Window on the West

Views from the American Frontier
The Phelan Collection

Exhibition Available 2006 - 2008

It 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. These 60 paintings from the Arthur J. Phelan Collection were selected to give a historically accurate cross-section of what really happened in the expansion of the West. They depict the people who moved west from the Mississippi. They examine how the West was gradually transformed over the decades as the continent filled and the frontier receded and then disappeared.

Included are works by the greats – Frederic Remington, Carl Wimar, Alfred Jacob Miller, Karl Bodmer 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.

“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,” says Phelan who became interested in the West in his graduate study.  His collection is our Window on the West, a balanced, historical view from the artists themselves.

Click each image for a larger view.