I had Victoria Adams on today and wow, what a delightful person she is. She's such an upbeat, happy person. I've been very familiar with her work for probably two decades, and she always exhibits at prominent Indian Market events. Victoria is known for her beautifully designed jewelry and she makes custom handbags that are to die for. This year at SWAIA Indian Market, she won the best of class for the diverse arts category, which is a big, big deal. Her entry was very unique mixed-media sculptur...
Sep 20, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 262
So many of the podcasts that I do deal with Western art, but rarely do I have an artist that epitomizes what it means to be a "Western artist" the way that Teal Blake does. Teal was raised in Montana and he's been in the West his whole life and currently lives in Texas. Not only does he have the credentials of being a Western individual, but he was a professional cowboy for seven years as part of the rodeo circuit. To take that life experience and translate it into how he paints and sees the wor...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 261
I do this podcast because the people I meet in my line of work are really interesting. That's a lot of it. John Bell is exactly the kind of podcast I love doing because he's not somebody you can just throw into a typical mold and say, oh he's an artist or he's an art dealer. You know? John is an Academy Award-nominated individual who's worked on movies like Back to the Future Two, Men in Black, and Jurassic Park. All are culturally significant, yet they'd be incomplete without the influence of J...
Sep 06, 2023•1 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 260
I had a great time talking with Ray Dewey. It's a podcast that I've been wanting to do for quite a while and it's just taken a while for us to get together. He's a really busy guy so I finally said: "Fine, I'll come up to Santa Fe." I knew Ray would have a great story, and he did not disappoint. Ray was an instrumental figure in the Native American art business, especially from the 1970s through the 1990s. He still buys and sells paintings, so it's not like he's not out of the scene, but he was ...
Aug 30, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 259
I think the reason I do these podcasts is for guests like the one I just had on, which is Roy Talahaftewa. I have to say, he is such a genuine, wonderful person, artist, and someone that I think everyone should get to know if they don't already. For one thing, just on the silversmith part, he's won best of show at the Indian Market events the Heard Museum, and the Museum of Northern Arizona, but also at the Santa Fe Indian Market. I could be wrong but don't think anybody has accomplished that be...
Aug 23, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Season 1Ep. 258
In order of appearance: • Jamie Schulze: Executive Director, SWAIA • Bo Joe: Navajo/Uté Silversmith (Booth # LIN W 757) • Barbara Teller Ornelas: Navajo Weaver (Booth # LIN W 774) • Jared Chavez: San Felipe Silversmith (Booth # FR N 306) • Russell Sanchez: San Ildefonso Pueblo Potter (Booth # LIN E 711) • Kathleen Wall: Jemez Pueblo Pottery Artist (Booth # PLZ 78) • Marla Allison: Laguna Pueblo Artist (Booth # LIN E 730) • Mateo Romero: Artist and Activist (Booth # LIN E 739) • Duane Maktima: Ho...
Aug 16, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 257
I had Christine Mollring on today. For those who don't know who she is, you need to. Christine is one of the backbones of Western art. She started her own gallery early on in the 1970s and owned Trailside Gallery until about 94. Think back on what kind of individuals were running Western art galleries back in that era. They were pretty much all men. We talked about it a little, not a lot, because she felt like it was just what she had to do. It didn't stop her from becoming the best of the best....
Aug 09, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Season 1Ep. 256
I had a very interesting talk with Jim Rea today. Jim helps run the Masters show at the Autry Museum along with his wife, Jodie. We get the whole story of - not only the Autry show and how it began - but of how Jim, who started out in accounting, ends up being a critical component in this very important art show at an important museum. Jim is a guy who really liked art but wasn't trained in art. Just the opposite. He's a numbers guy. That being said, he sees the world change before his very eyes...
Aug 02, 2023•1 hr 21 min•Season 1Ep. 255
Had a wonderful podcast today with Curt Walters. He's always been one of my favorite painters. He is known as a Grand Canyon painter, but he paints all sorts of things of all shapes and sizes, painting a giant canyon one day, and water lilies the next. It was fun to be able to listen to his journey as it was not an easy one. Curt grew up in Farmington, New Mexico and he was dyslexic. As a kid, he was having issues dealing with a learning disability that most people just didn't understand at that...
Jul 26, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 254
I had Jamie Schulze say today, she is just a terrific individual and I just love her upbeat, happy demeanor. You can just feel in her something that is giving. She's the perfect person to be the executive director of SWAIA. Jaimie is someone who really cares about the artists and understands the process. She has the responsibility of promoting not only the art, but the cultural sensitivity of participants that represent over 200 different tribes. So it's a big organization to control and this is...
