.

Grafton Tyler Brown―whose heritage was likely one-eighth African American―finessed his way through San Francisco society by passing for white. Working in an environment hostile to African American achievement, Brown became a successful commercial artist and businessman in the rough-and-tumble gold rush era and the years after the Civil War. Best known for his bird’s-eye cityscapes, he also produced and published maps, charts, and business documents, and he illustrated books, sheet music, advertisements, and labels for cans and other packaging. This biography by a distinguished California historian gives an underappreciated artist and his work recognition long overdue. Focusing on Grafton Tyler Brown’s lithography and his life in nineteenth-century San Francisco, Robert J. Chandler offers a study equally fascinating as a business and cultural history and as an introduction to Brown the artist. Chandler’s contextualization of Brown’s career goes beyond the issue of race. Showing how Brown survived and flourished as a businessman, Chandler offers unique insight into the growth of printing and publishing in California and the West. He examines the rise of lithography, its commercial and cultural importance, and the competition among lithographic companies. He also analyzes Brown’s work and style, comparing it to the products of rival firms. Brown was not respected as a fine artist until after his death. Collectors of western art and Americana now recognize the importance of Californiana and of Brown’s work, some of which depicts Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and they will find Chandler’s checklist, descriptions, and reproductions of Brown’s ephemera―including billheads and maps―as uniquely valuable as Chandler’s contribution to the cultural and commercial history of California. In an afterword, historian Shirley Ann Wilson Moore discusses the circumstances and significance of passing in nineteenth-century America.

Almost as familiar as the images of the American West he painted and sculpted is the figure of Charles M. Russell himself. Standing or mounted, in boots and wide-brimmed hat, sash knotted at his waist, gaze steady under a hank of unruly hair: he is the one and only "Cowboy Artist." What is not so well known is the story that unfolds in the myriad photographs of Russell, pictures that document a remarkable life while also reflecting the evolution of photography and the depiction of the American West at the turn of the twentieth century. This biography makes use of hundreds of images of Russell, many never before published, to explore the role of photography in shaping the artist's public image and the making and selling of his art. More than that, the book shows how the Cowboy Artist personified what he portrayed. Born in 1864 to a well-to-do family in St. Louis, Russell was smitten early on by the burgeoning art of photography and the images of the West that were proliferating as rapidly as the frontier was disappearing. When he moved to Helena at sixteen, his passions came together, as professional and amateur photographers made their way to the Montana Territory to document the cowboy life that Charlie was embracing and beginning to paint. Larry Len Peterson traces Russell's image and his career from these first adventures to his apotheosis as an artist, and then to his California period and his final days as the grand statesman of the American West. Along the way we meet some of the most interesting photographers of the era, as Russell posed for Edward S. Curtis, Roland Reed, Clarence S. Bull, Hildore C. Eklund, and Dorothea Lange, among others. Because Nancy Russell used photographs to promote her artist husband’s career and artistic identity, we also see the medium's early application as a marketing tool in the hands of a surprisingly savvy businesswoman. Alongside Peterson's engrossing tale of the life of this American icon, the hundreds of photographs of Russell, his friends, family members, business associates, colleagues, and celebrities of his time offer a unique view of the artist's historic and cultural milieu―a view at once panoramic and intimate.

