Hovenweep

Artist Joan Myers (American, born 1944)

Printer Wendy Young (American, born 1963)

Date2013

Mediumpigment print

DimensionsImage: 14 5/8 × 22 in. (37.1 × 55.9 cm)
Support: 17 1/4 × 24 in. (43.8 × 61 cm)

ClassificationsPhotograph

Credit LineGift of Joan Myers, 2017

Object number2017.5.27

DescriptionBrick adober ruins in the desert. A black bird is perched atop the highest ruin, off center towards the right.
eMuseum Notes

Emuseum Notes

Acutely aware of the iconography and symbols used to romanticize life in the West, Myers photographs the intersecting spaces where contemporary Western life, often raw and complex, overlaps with myth. The artist contrasts imagery of the natural world with the man-made, often using highly saturated color to emphasize the commercialization and commodification of the West. In other images, she shoots in black-and-white, channeling old movies and a patina of nostalgia. The resulting images constitute a rich visual tapestry that weaves together American mythology of the West with its many histories and present-day practices.

Emuseum Notes

The photograph was made at Hovenweep National Monument in Utah.

Hovenweep was home to ancestral Puebloans, a sedentary farming culture that occupied the Four Corners area from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1300. Similarities in architecture, masonry and pottery styles indicate that the inhabitants of Hovenweep were closely associated with groups living at Mesa Verde and other nearby sites. Most of the structures at Hovenweep were built between A.D. 1200 and 1300. The ancestral Puebloans later migrated south to the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico and the Little Colorado River Basin in Arizona. Today's Pueblo, Zuni and Hopi people are descendants of this culture. On March 2, 1923, President Warren G. Harding proclaimed Hovenweep a unit of the National Park System.

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