50 Years of the Prix de West Invitational
Rough Passage by Kyle Pozin.
Earlier this summer at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, OK, one of the western art world’s premier annual events marked a major milestone: The Prix de West Invitational show and sale celebrated its 50th anniversary. An important barometer of the western art market, the show sold more than $3.8 million of art on Saturday, June 18, a substantial increase over last year’s $2.5 million.
One of the most anticipated aspects of the opening-weekend celebration is the announcement of awards. This year the top prize—the Prix de West Purchase Award for the best artwork in the show—went to one of western art’s brightest young stars, Kyle Polzin, for ROUGH PASSAGE. The painting shows the top of a stagecoach loaded with various parcels and a double-barrel shotgun that would have been necessary to protect the passengers on a dangerous journey through the West. At the awards ceremony, Polzin noted that he built a stagecoach in order to create his winning painting from life.
Another eagerly awaited announcement is that of the Robert Lougheed Memorial Award, given to the artist who presents the best body of work and selected by the participating artists themselves. This year it went to T. Allen Lawson for two oil paintings, SIX TO EIGHT INCHES POSSIBLE and TWO OF US, and a drawing titled THE BECKTON STATESMAN. Lawson also received the Wilson Hurley Memorial Award for the best landscape for TWO OF US.
The Frederic Remington Painting Award went to Huihan Liu for FAMILY TIME, an impressionistic scene depicting a Navajo mother teaching her young daughter to weave. The James Earle Fraser Sculpture Award was given to Steve Kestrel for HEIR OF ARIES, a powerful depiction of a ram’s head made from California Central Coast river stone.
Ron Kingswood won this year’s Major General and Mrs. Don D. Pittman Wildlife Award for his oil painting A MORNING WALK, which depicts a ring-necked pheasant camouflaged amid a dense cover of corn stalks and leaves. Thomas Blackshear II took the Express Ranches Great American Cowboy Award for TWO AMERICANS OF THE OLD WEST, an oil portrait of two black cowboys. Dean Mitchell received the Donald Teague Memorial Award for the best work on paper for a watercolor called THE 1903 WICKEDEST TOWN IN THE WEST & CHRISTIANITY. Last but most certainly not least, the Jackie L. Coles Buyers’ Choice Award went to Curt Walters for his painting INEXORABLE SHIPROCK—the eighth time Walters has won that accolade.
This Editor’s Letter appeared in the August/September 2022 issue of Southwest Art magazine.