From Ground to Sky: Arid Visions and the Making of the Southwest

Abstract

As American artists experimented with new forms in the early twentieth century, they established art colonies in New Mexico where abundant sunshine and Indigenous cultures captivated a growing number of white tourists. Artists in Santa Feand Taos developed a style of American modernism entwined with a Southwestern aesthetic beginning in the 1900s. Their paintings rendered diverse landscapes legible as a coherent region to a national audience. Decades after federal Indian policy, warfare, and settler expansion transferred Indigenous homelands to agrarian colonists, the sky above New Mexico continued to function as a space of possession, inhabited and promoted by artists and their representations. This article examines skyscapes by Ernest Blumenschein, Victor Higgins, Lafayette Maynard Dixon, and Georgia O'Keeffe to argue that the scale of Western skies compelled innovations in style as artists lowered horizons and lengthened sight lines to create a new genre of Southwestern environmental imagery.