Jul 19, 2023•42 min•Season 1Ep. 253
I had Mark Rossi on my podcast today and we had a really wonderful talk. I've known Mark for almost 30 years and he's been in my gallery almost that long as well. He's known for his sculptures of animals. He's focused primarily on the animals of the Sonoran Desert, but because he's involved in so many museum collections as well as zoo collections, he's gotten to do a lot of exotic animals as well. If you're in the world-famous San Diego Zoo, you're going to see a Mark Rossi. If you're visiting t...
Jul 12, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 252
I had a Russell Case on the podcast today. I'm such a fan of his artwork. He captures the Southwest in a way that few others do. In this podcast, we delve into what it means to paint and how he tries to paint like how a musician makes music, which is a very interesting concept to me. We cover the struggles that he had to go through to get where is today and how all of these experiences, while difficult, made him a better artist. Russell will be the first to tell you that it doesn't happen overni...
Jul 05, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 251
I love the type of podcast where I get to go in-depth with the person I'm speaking to, so much so that I begin to feel a connection that's hard to describe. Well, I had that experience with Bo Joe. He's an amazing silversmith and an incredibly interesting person. I've known his father, sculptor and painter Orland Joe for many tears, but I hadn't really had the opportunity to talk to his son, especially not on this kind of level. Bo was a successful sound engineer for some big names in the music ...
Jun 28, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 250
I love the type of podcast where I get to go in-depth with the person I'm speaking to, so much so that I begin to feel a connection that's hard to describe. Well, I had that experience with Bo Joe. He's an amazing silversmith and an incredibly interesting person. I've known his father, sculptor and painter Orland Joe for many tears, but I hadn't really had the opportunity to talk to his son, especially not on this kind of level. Bo was a successful sound engineer for some big names in the music ...
Jun 21, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 249
Cathy Smith joined us on the podcast today and we had a delightful talk. She is a world-renowned costume designer and has worked on major motion pictures and in television. Her big break was 'Dances with Wolves,' a movie that dramatically changed Native American representation in film. Cathy went on to win an Emmy and is honored in the Cowgirl Hall of Fame for her contributions to Western media. Even with all of these accolades and accomplishments, she really struggled to begin with. It took her...
Jun 14, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Season 1Ep. 248
This podcast was particularly interesting and fun for me because I knew the person that I did it with pretty darn well. I've known Anne Gartner and her husband, Jeffrey, for almost 20 years. They're, wonderful collectors, and I wanted to talk art, which of course this is what this podcast is all about, but also the fact that she was in the military. Anne was a Navy nurse in Vietnam on one of the ships out of Danang. As many people have heard, there's a constant thread throughout a lot of my epis...
Jun 07, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Season 1Ep. 247
I had oil painter Summer Spitsbergen on my podcast today. She is a young and upcoming artist that I happened to have met last summer at the C.M. Russell Museum. They have their big show every third week of August (which you should all go to). It's a great show and while I was up there I fell in love with her work. Summer is a self-taught artist, hyper-focused on what she wants to achieve with her painting. When you're doing that as an artist and you have great talent, you can go very, very far. ...
May 31, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 246
I had Ann M. Wolfe on today, and she is the chief curator and associate director of the Nevada Museum of Art. One of the first things we did is made sure everybody knows what the word is. "Nuh·vada" not "Nuh·vaw·da". She really is an interesting person. You can tell Ann has this great dedication to her job and what she does and that there's a big vision for what they're trying to do up at the Nevada Museum of Art. It's a self-proclaimed museum of ideas (that's really a trademarked and copyrighte...
May 24, 2023•56 min•Season 1Ep. 245
I had David Meikle on today, which was really wonderful. I've had David on my podcast in the past, but today we are talking about something that is just so interesting and different from the previous episode. You see when you're an artist, sometimes you get these opportunities that come out of nowhere. In this case, David had a unique opportunity to work with one of the best directors of all time - Wes Anderson. They worked closely together to come up with the poster for the movie, as well as so...
May 17, 2023•42 min•Season 1Ep. 244
Had a wonderful podcast today with Sarah Webber. I've known Sarah for over 20 years and she's a very interesting person. Sarah brings a unique perspective to the podcast because she's an individual who's not only been an artist for over 20 years, but was in art sales, working for various art galleries. As a result, she has this component that allows her to look at the world that she inhabits (which is as an artist) but from a different viewpoint that involves the business chops that are required...