Naturalist John James Audubon found the Great Plains and their wildlife so riveting when he visited the region in 1834 that he broke off a letter to his wife because he was too excited to write. In the almost two hundred years since then, the Wyoming landscape, deemed the “Italy of America” by landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, has retained its glory if not its place in the imagination of the American public. This book reminds us of the remarkable bounty contained in the wild beauty and rich history of the Wyoming grasslands—even as these riches are under threat from both human and natural forces. This landscape is now captured in all its spectacular diversity in the photography of Michael P. Berman and William S. Sutton, two of the modern American West’s most accomplished and well-known landscape photographers. Essays by Frank H. Goodyear, Jr., and Charles R. Preston provide a contextual framework for the images. Goodyear introduces us to the imagery of the American West and explains the place of Berman’s and Sutton’s work within that tradition, and Preston focuses on the natural history of the grasslands, illuminating the area’s ecological diversity and changes through the seasons and over the years. In 2012 Berman and Sutton launched their massive Wyoming Grasslands Photographic Project, a partnership between The Nature Conservancy, Wyoming Chapter, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. Working in the tradition of late-nineteenth-century explorers and photographers of the American West, Berman and Sutton shot more than 50,000 digital photographs of Wyoming prairie, from the Red Desert of southwestern Wyoming to the Thunder Basin National Grassland of the state’s northeastern corner. The best of their extraordinarily sensitive, revealing, and powerful images appear in these pages, documenting the sweep and the seasons of the Wyoming landscape. In eloquent words and pictures, including a foreword by environmental historian Dan Flores, Wyoming Grasslands offers dramatic proof of how the land that inspired the likes of Audubon and Bierstadt, while having altered over time, still holds and demands our attention.

Artist-explorer John Mix Stanley (1814–1872), one of the most celebrated chroniclers of the American West in his time, was in a sense a victim of his own success. So highly regarded was his work that more than two hundred of his paintings were held at the Smithsonian Institution—where in 1865 a fire destroyed all but seven of them. This volume, featuring a comprehensive collection of Stanley’s extant art, reproduced in full color, offers an opportunity—and ample reason—to rediscover the remarkable accomplishments of this outsize figure of nineteenth-century American culture. Originally from New York State, Stanley journeyed west in 1842 to paint Indian life. During the U.S.-Mexican War, he joined a frontier military expedition and traveled from Santa Fe to California, producing sketches and paintings of the campaign along the way—work that helped secure his fame in the following decades. He was also appointed chief artist for Isaac Stevens’s survey of the 48th parallel for a proposed transcontinental railroad. The essays in this volume, by noted scholars of American art, document and reflect on Stanley’s life and work from every angle. The authors consider the artist’s experience on government expeditions; his solo tours among the Oregon settlers and western and Plains Indians; and his career in Washington and search for government patronage, as well as his individual works. With contributions by Emily C. Burns, Scott Manning Stevens, Lisa Strong, Melissa Speidel, Jacquelyn Sparks, and Emily C. Wilson, the essays in this volume convey the full scope of John Mix Stanley’s artistic accomplishment and document the unfolding of that uniquely American vision throughout the artist’s colorful life. Together they restore Stanley to his rightful place in the panorama of nineteenth-century American life and art.

As time passes, personal memories of the Great Depression die with those who lived through the desperate 1930s. In the absence of firsthand knowledge, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the photographs produced for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) now provide most of the images that come to mind when we think of the 1930s. That novel and those photographs, as this book shows, share a history. Fully exploring this complex connection for the first time, Picturing Migrants offers new insight into Steinbeck’s novel and the FSA’s photography—and into the circumstances that have made them enduring icons of the Depression. Looking at the work of Dorothea Lange, Horace Bristol, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee, it is easy to imagine that these images came straight out of the pages of The Grapes of Wrath . This should be no surprise, James R. Swensen tells us, because Steinbeck explicitly turned to photographs of the period to create his visceral narrative of hope and loss among Okie migrants in search of a better life in California. When the novel became an instant best seller upon its release in April 1939, some dismissed its imagery as pure fantasy. Lee knew better and traveled to Oklahoma for proof. The documentary pictures he produced are nothing short of a photographic illustration of the hard lives and desperate reality that Steinbeck so vividly portrayed. In Picturing Migrants , Swensen sets these lesser-known images alongside the more familiar work of Lange and others, giving us a clearer understanding of the FSA’s work to publicize the plight of the migrant in the wake of the novel and John Ford’s award-winning film adaptation. A new perspective on an era whose hardships and lessons resonate to this day, Picturing Migrants lets us see as never before how a novel and a series of documentary photographs have kept the Great Depression unforgettably real for generation after generation.

