Modern and contemporary art created in the American West, manifesting an independent spirit and embodying unique ideas, has been largely written out of the mainstream narrative of art history or placed in unhelpful contexts. Collecting on the Edge, featuring work by 172 artists from the collection of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University in Logan Utah, aims to correct that situation. Texts accompanying each artwork, by eighty-one critics, art historians, curators, gallerists, artists, and collectors, provide illuminating insights into the works and their creators.
In an introductory essay art critic Michael Duncan exposes the provincialism and regionalist thinking that has dictated mainstream views of modernism: “Many of the nation’s most daring, innovative, and iconoclastic works have been ignored…simply because they were made on the wrong side of the Mississippi.” This extensive catalogue also includes a substantial interview with visionary collector George Wanlass, who amassed these works over a thirty-year period, providing a rare glimpse of his philosophy and practice. An inclusive rewriting of the traditional narrative, with new perspectives on artists both familiar and unfamiliar, Collecting on the Edge is a must-have resource featuring material unavailable online or through any other publication.