When Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West unveiled the Louis Sands IV Center, the crown jewel of a $12 million expansion project in late March, it opened with four new interconnected exhibitions of Western and Native American art curated to reflect the depth and diversity of the region’s creative traditions and the museum’s collections.
Bill Nebeker, Flowers for My Wagon Widow, 1982, bronze, ed. 7 of 25, 28 ¾ x 14 ¾ x 9 in.
Complementing From Earth to the Stars, which traces the evolution of American Indian jewelry, and Fire of Ages which showcases six centuries of Native American pottery, is Visions of Bronze. Featuring 16 artists and spanning roughly 125 years of American sculpture, the exhibition explores how the medium of bronze has shaped the enduring modern myth of the West.
Andrew Patrick Nelson, Western Spirit’s chief curator, says, “From Henry Merwin Shrady’s Buffalo and Moose, completed at the turn of the last century, to John Coleman’s Victory! Plenty Coups, completed in 2024, the breadth [of this exhibition]—from the tail end of the 19th century to the present day—allows visitors to trace both the enduring conventions of the Western bronze tradition and the ways contemporary artists have complicated and expanded it.”
Joe Beeler (1931-2006), Lord of the Southern Plains, 2000, bronze, ed. 1 of 25, 35 x 18 x 17 in.
Other artists represented include Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, Allan Houser, Harry Jackson, Charles Schreyvogel, Roxanne Swentzell and Baje Whitethorne Sr.
“The works were selected to illustrate bronze’s long cultural function as a medium of myth and idealization, and to trace how American sculptors, working consciously within a tradition stretching back to classical antiquity, used it to cast the figures of the frontier into heroic archetypes,” explains Nelson. “The selection also deliberately reaches beyond the canonical names of Western American art to include sculptors like Allan Houser, Roxanne Swentzell and Baje Whitethorn Sr., who bring their own cultural perspectives to the medium, casting visions that belong to them rather than to an outsider’s romantic imagination. Together, the works let us admire the artistry while asking important questions about mythmaking and memory.”
Grant Speed (1930-2011), The Boss is a Lady, 1995, bronze, ed. 20 of 30, 15 x 14 x 10 in.
Nelson notes that several works stand out for their historical importance, formal ambition or interpretive complexity. He points to Remington’s Mountain Man, 1903, as perhaps the exhibition’s most iconic piece. “Made by America’s most celebrated Western sculptor at the height of his powers, it crystallizes the exhibition’s central thesis—the frontier figure as mythic hero—in a single, breathtaking composition,” he says, adding that Houser’s 1986 bronze Buffalo Dance Relief is equally significant for different reasons. “In a frieze format recalling ancient Greek and Roman relief sculpture, one of the most important American Indian artists of the 20th century renders a Chiricahua Apache ceremony from the inside, as lived tradition rather than outside myth,” Nelson explains. “The juxtaposition of these two works captures the exhibition’s dual ambition.”
Deborah Copenhaver Fellows, Branded - He’s Mine Forever, 2007, bronze, ed. 26 of 50, 29 x 14 x 7 in.
Other works of note are Swentzell’s multi-figure Generation Tower, which challenges the fictional ideal of the heroic individual and shifts the focus, and therefore, the value to community. Nelson adds, “And Coleman’s Victory! Plenty Coups, 2024, the most recent work, raises the medium’s most persistent question in its label text: bronze has always served the vision of its maker, so whose vision of greatness is this?” —
Visions in Bronze
Ongoing
Western Spirit Museum: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West
3830 N. Marshall Way, Scottsdale, AZ 85251
(480) 686-9539, www.westernspirit.org
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