The American nineteenth century saw a largely rural nation confined to the Eastern Seaboard conquer a continent and spawn increasingly dense commercial metropolises. This time of unprecedented territorial and economic growth has long been thought to find its most sweeping visual equivalent in the period’s landscape paintings. But, as Matthew N. Johnston shows, the age’s defining features were just as clearly captured in, and motivated by, visual material mass-produced through innovations in printing technology. Illustrated railroad and steamboat guidebooks, tourist literature, reports of geological surveys, ethnographic studies: all of these new print vehicles brought new meanings to the interplay of time, space, and place as American continental expansion peaked. Instrumental to that project of national and industrial growth, these commercial and scientific publications introduced readers, travelers, and citizens to a changing North American landscape made more accessible by new travel routes blazed between 1825 and 1875. More fundamentally, as Johnston shows in his nuanced analysis, by simulating new temporal frameworks through their presentation of landscape, these print materials established new models of consumption and new kinds of knowledge critical to expansion. Johnston relates these sources to traditional art historical subjects—the landscapes of the Hudson River school, luminist paintings by John Kensett and William Trost Richards, Native portraits painted by George Catlin, and photographs by Timothy O’Sullivan—to show how key discourses associated with expansion shifted away from picturesque strategies pairing imagery and narrative toward entirely new forms that gave temporal structure to viewers’ experience of an emerging modernity. Revealing the crucial role of print and visual culture in shaping the nineteenth-century United States, Narrating the Landscape offers fresh insight into the landscapes Americans beheld and imagined in this formative era.

On May 10, 2008, a tornado struck the northeastern Oklahoma town of Picher, destroying more than one hundred homes and killing six people. It was the final blow to a onetime boomtown already staggering under the weight of its history. The lead and zinc mining that had given birth to the town had also proven its undoing, earning Picher in 2006 the distinction of being the nation’s most toxic Superfund site. Recounting the town’s dissolution and documenting its remaining traces, Picher, Oklahoma tells the story of an unfolding ghost town. With shades of Picher’s past lives lingering at every intersection, memories of its proud history and sad decline inhere in the relics, artifacts, personal treasures, and broken structures abandoned in disaster’s wake. In Todd Stewart’s haunting photographs, faded snapshots and letters, well-worn garments, and books and toys give harrowing and elegiac testimony of constancy and dislocation. Empty buildings and bared foundations stand in silent witness to the homes, schools, churches, and businesses that once defined life in Picher. As these photographs and Alison Fields’s accompanying essays explore the otherworldly town teetering over massive sinkholes, they reveal how memory, embedded in everyday objects, can be dislocated and reframed through both chronic and acute instances of environmental trauma. Though hardly known outside the Three Corners Region of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, the fate of Picher echoes well beyond its borders. Picher, Oklahoma reflects the broader intersections of memory, time, material objects, and changing environments, demanding our attention even as it resists easy interpretation.

One of America’s most popular and influential American artists, Frederic Remington (1861–1909) is renowned for his depictions of the Old West. Through paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he immortalized a dynamic world of cowboys and American Indians, hunters and horses, landscapes and wildlife . Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is a comprehensive presentation of the artist’s body of flat work, both in print and on this book’s companion website. Beautifully illustrated with more than 150 figures and 100 color plates, this book offers insightful essays by notable art historians who explore Remington’s experiences in Taos, New Mexico, and other parts of the West. The chapters include analyses of Remington’s artistic development from an illustrator to a fine art painter, his search for and understanding of “men with the bark on,” his relationship with the famed illustrator Howard Pyle, and the shared imagery of Remington and “Buffalo Bill” Cody. A chapter considering Remington’s enduring bond with the horse and its representation in his paintings follows an examination of Remington’s ties to Theodore Roosevelt that reveals how the two men helped move the American conscience toward wildlife preservation. An assessment of the authentication process for evaluating Remington’s works opens the collection: Remington is perhaps the most frequently faked American artist. The book features a unique keycode granting access to a companion website that brings together more than 3,000 reproductions of the artist’s flat works, including the complete original 1996 edition of the Catalogue Raisonné and nearly 300 previously unknown or relocated pieces. Each entry includes the title, date, medium, size, inscriptions, provenance, and exhibition and publication history of the work, as well as select commentary. The online catalogue is fully searchable and will be continuously updated as new information becomes available. Based on decades of scholarship and research, the revised Remington Catalogue Raisonné is an essential resource for scholars, collectors, museum curators, historians of the American West, and anyone seeking definitive information on the art of Frederic Remington. Frederic Remington: A Catalogue Raisonné II is published in cooperation with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, Wyoming.

