Email
PrintPurchase of a Lifetime
Jackson Hole artists Scott Christensen, Jim Wilcox and Tucker Smith are part of an exclusive club – Prix de West winners.
Scott Christensen won the 2000 Prix de West Purchase Award at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s show for Wind River Ice.
It might be ski bums, second homeowners and wildlife watchers descending on this region today, but go back 150 years and it was artists who were everywhere: Thomas Moran, accompanying the Hayden expedition of 1871, was first (at least the first to become widely famous … his watercolors were partly responsible for convincing the government to create Yellowstone National Park). Then came Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, Birger Sandzen, and Frederic Mizen, among others. But this region’s art history isn’t all in the past. Hundreds of artists live and work in the area today and three of them – Jim Wilcox, Tucker Smith and Scott Christensen – have earned a place among the best Western and wildlife artists to have ever brought brush to canvas by winning what is, inarguably, the most prestigious award in the genre, the Prix de West Purchase Award. And, being humble like so many Wyomingites are, Christensen, Smith and Wilcox never expected it.
The annual invitation-only Prix de West show and sale at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is akin to the Academy Awards, with a little National Finals Rodeo thrown in. The show’s purchase award goes to the single artist whose Western or wildlife work is deemed most necessary to add to the museum’s collection that year.
“What makes our purchase award so significant, even among other similar awards that have started up more recently, is that it helps direct this institution in fulfilling its mission to educate the public about the American West,” says Mike Leslie, assistant director of the museum. “The purchase award is given to the piece that best compliments and completes the historic works of art already in our collection. Fifty years from now these purchase award pieces will be viewed in the same vein and with the same distinction as the Russells and Remingtons we have.”
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum’s contemporary and historical collections together include about 4,000 pieces – Russells, Remingtons, Frank T. Johnsons, Bierstadt’s Emigrants Crossing the Plains, William R. Leigh’s The Leader’s Downfall, and, of course, by virtue of winning the Prix de West Purchase Award, paintings by Scott Christensen, Jim Wilcox and Tucker Smith.
“There are so many hundreds of pieces in the Prix de West show and so many artists there who deserved to win,” says Christensen, who won in 2000 and recently opened a new studio and gallery space in Victor, Idaho. “I still can’t believe I won. There were lots of other pieces that were every bit as good. It was humbling to get the award when there are so many deserving pieces.” Christensen received the news he had won via a phone call as he was working on a book project in California. He had to be told he won several times before he believed it.
Because the Prix de West is so competitive – pretty much every single significant Western and wildlife artist currently working has a piece in the running – no one really enters with the expectation of winning. Jim Wilcox had already been in the show for years when he and wife Narda were flying to Oklahoma for the 1987 incarnation. “As we were on our way there, I remember saying to [Narda] that wouldn’t it be great if everything good that could happen would, but I certainly wasn’t thinking about winning the purchase award, or any prizes, for that matter. I was thinking about selling some paintings and being made a member of the National Academy of Western Art.” (At the time, it was the National Academy of Western Art that ran the show.) And Wilcox was made a member that year … but he won the major prize as well.
“Hearing my name announced was about as overwhelming as anything that has happened in my career,” he says. “Winning the award moved me into a completely different category. As we were leaving that night someone said, ‘Congratulations, now you’re famous.’ Back home, I could hardly get out of the gallery for a month, so many people were coming in to buy something or congratulate me.”
Smith’s story is the same. “Well of course winning it was a great surprise,” he says. “It was certainly not something I was planning on. To be in the company of all those great artists of the past and present? It’s like a dream.”
As is living in the middle of a place that has inspired great artists for generations.
