A rich compendium of Western art by women, this book also contains essays which examine the many economic, social, and political forces that have shaped the art over years of pivotal change. The women profiled played an important role in gaining the acceptance of women as men's peers in artistic communities. Their independent spirit resonates in studios and galleries throughout the country today. Photos.

The only two-time winner of the prestigious Prix de West grand prize—the highest honor in the storied movement of art of the American West—George Carlson creates works in the tradition of American masters Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and the Taos School artists. No comprehensive book of George Carlson’s work has ever before been published, making this magnificent volume an incomparable addition to the libraries of collectors and students of Western art and American landscape painting. Likened to the French and American Impressionists, who turned to nature’s beauty for relief from the industrialized world, Carlson is regarded as one of the most important American artists of his generation. His Prix de West triumphs have come in two different mediums: sculpture and, more recently, landscape painting. Recognized as one of America’s greatest bronze sculptors, Carlson is also a master at using pastels and oils. Carlson’s tactile, textured landscape paintings are viewed as bold touchstones for a new movement taking hold in Western art—and it is inspiring new generations of Realists and Impressionists. With nature as his muse, Carlson is an American treasure, and this book demonstrates how and why he is making his own impactful contribution to the canon of art history.

Profiles more than 150 women artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the American West, offers fifteen interpretive essays, and includes nearly three hundred reproductions of their works.

This encyclopedia is a biographical dictionary of some 1,000 women artists of the American West. The product of a twenty-year, coast-to-coast research project by authors Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick, it offers accurate, concise introductions to women painters, graphic artists, and sculptors, all of whom achieved recognition as depictors of Western subjects between the 1840s and 1980. Their styles range from representationalism to early modernism, while their works depict everything from bold landscapes and scenes of intensive action to studies of Native Americans, pioneers, ranchers, farmers, wildlife, and flora. Each entry in the encyclopedia features the salient facts of the artist's life and career, with attention to her work with Western subject matter. Many of the entries also contain a selected list of the artist's exhibitions, current locations of her work in public collections, pertinent references, and a black-and-white example of her work. An overview of the history of women in western art complements the biographical entries.

Describes changes in how the West has been seen, from a male-dominated frontier, to a region with a powerful sense of place, to a modern center of both genders, ethnic groups, and environmental interests

Dissects and studies twenty-one classic Western paintings, and analyzes the lives and styles of the artists, including Remington, O'Keefe, and Catlin.