In 1879 two Englishmen, writer Samuel Nugent Townshend and photographer John George Hyde, set out for a pleasant Indian summer on a tour of the American West. The duo documented their travels by steamship and train, through Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, across the Missouri to the “new state of Kansas” and the beginning of the western lands and business opportunities that were to become the focus of their narrative. Reprinted here with critical notes and introduction, Our Indian Summer in the Far West offers an enlightening—and often entertaining—perspective on an early moment in the growth of capitalism and industry in the American West. Originally published as a photographic travelogue and guide to British investment in the American West, Townshend and Hyde’s account is both idiosyncratic and emblematic of its time. Interested in the West’s economic and environmental potential, the two men focused on farming in Kansas, railroads and mining in Colorado, a bear hunt in New Mexico, and ranching in Texas. The sojourners’ own foibles also enter the narrative: alerted to the difficulty of finding a hotel with a bath, the two Victorians took along a portable bathtub made of India rubber. Their words and pictures speak volumes about contemporary attitudes toward race, empire, and the future of civilization. An introduction by coeditor Alex Hunt provides background on the creators and the travelogue genre. The recovery and republication of this extremely rare volume, an artifact of the Victorian American West, make available an important primary document of a brief but pivotal historical moment connecting the American West and the British Empire.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the land known as “Indian Territory” was populated by diverse cultures, troubled by shifting political boundaries, and transformed by historical events that were colorful, dramatic, and often tragic. Beyond its borders, most Americans visualized the area through the pictures produced by non-Native travelers, artists, and reporters—all with differing degrees of accuracy, vision, and skill. The images in Picturing Indian Territory , and the eponymous exhibit it accompanies, conjure a wildly varied vision of Indian Territory’s past. Spanning nearly nine decades, these artworks range from the scientific illustrations found in English naturalist Thomas Nuttall’s journal to the paintings of Frederic Remington, Henry Farny, and Charles Schreyvogel. The volume’s three essays situate these works within the historical narratives of westward expansion, the creation of an “Indian Territory” separate from the rest of the United States, and Oklahoma’s eventual statehood in 1907. James Peck focuses on artists who produced images of Native Americans living in this vast region during the pre–Civil War era. In his essay, B. Byron Price picks up the story at the advent of the Civil War and examines newspaper and magazine reports as well as the accounts of government functionaries and artist-travelers drawn to the region by the rapidly changing fortunes of the area’s traditional Indian cultures in the wake of non-Indian settlement. Mark Andrew White then looks at the art and illustration resulting from the unrelenting efforts of outsiders who settled Indian and Oklahoma Territories in the decades before statehood. Some of the artworks featured in this volume have never before been displayed; some were produced by more than one artist; others are anonymous. Many were completed by illustrators on-site, as the events they depicted unfolded, while other artists relied on written accounts and vivid imaginations. Whatever their origin, these depictions of the people, places, and events of “Indian Country” defined the region for contemporary American and European audiences. Today they provide a rich visual record of a key era of western and Oklahoma history—and of the ways that art has defined this important cultural crossroads.

