47 East 200 North St. George, UT 84770 (435) 627-4525 museum@sgcity.org Mon - Sat: 10am - 5pm 3rd Thursday 10am - 9pm Return to Current Exhibits Return to Past Exhibits Window on the West: Views from the American Frontier Show available: April 08, 2006 through July 08, 2006 The St. George Art Museum proudly presents Window on the West, an amazing exhibit from the Trust for Museum Exhibitions in Washington D.C. This exhibit is not just the West that you have seen in the movies, and not the stuff of legend, but rather the West as a newly-minted place - a land of surprise, quick settlement and authentic grandeur, as seen by the artists who personally explored the West and visually documented what they discovered. These 60 paintings from the Arthur J. Phelan Collection were selected to give an historically accurate cross-section of what really happened in the expansion of the West. They depict the people who moved west from the Mississippi, the land they passed through and chose for their new homes, and the settlements they created. They examine how the West was gradually transformed over the decades as the continent filled and the frontier receded and then disappeared. Included in the exhibit are works by the greats - Frederic Remington, Carl Wimar, Alfred Jacob Miller, Karl Bodmer, Albert Bierstadt, and John Frederick Kensett, as well as Lone Wolf who was perhaps the first academically trained Native American artist. However, this exhibition is unique in that it emphasizes the views of lesser-known men and women artists, personally recording what they observed in the newly-founded country. “What I’ve looked for in the pictures is some kind of message about the past,” says Phelan, talking about an interest which grew from his graduate studies in American history at Yale. “I use art as a way to try to visualize the past - it becomes my personal time machine. Let’s not take John Wayne’s West or the Indian aficionado’s West as the only West. There were many Wests.” Rather than looking for European roots in the subject and technique of the paintings he has collected, Phelan has been more interested in the artist’s documentation of how the landscape, settlements, and people of the West actually appeared to the artists capturing these subjects on canvas. His collection is our Window on the West, a balanced, historical view from the artists themselves. You are invited to visit YOUR Art Museum to view Window on the West on view in the Mezzanine and Legacy Galleries with the Regional Exhibit on view in the Main Gallery. If you join the St. George Art Museum, you not only get free admission to this exhibit but admission for one full year, as well as many other benefits, including a tax deduction. You can obtain a membership brochure from the website, at the Art Museum, or by calling. 2006 has been designated the Year of the Museum by the United States Congress, so visit and join the growing number of museum members now.