Kim Wiggins WAA Oct/Nov 2024

Occasionally, the phone rings, and it’s a call you’ll never forget. For artist Kim Douglas Wiggins, that call came one day in 1998. On the other end of the line was John Geraghty, a trustee of the Autry National Center for the American West, who had helped establish the organization’s

Masters of the American West art exhibition and sale earlier that year. “He said, ‘Doug, I wanted to do something new here with Masters of the American West,’” Wiggins recalls. Geraghty explained his desire to showcase artwork outside of Western Realism, a style canonized by the genre’s greats, from Russell and Remington to Catlin, Moran, and Couse. “‘I don’t know if it’s going to work,’” the artist recalls Geraghty saying, “‘but I’d like you and Kevin Red Star to come out next year, and let’s see what happens and what kind of results we get.’”