Western Mystique
Weekend reception: Saturday, March 15, 6-9 pm
with a live performance by LA Cowboy Poetry
On view through April 2
The Western Mystique reimagines the West beyond its mythic past. The frontier was never just cowboys and conquest; it was a place shaped by the resilience of women whose stories remain largely untold. From Indigenous leaders like Lozen, the Apache warrior and healer, to Biddy Mason, the formerly enslaved woman who built a legacy of landownership and community care in California; from ‘Stagecoach Mary,’ the first African American woman to work as a U.S. postal carrier in the West, to artists like Agnes Pelton, who sought spiritual transcendence through abstraction; and yes, even ‘Calamity Jane’. These women have long transformed the West into a space of reinvention, survival, and quiet revolution.