Don Stinson, Relics.

An essay by Erika Doss
Edith O’Donnell Distinguished Chair
The Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History
Harry W. Bass School of Arts, Humanities, & Technology
The University of Texas at Dallas.

Derived from the Latin “reliquiae” for remains, the word relics is often used to reference things left behind or abandoned. It is an apt title for Don Stinson’s new show at Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe. A mix of recent work and a few older paintings, Relics surveys things built and abandoned in the American West, from houses and hotels and whole towns to art projects. Red Sign, Relics of Conquest (2025) features a faded billboard and a band of wild horses, both deserted in a landscape of New Mexico sagebrush. No Gas, No Lodging, Hwy. 76, Roggen, CO (2024) shows the remains of a place listed as a ghost town on state maps. Themes of impermanence and ruin resonate, upending ideas about “what constitutes an authentic, western landscape” and what, he observes, “we hope to see.” Yet Stinson also chronicles the creative practices, from civic re-branding to adaptive reuse, that coexist within these contemporary states of damage and decay. Inserting the human imprint into his panoramas of the American West, Stinson expands on classic vistas by raising pointed questions about duration and change.

In the nineteenth-century, landscape painting was an influential medium of nation building, identity formation, national allegiance, and national pride. Idealized pictures of seemingly infinite American wilderness invited settlement and colonization, and justified manifest destiny and continental expansion. Monumental canvases of the nation’s natural wonders, like Thomas Moran’s paintings of Green River, Wyoming’s dramatic cliffs and canyons, helped convey the idea of American exceptionalism. They also romanticized the West as a pre-modern, pre-industrial space, devoid of the actual bridges and railroads that artists took to actually get there. 

Stinson’s Green River Bridge (2014) retains Castle Rock, the city’s iconic sandstone landmark, but adds the material specifics of the modern West: note the wind turbines on the far left, the airplane contrail and towering pylon signs for gas stations and motels on the far right, the freight train hauling coal and cars in the middle. Pockets of fine white powder reference soda ash, Wyoming’s biggest export, used in countless products from beer bottles and toothpaste to detergent and cat litter. A lone kayaker traverses the river’s northern channel, part of a local water park developed in the early 2000s to enhance tourism. An old iPhone with dangling white earphone cords lies abandoned in the weeds under the bridge. Both historic and contemporary, Stinson’s landscapes scan the American West’s past and reckon with its present.

Personal experience and popular culture are among his sources. Born in Amarillo in 1956, raised in Wichita, Kansas and Littleton, Colorado, Stinson lives and works today in Austin. Growing up, he spent summers on his grandparents cattle ranch near Hillsboro, Texas, braving long road trips from Denver to Dallas and back with his siblings: sitting in the rear of the family’s Studebaker Wagonaire with the dog and, on return trips home, with a cooler of beef. Like Ed Ruscha, Stinson’s paintings echo the cinematic framing of the postwar Western, the era’s most popular movie genre. The low horizontal composition of big sky landscapes like Walking the Tsankawa Trail (2022) mirrors the widescreen format of CinemaScope, typically advertised at the end of movies like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) with its logo planted on top of an image of a Western mountain range. In paintings like America the Beautiful, Clark Fork of the Yellowstone River (2026), Stinson riffs on the signature summit used by Paramount Pictures since 1914: a snowy mountain peak surrounded by a ring of stars, referencing a mountain in Utah where Paramount’s founder spent his childhood, and the number of movie actors under contract with the studio.

America the Beautiful, a dramatic landscape featuring a snow-capped mountain range dubbed “Yellowstone’s Matterhorn,” seems to repudiate Stinson’s painterly objective, his insistent probing of Western myths and stereotypes. But then we notice the shattered timbers in the raging waters, the broken canoe, the stranded travelers, and the horse and rider in mid-rescue. What’s beautiful about America on the nation’s 250th anniversary? Spacious skies? Amber waves of grain? Purple mountain majesties? What about acts of kindness, Stinson suggests. 

Questions Raised by a Foaming Sea and the Long Swim South From Rozel Point (2013) and On the Map: Viewing Stations at Sun Tunnels, December 2003, AM (2004) pay homage to earthworks by Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) was submerged in the briny depths of the Great Salt Lake for decades, until drought lowered the water table and the project re-emerged, covered in white salt crystals. Imagining Spiral Jetty along the route of the lake’s annual 8-mile open water marathon, Stinson’s painting includes tiny figures of swimmers, including a man on the right clearing sea foam from his snorkel. Today, the Great Salt Lake has lost 70% of its water volume, making Spiral Jetty as much of a land-bound sculpture as Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976), built across the lake near Lucin, Utah. Stinson’s unexpected subjects—Sun Tunnels at night, for example—prompt us to think differently about the Western landscape, to recognize its own inconstancy.

The Rescue: Ouray Ice Fall (2013) taps into reinvention, another Western trope. A mining boom town gone bust, Ouray rebranded in the 1990s by rerouting excess municipal water through a two-mile gorge and becoming the ice climbing capital of the world. Today, the Ouray Ice Park attracts thousands of people every winter and is central to the town’s economy. It’s risky tourism, exacerbated by falling rock, long term drought, and climate change. Stinson’s painting, which includes two tiny figures dwarfed by the daunting ice walls, alludes to the town’s economic revival and speculates about its futurity given today’s environmental crisis.

Painted Lady Migration, Mustangs and Shoe Canopy in the Eastern Mojave (2026) also maps the creative reuse of Western spaces and places. A derelict gas station on Highway 62 near Rice, California has become a quirky roadside attraction for scores of tourists, who hang old shoes on what’s left of the roof and on nearby fences and trees. Conflicts between “leave no trace” ethics and broader public interests in embellishing vernacular landmarks are clearly in play. Stinson includes other traces, too: the Painted Lady butterflies that thrive on desert thistles after a wet winter, the herds of mustangs that somehow survive the Mojave’s harsh ecosystem, and on the far right, an oil tanker train. Like Desert Burn (2006-2025), which features an alternative bonfire to the alternative that was once Burning Man, Stinson respects experiential creativity. But he also recognizes that even as abandoned and ruined places yield to mark making, they yield to their own disappearance, becoming relics.