Throughout his long and prolific career, Ray Stanford Strong (1905–2006) strove to capture the essence of the western American landscape. An accomplished painter who achieved national fame during the New Deal era, Strong is best known for his depiction of landscapes in California and Oregon, rendered in his signature plein air style. This beautiful volume, featuring more than 100 color and black-and-white illustrations, is the first comprehensive exploration of Strong’s life and artistry. Through family papers, archives, photographs, and a two-year series of interviews conducted with the artist personally, Mark Humpal traces Strong’s journey from his childhood on an Oregon berry farm to his artistically formative years in New York and San Francisco. After moving back to the West Coast, Strong produced important works for the WPA, executed major diorama projects for two world expositions, helped organize the Santa Barbara Art Institute, and served as teacher and mentor for a new generation of plein air artists. But, as Humpal emphasizes, Strong distinguished himself by resisting the drumbeat of the avant-garde. During an era when many artists were experimenting with abstract expressionism, Strong never relinquished his personal vision and adherence to a more traditional style. With his outgoing personality, he forged friendships and associations with such prominent artists as Frank Vincent DuMond, Maynard Dixon, Ansel Adams, Frank Lloyd Wright, and John Steinbeck. Ultimately, Strong had little concern for his place in the sweep of art history. The proficiency he achieved through years of formal and informal study allowed him to craft a personal style difficult to categorize but unique and engaging. By expanding our understanding and appreciation of Strong’s artistic contributions, this book offers a fitting tribute to one of America’s finest landscape artists.

As one of America’s most prominent nineteenth-century painters, Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) is justly renowned for his majestic paintings of the western landscape. Yet Bierstadt was also a painter of history, and his figural works, replete with images of Plains Indians and the American bison, are an important part of his legacy as well. This splendid full-color volume highlights his achievements in chronicling a rapidly changing American West. Born in Germany, Bierstadt rose to prominence as an American artist in the late 1850s and enjoyed nearly two decades of critical success. His paintings propelled him to the forefront of the American art scene, but they also met with reproach from his peers and critics in the press who viewed his painting style as outmoded. Bierstadt’s star has both risen and fallen as modern art historians have reconsidered his complex oeuvre. This volume takes a major step in reappraising Bierstadt’s contributions by reexamining the artist through a new lens. It shows how Bierstadt conveyed moral messages through his paintings, often to preserve the dignity of Native peoples and call attention to the tragic slaughter of the American bison. More broadly, the book reconsiders the artist’s engagement with contemporary political and social debates surrounding wildlife conservation in America, the creation and perpetuation of national parks, and the prospects for the West’s indigenous peoples. Bierstadt’s final history paintings, including his dual masterworks titled The Last of the Buffalo —a special focus of this volume—stand out as elegiac odes to an earlier era, giving voice to concerns about the intertwined fates of Native peoples and endangered wildlife, especially bison. Along with its rich sampling of Bierstadt’s diverse artwork, Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West features informative essays by noted curators, scholars of art history, and historians of the American West.

When Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show traveled to Paris in 1889, the New York Times reported that the exhibition would be “managed to suit French ideas.” But where had those “French ideas” of the American West come from? And how had they, in turn, shaped the notions of “cowboys and Indians” that captivated the French imagination during the Gilded Age? In Transnational Frontiers , Emily C. Burns maps the complex fin-de-siècle cultural exchanges that revealed, defined, and altered images of the American West. This lavishly illustrated visual history shows how American artists, writers, and tourists traveling to France exported the dominant frontier narrative that presupposed manifest destiny—and how Native American performers with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and other traveling groups challenged that view. Many French artists and illustrators plied this imagery as well. At the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, sculptures of American cowboys conjured a dynamic and adventurous West, while portraits of American Indians on vases evoked an indigenous people frozen in primitivity. At the same time, representations of Lakota performers, as well as the performers themselves, deftly negotiated the politics of American Indian assimilation and sought alternative spaces abroad. For French artists and enthusiasts, the West served as a fulcrum for the construction of an American cultural identity, offering a chance to debate ideas of primitivism and masculinity that bolstered their own colonialist discourses. By examining this process, Burns reveals the interconnections between American western art and Franco-American artistic exchange between 1865 and 1915.

