Marie Romero Cash (b.1942) comes from a long line of santeras/os, people who create sculptures in a Mexican-American Catholic tradition. As part of a major restoration project in the 1980s, the San Juan Nepomuceno Church in El Rito commissioned Cash to create a new retablo, a colorful painting on a massive wooden panel placed on the back of the altar. This early rendering of the retablo depicts saints significant to the church community.

In Utah’s Great Basin Desert, artist Nancy Holt (1938–2014) realized her site-specific earthwork, Sun Tunnels. According to Holt, the positioning of four massive concrete tunnels brings “the vast space of the desert back to human scale.” The tunnels frame nature as art, accentuating light and shadow with every rise and fall of the sun. Holt filmed the construction of the artwork, showing how the concrete tubes were fabricated, delivered, and installed.

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) grew up in AZ and CA. His father was often away from the family working as a road surveyor for the government. In the summer of 1927, Jackson and his brother Sanford joined their father’s crew to help build a dirt road to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Here the Pollock men contemplate the remarkable vista. Three years later, Pollock moved to NY and began painting. He later attributed memories of western landscapes to his expressive artistic vision.

Robert Delford Brown (1930–2009) performed in the persona of a minister of his own religion. According to Brown, “many religions tell you how to get to Nirvana. They all give very complicated directions. The First National Church of Exquisite Panic, Inc. tells you how to get to Nevada. It sounds close and its [sic] simple. YOU TAKE A BUS!” In the spirit of his unorthodox doctrine, Brown created collages connecting major cities like Paris, shown here, to Nevada.

The 1981 exhibition Murals of Aztlan: The Street Painters of East Los Angeles at the Craft and Folk Art Museum featured large portable murals by Carlos Almaraz, Gronk, Judithe Hernandez, Willie Herron, Frank Romero, John Valadez and the East Los Streetscrapers (David Botello, Wayne Healy, George Yepes). It marked a turning point in the reception of Chicano art—the radical, and often illegal, practice of muralismo, a form of street art, transformed an institutional setting. Click for film.

Painter Louis Bunce (1907–1983) first moved to Portland, Oregon, from Wyoming in 1920 to work at a shipyard. After studying art in New York for a few years, he returned to Portland and quickly became a prominent member of the local arts scene. In this sketchbook, Bunce has rendered a fishing dock near Newport in precise strokes of pencil and ink. Detailed sketches of area docks, shipyards, and bridges informed his surrealist, semi-abstract paintings of the time.

Kamekichi Tokita (1897–1948) was a painter and businessman who emigrated from Japan in 1919 and settled in Seattle. His colorful watercolors of local neighborhoods and landscapes were exhibited throughout the Pacific Northwest. This page from a family photograph album illuminates his relationship with fellow artist, Kenjiro Nomura. Tokita and Nomura co-owned a sign-painting business, Noto Sign Co., in the heart of the Japantown/ Nihonmachi District (today known as the International District).

In 1942 Roger Shimomura (b.1939) and his family were incarcerated at the Minidoka Camp in the remote high desert of Idaho as part of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. His grandmother, Toku, maintained a journal of her experience. Decades later, Shimomura created the performance artwork Seven Kabuki Plays based on Toku’s journal. Shimomura combined traditional techniques of Kabuki Theater with elements of American pop culture to chronicle the family’s forced relocation from Seattle.

In 1919 painter W. Langdon Kihn joined his art teacher Winold Reiss on a painting trip to MT. In a letter home to his parents, Kihn passionately describes the Rocky Mountains in Glacier National Park: “There is nothing but the moan of the wind in the trees, and the light of the clear moon from the sky, and nothing but the sad silent range going on and on.” Throughout the 1920s, Kihn traversed the Western United States and Canada, where he visited and painted various Native American tribes.

After the death of legendary cowboy Col. William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody in 1917, the Buffalo Bill Memorial Association tapped sculptor and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to create an artwork honoring his “pioneer spirit.” The Scout was unveiled at a Boy Scout rally on July 4, 1924. It stood in an empty lot until the log-cabin Buffalo Bill Museum opened in 1927. Today, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is a vaunted museum complex, including the Whitney Western Art Museum.

Artist Emanuel Martinez (b.1947) was born in Denver and currently lives in Morrison. Discovering art and the Chicano Movement simultaneously in the 1960s fostered his transition from a troubled youth to a respected community leader. Today, he works with students throughout the southwest, producing bold murals that document and illustrate the Chicano experience. The city of Denver maintains many of these murals, providing a colorful and educational backdrop for tourists and residents alike.

During World War II, Henry Varnum Poor (1887–1970) was a member of the War Artists’ Unit with the rank of major. For several months in 1943, he was stationed in Alaska as a war correspondent tasked with documenting soldier life at Ladd Army Airfield in Fairbanks. Poor sketched this view of the Yukon River from a military plane. “The pattern of tundra…seen from a height of 7,000 feet, is an intricate abstract arrangement in curves,” he wrote in his manuscript, An Artist Sees Alaska.

Painter and poet Reuben Tam (1916–1992) was deeply influenced by the landscapes of his native Hawaii. While hiking the volcanic terrain, he reflected on nature’s many moods. “Yellow grass splashes down the slopes, and the landscape is turbulent yet serene,” wrote Tam in this diary entry about Haleakalā, a shield volcano forming a large portion of Maui. The artist’s evocative descriptions and rough sketches served as starting points for his expressive landscape paintings.

This Guide comes from the Smithsonian’s ​Archives of American Art, the world’s most widely used research center dedicated to collecting, preserving, and providing access to primary sources documenting the history of the visual arts in America. We house more than 20 million letters, diaries, scrapbooks, manuscripts, financial records, photographs, films, and audiovisual recordings of artists, dealers, collectors, critics, scholars, museums, galleries, associations, and other art world figures.