Featured Artists

Each issue of Southwest Art magazine features in-depth profiles of top artists in the West and beyond. Browse this section to read interesting and compelling stories about artists’ lives and their techniques, artistic styles, and sources of inspiration. Each article is accompanied by plenty of images to show examples of the artists’ works—including sculpture and paintings in oil, pastel, watercolor, and acrylic, and featuring subjects from western landscapes to cityscapes, figures, wildlife and animal art, still lifes, and more.

Melissa Darden

A Louisiana basket maker keeps her tribe’s traditional art alive Melissa Darden was 14 when she quit school, 15 when she married, and 16 when she had her first child. Back then, her career aspirations were nonexistent and her Native heritage, as the daughter of a Chitimacha father and Caucasian mother,...