A HISTORIC PHOTO FOR A HISTORIC TIME

The May 2020 issue of Western Art Collector exists in a fog for many of us here on the editorial and production teams. We worked on May in March 2020, which is when Covid-19 slammed into the American economy. In addition to sports, music, movies and other huge segments of the country, the art market was suddenly incapacitated with canceled shows, shuttered public events and online-only openings that were hastily organized at the last minute. Logan Maxwell Hagege made Western

Art Collector history that month when he appeared on our cover with one of his paintings. It was the first and only time an artist would appear in a photograph on the cover, although Andy Thomas would paint Charlie Russell on Issue 67, and Joseph Henry Sharp would do a partial self-portrait on Issue 128. When the magazine made inquiries about the Hagege painting for the cover, it was the artist who pitched us on the photograph.

“I just liked the idea of a photograph because it showed the scale of the painting, which was 8 feet by 12 feet,” says Hagege, who’s had four total covers for Western Art Collector. “I was given some loose direction on the format of the cover, so I hired a photographer to come to Maxwell Alexander Gallery to shoot me painting. It was early in Covid so the photographer wasn’t wearing a mask, but he wouldn’t shake my hand because he had been reading about how Covid was spread. So we fistbumped. It was a strange time. That was my Covid show. We didn’t open the gallery, but we did do the show online. That image is special to me because not many people were able to see the actual painting because of what was happening in the world. But they did see it on the cover of the magazine.”