Traveling Western Art Exhibit

When I travel I always make time in my schedule to visit local museums. Recently, I was in San Diego with my family and we enjoyed a visit to Balboa Park’s Museum of Man, which I highly recommend. But, if the San Diego Art Museum had been hosting the traveling exhibition “Painted Journeys: The Art of John Mix Stanley,” the Museum of Man would have had to wait for another trip to Balboa Park. Currently, the exhibition is at the Special Exhibition Gallery at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, until August 29, 2015. If you are traveling near Yellowstone National Park and have extra time in your schedule, I would make the effort to visit Cody and the Center of the West to see the rare collection of Stanley art, which is extraordinary. The life of Stanley and the exhibition is also the subject of a new book from the University of Oklahoma Press, Painted Journeys: The Art of John Mix Stanley by art historians Peter H. Hassrick and Mindy S. Besaw. Published in cooperation with the Center of the West, the highly illustrated volume is the most complete work on the well-traveled 19th century artist whose artwork is a great bridge between the early masters George Catlin and Alfred Jacob Miller and the great master Western artists Frederic Remington and Charlie Russell.  If you miss the show in Cody, the exhibit will be in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the Gilcrease Museum from Oct. 3, 2015 to Jan. 3, 2016 and in Tacoma, Washington, at the Tacoma Art Museum from Jan. 30, 2016 to May 1, 2016.