Mark Maggiori
Mark Maggiori (b. 1977) is a Taos, New Mexico-based oil painter known for his depictions of the American West, its working cowboys, and the towering skies above them. Born in France, the birthplace of impressionism and romanticism, Maggiori trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, the same school where Ernest L. Blumenschein, Bert Geer Phillips and Joseph Henry Sharp studied before they founded the Taos Society of Artists. He went on to learn narrative craft at Walt Disney Animation France, then first made a name for himself as the singer, photographer and music video director for the metal band Pleymo. When the band went on hiatus, Maggiori returned to America, a country he had first crossed at fifteen. He settled in Los Angeles and later in Kingman, Arizona, where a visit to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City led to his first cowboy paintings.
Maggiori's clouds are recognizable at first glance. They erupt off the horizon in gold and shadow, and their complexity, their detail, and the color he builds into them have no equivalent in the field. They give his riders and horses something to stand against, a weather system with its own scale and temper. He paints from firsthand experience, out on the range with working cowboys and in the places themselves, and it shows in the way he holds movement in stillness, binding figure and weather and land into a single moment as it happens.
That work has been recognized fast, and by the institutions that define the field. In 2016 he hung alongside Logan Maxwell Hagege and G. Russell Case in The Wild Bunch at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, and showed the following year in Quest for the West at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. The Briscoe Western Art Museum in San Antonio recognized him twice, with the William B. Travis Award for Patrons Choice in 2016 and the Sam Houston Award in 2017. The Autry Museum of the American West honored him with the Don B. Huntley Spirit of the West Award at Masters of the American West two years running, in 2018 and 2019, and its patrons chose his work again in 2020. Most of those honors were decided by collectors rather than juries, which is its own kind of verdict: in rooms holding the best Western painters alive, people kept choosing him. His gallery shows in Los Angeles, New York and Austin have followed the same pattern, and his print releases now draw hundreds of thousands of viewers each time they open.
Maggiori moved to Taos in 2019, the valley those Paris-trained painters had come looking for a century before him. He is married to the artist and designer Petecia Le Fawnhawk, and they have three daughters. In 2021 he started the Taos Pueblo Art Education Fund, which raises money for art programs at the Taos Day School with Parsons Gallery of the West.
