By Donna Tennant
Under the Sun: A Sonoran Desert Odyssey
As a longtime professional pilot for the Navajo Nation, Adriel Heisey was inspired by the beauty of the land during his many flights over the Southwest and, in particular, over the Sonoran Desert. He’d carried a camera with him in the cockpits of planes ever since his earliest flying lessons, but eventually he decided he wanted to take more and better pictures. So he adapted a Kolb Twinstar airplane for aerial photography. The plane flies slowly (35 to 75 miles per hour) and has no front enclosure, giving Heisey a great deal of freedom to fly and shoot pictures at the same time. Because he rarely flies above 1,000 feet, Heisey takes photographs that bring us close to the land while wholly redefining it from a new perspective.
2000 Rio Nuevo Publishers, Tucson, AZ, 128 pages, 70 color photographs, $40 hardbound (ISBN 0-9700750-0-6)
Chihuly Projects
By Dale Chihuly
Dale Chihuly, co-founder of the well known Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle, has been called the most important contemporary artist working in glass. Over his 30-year career, Chihuly’s experimentation has taken glass blowing to a new level, and his dramatic installations have grown not only in size but also in grandiosity. These large-scale works are celebrated in Chihuly Projects, which focuses on Chihuly’s permanent installations in public buildings, museum exhibitions around the world, and outdoor ensembles. Projects included range from a ceiling sculpture made of more than 2,000 hand-blown forms in the lobby of Las Vegas’ Bellagio Resort to an extensive installation created for the Seattle Art Museum in 1992. The book’s large photographs are accompanied by Chihuly’s personal accounts and drawings—the first major statement the artist himself has made about this work.2000 Abrams, New York, NY, 364 pages, 200 illustrations, 30 drawings, $75 hardbound (ISBN 0-8109-6708-1)
Land America Leaves Wild: Paintings by Diana Wege
Introduction by Judith Sobol
In Land America Leaves Wild, artist Diana Wege celebrates America’s stunningly diverse wilderness areas and the unique American foresight that has preserved these places. Over a period of 25 months, Wege visited and painted 24 national lands and Nature Conservancy properties. These included such western United States spots as Wyoming’s Absaroka Range, the San Juan Islands National Wildlife Refuge in Washington, Denali National Park in Alaska, and Montana’s Gallatin National Forest. After her first trip, to Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, she created six acrylic paintings. Later she pushed together the four most successful of those works, and this four-panel layout became the format for all of the subsequent work in the series. 2000 University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, 176 pages, 72 color illustrations, $65 hardbound (ISBN 0-295-98008-7)
Featured in December 2000