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Home » News » BFA ’01 Tracy Stuckey in New American Paintings

BFA ’01 Tracy Stuckey in New American Paintings

Published October 28, 2015

New American Paintings is a juried exhibition-in-print. Each museum-quality issue results from a highly selective juried competition and presents the work of forty painters. Thousands of artists enter our competitions every year, but only a limited number make it through the jurying process. We work closely with renowned curators in order to select those artists whose work deserves to be seen by a wider audience. Unlike other art publications, New American Paintings does not discriminate by style or yield to art-world trends.

StuckeyThe American West has been idealized throughout history, transformed into a physical and cultural icon. As the frontier ended, the cowboy way of life and the landscape itself came to be highly romanticized through dime novels and the Wild West shows of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1920s, the creation of Western films further etched the image of the iconic West and its characters into the American psyche. From then on, the cowboy became a symbol of the American ethos. “Western” has become a brand used to signify certain physical and psychological characteristics. John Wayne, the Marlboro Man, and Monument Valley are products as well as producers of this glamorization.
In my work, I combine stereotypical Western characters and themes with pop cultural depictions of the region and its inhabitants to reflect my own interpretations of the contemporary West. My paintings rely heavily on Western novels, pulp covers, music, film, and fashion advertisements.

Tracy was also in the 2013 New American Paintings publication.