Art in a business environment speaks to the vitality of the company that collects it, leading to deeper inquisitiveness, to awakened intuitive capacities, and to fresh responses in thinking, feeling and seeing. At First Western, art connects our curiosity to yours.

First Western’s art collection is comprised primarily of works by contemporary artists who live and work in the American West.  In the West, artists learn from driving long stretches of road, from marveling at blistering desert sunsets, from distances, remoteness, from the sheer magnitude of space. They learn as well from the often surreal contradictions and cross-fertilizations of nature and culture in the American West—the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, Disneyland and Mesa Verde.

These men and women are not afraid of the dissonance between the way things are, the way things were, and the way we want them to be. First Western, in its willingness to look beyond predictable, stereotypically romanticized images of the West, participates in that same spirit—a confident mastery of the complexities of the present, grounded in the solid nourishment of the past.

Simon Zalkind, Curator