Curator’s Corner

When audiences today tune into gritty TV series like Yellowstone or Outer Range, they’re tapping into a long legacy of storytelling that dates back more than a century. In our current exhibition, The Cinematic West: The Art That Made the Movies, visitors can explore how that legacy took shape—quite literally—through the bold, colorful movie posters that helped define the Western genre in its early days. These posters weren’t just advertisements. They were promises of adventure, heroism, and the mythic West. And they are visual echoes of the dynamic artworks by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell featured alongside them in our [...]

What happens when a painting leaps from the canvas onto the silver screen? That is the story at the heart of a recent lecture at the lecture Sid Richardson Museum, in which our director, Scott Winterrowd, traced the fascinating journey of Remington’s 1897 painting A Misdeal—a smoky, tense card game gone wrong—through Hollywood history, illuminating how Western art and cinema became deeply intertwined. Remington’s A Misdeal is not attached to any specific story, yet it brims with narrative potential. Gunsmoke lingers in a dimly lit saloon. Wounded players slump at the table, with one figure still standing at center. The [...]

Long before the silver screen mythologized the American West, Charles M. Russell had already etched it into bronze and canvas. But in the twilight of his life, Russell wasn’t just painting cowboys. He was rubbing elbows with movie stars. When Charlie and Nancy Russell began wintering in Southern California in 1920, they weren’t merely escaping the Montana cold. They were entering a lively, evolving cultural hub where artists, filmmakers, and writers mingled freely. And where the Old West met the New Hollywood. Russell’s ties to Tinseltown may sound like an unlikely chapter in the life of a Western artist, but [...]

From Cowboy to Costume Designer: Joe De Yong and the Art Behind Hollywood’s Westerns Before Clint Eastwood donned his poncho or John Wayne rode into the sunset, there was a young cowboy from Oklahoma with a sketchpad and a dream. Joe De Yong’s life reads like a Hollywood script: cowboy, artist, silent film actor, survivor, and ultimately the bridge between Western art and the golden age of Western cinema. But unlike many stars on the silver screen, De Yong never craved the spotlight. Instead, he worked behind the scenes, shaping the imagery of the American West that generations of moviegoers [...]

Cowboys are back. From streaming sensations like Yellowstone and 1883 to Oscar-nominated films like The Power of the Dog, the American West is once again galloping through our cultural imagination. But this isn't the first time the West has captured our collective attention—nor is it a new story. Long before cameras rolled in Monument Valley or grizzled heroes rode into dusty towns, the mythology of the West was painted in oils and sculpted in bronze. Artists like Frederic Remington and Charles Russell didn’t just illustrate the frontier, they invented the visual language that would define it for generations to come. [...]

At first glance, Charles Russell’s Trouble Hunters might appear to be exactly what it seems: a dynamic portrayal of a war party riding across the rugged Montana terrain, bathed in a rich, golden light. But for Sid Richardson Museum Director Scott Winterrowd, the painting held a mystery just below the surface—literally. What started as a hunch led to a journey through art history, scientific analysis, and the mind of a self-taught Western master. Beneath the vibrant brushstrokes and heroic figures lies a story of artistic revision and discovery, centered around a legendary warrior named White Quiver. As it turns out, [...]

Featured in our current exhibit, Remington and Russell in Black and White, is a drawing of a seemingly unusual sight: a soldier jumping on to a horse! This drawing is one of three images of horse acrobatics featured in an 1898 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine article, “The Essentials at Fort Adobe,” written and illustrated by Remington. The Fort Adobe he refers to in the article is actually Fort Robinson, a military post in Nebraska established in the early 1870s. Remington’s title was likely drawn from the adobe barracks that were built in 1887 to house the officers stationed there.   [...]

Our current exhibition, Remington and Russell in Black in White, examines both artists’ careers in illustration at the turn of the 20th century. Many of the artworks featured in the show are painted in grisaille, which is an art term for grayscale. These black and white works specifically functioned as the source for reproduction in books and magazines of Remington and Russell’s day. Both artists were very deliberate in how and why they were making these artworks to help tell the story of the American West as they imagined it. Let’s first take a closer look at Remington’s illustration career. [...]

During his time as a regular illustrator, apart from his documentation of the American Indian Wars and the Spanish American War, Frederic Remington was often sent out on assignment to capture the daily routines of the cavalry. In 1893, he traveled out west to Yellowstone National Park to write and illustrate an article about the 6th Cavalry patrols in the park to prevent poaching, including the dwindling bison herd that was supposed to be protected there.   “Policing the Yellowstone,” Frederic Remington, Harper’s Weekly, January 12, 1895   Remington’s article appeared in the January 12, 1895 issue of [...]

The Golden Age of American illustration wasn’t limited to popular periodicals of the era. Charles Russell and Frederic Remington also contributed illustrations for different book projects. In 1902, Remington painted Days on the Range to serve as the frontispiece for Alfred Henry Lewis’s book Wolfville Days. The scene portrayed in Remington’s canvas relates to the 19th chapter in the book, “When the Stage was Stopped.” In this last section of the book, the narrator describes a long-winded tale about stagecoach robberies and holdups. In the story, the townspeople of Wolfville devise a scheme to trick one of the suspected bandits, [...]