About this Event

January 31st: Friends of Western Art-Amerind Exhibit Celebration

9 am to 12 pm at the Amerind Museum

"Stormy Days~Rain in the West"

'Clouds Over Black Mesa' by James Swinnerton (1875-1974). Amerind permanent collection

9:00 am: The gallery doors open for exhibit viewing.

These featured artworks, exemplifying the power, beauty, need and gift of rain in the West, are from the private collections of FWA members and Amerind's permanent collection.

10:00 am in the Main Gallery:

Amerind will present "Mac Schweitzer: Rediscovering a Southwest Artist and Her Legacy", a special guest lecture by Dr. Ann Lane Hedlund (University of Arizona, retired). Dr. Hedlund is a cultural anthropologist who collaborates with visual artists, including contemporary Indigenous weavers. She is an internationally-recognized expert on historic and modern textiles from the American Southwest.

Dr. Hedlund's subject, artist Mac Schweitzer (1921-1962) was well known in the Tucson and Scottsdale art colonies of the mid-twentieth century. Her award-winning Southwestern works portrayed stylized animals, watery landscapes, compelling Indigenous portraits and dramatic desert relics. Mac worked in many media -- oils, watercolors, inks, scratchboard, serigraphy and lithography. Ahead of her time, she experimented with sgraffito, wet-on-wet with crumpled paper, collage and found objects. In this talk, author Ann Hedlund examines Mac's groundbreaking work of the 1950's, which was like no one else's before or since, and discusses why the artist's legacy disappeared by the mid-1960's and its rediscovery 60 years later.

11:00 am - Noon: Private brunch at the Fulton Seminar House.

$20 per person, payable to FWA.

RSVP to FWA by Saturday,
January 24, 2026.