May 10, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 243
I had fine artist and Illustrator Keith Batcheller on the podcast today. He went to ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, got his BFA, and worked with all these interesting folks afterward, including Bob Peak, Mark English, and Bernie Fuchs. When Keith became a professional illustrator he worked with big firms in New York, Chicago, and L.A. He eventually started working for Walt Disney Productions and did artwork for massive animated films like Pocahontas, Beauty and the Beast, the Hunchback ...
May 03, 2023•59 min•Season 1Ep. 242
One of the great things about this podcast is I get to go down memory lane with people that have these insane historical interactions and today that person is Beverly Miller. Her father was Clay Lockett. Now, Clay is this amazingly complex, interesting man who was an archeologist, had a doctorate in anthropology, and was a well-known Indian trader. He ran the Museum of Northern Arizona's trading post inside the gift shop from 1965 until his death in 1984. Lockett also owned Cloud World by Maynar...
Apr 26, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 241
Had one of my favorite people on the podcast today. Bill Robertson. I've known Bill for more than 30 years and he worked for me for at least 15. Bill's got an amazing story. He moved to Albuquerque in 1950, and he was an English teacher for 30 years He even taught a young Bob Gallegos, a native arts dealer who's also been on the podcast so that tells you how long Bill's been around. He started collecting pottery in the early sixties, and knew all these amazing people like Charles Loloma, Garnet ...
Apr 19, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 240
I had artist Jordan K. Walker on today and it just so happens that he's the newest addition to Medicine Man Gallery. I don't get to take new artists on very often, especially younger artists (he's only 28, but he paints a lot older). You see, Jordan trained at the Rhode Island School of Design and then came out to the West after he graduated. He was already a naturalist, but since moving westward he's really just fallen in love with the plants, animals, and the landscape out here. We're going to...
Apr 12, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 239
I had Laura Worthington on today and it became one of the most interesting podcasts I've ever had because I know so little about this field, even though it's an art form. Laura makes fonts. She comes from a calligraphy background and it's so unique because at a very young age, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. She was focused and completely obsessed with the written word. Laura is one of probably 1500 people in the world that actually makes their entire living from designing fonts. It turn...
Apr 05, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 238
I had Francis Livingston on the podcast today. I'd had Francis on probably three or four years ago and we talked about his life and the backstory of how he became an artist. This time, he's here for a show that we're doing, 'Forests and Beyond' and I thought I would really like to spend a little time just talking about the nuance of his place in the art world. This podcast is a two-parter. In the first part, we start to talk about modern art and how it relates to what he does today. He also spea...
Mar 29, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 237
I had Francis Livingston on the podcast today. I'd had Francis on probably three or four years ago and we talked about his life and the backstory of how he became an artist. This time, he's here for a show that we're doing, 'Forests and Beyond' and I thought I would really like to spend a little time just talking about the nuance of his place in the art world. This podcast is a two-parter. In the first part, we start to talk about modern art and how it relates to what he does today. He also spea...
Mar 22, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 236
I had Duke Beardsley on today. He's something else. I just love his energy. When that man walks into a room, he has a presence, and if you look at his art - it's the same thing. These big, beautiful works with a modern sensibility, cowboys, and Western life. He's got his own voice, which again, is what I love in an artist and what I look for in my own artists that I represent. Duke has managed to find a lane that no one else has and he's been doing it for quite a while now. He's academically tra...
Mar 15, 2023•49 min•Season 1Ep. 235
I had Travis Humphreys on today, and he owns Gold River Gallery in Cedar City, Utah. Travis is such an interesting guy. He surprised us at the gallery, delivering a group of hand-carved frames that he made for two of my artists, Dennis Ziemienski and Josh Gibson. So I asked him, "Would you like to do a podcast?" I only kind of knew his backstory before this podcast. It's an interesting story because he's an artist who turned into a framer. Travis is responsible for the Mark Maggiori frames and s...
Mar 08, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 234
So this was a different interview for me. My guest was John Hallett. He's a unique guy because he's a veterinarian who has just always been in love with the arts and probably should have been an artist off the bat. But he went a different route, which many artists do. He pursued a professional life with guaranteed income and stability and then toward the end of that career, they start the next one. He's actually been extremely successful already with sculpting. So he contacted me and said "You k...
Mar 01, 2023•1 hr 31 min•Season 1Ep. 233