From its sweeping coastlines to its soaring inland mountains, verdant valleys, and volcanoes standing in splendid isolation, the Pacific Northwest has long inspired artists to capture the unique spirit of its varied landscape. Yet the early years of twentieth-century Pacific Northwest painting remain shrouded in mystery. In this groundbreaking work, John Impert introduces readers to the rich and varied array of artists and works of art that defined the region’s artistic transition from a nature-bound impressionism to the arrival of modernism. Focusing on nine artists—Paul Morgan Gustin, C. C. McKim, Clyde Keller, J. Edgar Forkner, Clara Jane Stephens, Dorothy Dolph Jensen, Eustace Paul Ziegler, Mark Tobey, and C. S. Price—art historian John Impert organizes his work around the landscapes, people, and city scenes they painted. He identifies the influence of impressionism, in particular the singular way in which each artist's biography, style, and iconography contribute to a distinctive northwestern sensibility. Painters of the Northwest shows us for the first time how a spectacular natural environment, one that conformed aesthetically to nineteenth-century ideals of romanticism and transcendental reverence, combined with an emphasis on subject over style to create a body of work far more concerned with the natural environment than with the socioeconomic issues that occupied city-bound artists of the day. Establishing a chronology, history, and art historical canon for this little-studied place and time, this book is a long-overdue foundational history of early twentieth-century painting in the Pacific Northwest.

In centuries long past, a vast swath of grassland swept down the center of North America, from Canada’s Prairie Provinces to central Texas. This once-plentiful prairie has now all but disappeared. Humans have grazed, mowed, and plowed the plains, dammed the rivers, and imposed their will on the land and its creatures. Fortunately, some remnants have survived, including the Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in northeastern Oklahoma. In this visually stunning volume, wildlife photographer Harvey Payne and historian James P. Ronda offer an intimate look at and into one of America’s Last Great Places. Spanning nearly 40,000 acres in Oklahoma’s Osage County, the Preserve is a living witness to a world that once existed. But the Osage prairie is not a museum or theme park—and it is not frozen in time. Under the stewardship of The Nature Conservancy, which has overseen its restoration, the Preserve lives on as a fully functioning ecosystem. And for twenty-five years, Payne and Ronda have explored these lands, together and in solitude. Rendered here in brilliant color and paired with Ronda’s informative yet deeply personal commentary, Payne’s photographs open our eyes to the ever-changing world of the Tallgrass Preserve. In chapters focused on grass, sky, birds, bison, and fire, Ronda and Payne reveal that the “Big Empty” is, in fact, teeming with life. Through interwoven images and words, Visions of the Tallgrass shows that our nation’s grasslands are sacred ground, a priceless piece of our American past—and future.

What is American Indian photography? At the turn of the twentieth century, Edward Curtis began creating romantic images of American Indians, and his works—along with pictures by other non-Native photographers—came to define the field. Yet beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, American Indians themselves started using cameras to record their daily activities and to memorialize tribal members. Through a Native Lens offers a refreshing, new perspective by highlighting the active contributions of North American Indians, both as patrons who commissioned portraits and as photographers who created collections. In this richly illustrated volume, Nicole Dawn Strathman explores how indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada appropriated the art of photography and integrated it into their lifeways. The photographs she analyzes date to the first one hundred years of the medium, between 1840 and 1940. To account for Native activity both in front of and behind the camera, the author divides her survey into two parts. Part I focuses on Native participants, including such public figures as Sarah Winnemucca and Red Cloud, who fashioned themselves in deliberate ways for their portraits. Part II examines Native professional, semiprofessional, and amateur photographers. Drawing from tribal and state archives, libraries, museums, and individual collections, Through a Native Lens features photographs—including some never before published—that range from formal portraits to casual snapshots. The images represent multiple tribal communities across Native North America, including the Inland Tlingit, Northern Paiute, and Kiowa. Moving beyond studies of Native Americans as photographic subjects, this groundbreaking book demonstrates how indigenous peoples took control of their own images and distinguished themselves as pioneers of photography.