This month, the travelling exhibition Branding the American West: Paintings and Films, 1900-50 heads east to the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia (29 October-5 February 2017). The show features more than 100 works that depict—and sometimes challenge—the mythologised stereotype of the “Wild West”, including iconic Hollywood movies, formalist and abstract paintings, and images of cowboys, Native Americans and Pueblo villages. Hermon MacNeil’s bronze sculpture The Sun Vow (modelled 1898-99, cast around 1925), which illustrates a coming-of-age Sioux ritual in which youth shoot an arrow into the sun, “reveals that the artist admired and saw a poetic beauty in his subjects—something that contrasts with the earlier myths of frontier life and shows how attitudes toward Indians were in flux in the early 20th century”, says Crawford Alexander Mann, the director of American art at the Chrysler Museum. The exhibition was first presented at the Brigham Young University Museum of Art in Provo, Utah earlier this year with loans from the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas.
