Lewis deSoto (born 1954) is an American conceptual artist, based in Napa, California.Czap, Nick. "The Conceptual Hot Rods of Lewis deSoto," The New York Times, August 28, 2010. Retrieved May 7, 2025.Goodwin-Guerrero, Erin. "Before After," Artshift, March 2009. His art explores cosmology, the human connection to landscape, and sociocultural histories related to being an American of Hispanic and Native American Cahuilla descent.Roth, David M. "Lewis deSoto at San Jose ICA," Artweek, April 2009. Retrieved May 7, 2025.Montiel, Anya. "Reclaiming The Landscape: The Art of Lewis deSoto," American Indian (Smithsonian), Fall 2012. Retrieved May 7, 2025.Pagel, David. "Myth Modernized," Los Angeles Times, October 3, 1991. Retrieved May 7, 2025.Lewallen, Constance. "Metaphor, Matter, Canvas, Stage: Conceptual Art 1968 to 1995," in Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area, Steven A. Nash (ed.), San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1995. DeSoto's artistic output includes video and sound installations, photography, prints, public art and sculptural objects such as giant inflatables and drivable custom cars.Solnit, Rebecca. "Lewis deSoto," in Visions of America, Landscape as Metaphor in the Late Twentieth Century, Martin Friedman et al., Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum/Columbus Museum of Art, 1994.Knight, Christopher. “No Diamonds but Plenty of Gems in 'Jeweled Isle,' First Big US Museum Survey of Sri Lankan Art," Los Angeles Times, December26, 2018. Retrieved May 7, 2025.Czap, Nick. "Provocative Art That Takes the Show on the Road," The New York Times, August 27, 2010. Retrieved May 7, 2025. Critics characterize his approach as reflexive and "syncretistic"—one that freely mixes contrasting metaphors, symbols and concepts in a sometimes playful manner.Yates, Christopher. "Sculpture Needs Its Own Space," The Columbus Dispatch, March 14, 2004.Stone, Nick. "360 Lb.-ft. One Ton Mash-up," Cahuilla, Sotolux, 2006. In a review of deSoto's retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, David M. Roth observed, "regardless of media, his work revolves around three themes: desire, mortality and transcendence. The result is a portrait of a hydrocarbon-powered, millennia-straddling Zen Catholic whose quest for meaning roams from the earthly to the ethereal."
DeSoto's work belongs to public collections including the Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. Lewis deSoto, Artists. Retrieved May 7, 2025. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles,Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Lewis deSoto, Artists. Retrieved May 7, 2025. Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Lewis deSoto, Collections. Retrieved April 17, 2025. San Jose Museum of Art,San Jose Museum of Art. Lewis deSoto, Collection. Retrieved May 7, 2025. Museum of Contemporary Art San DiegoJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Lewis deSoto, Fellows. Retrieved May 7, 2025. and Seattle Art Museum.Seattle Art Museum. Works of Lewis deSoto, Collection. Retrieved May 7, 2025. He has exhibited at the latter four museums, as well as the New Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Denver Art Museum and Phoenix Art Museum, among others.Nazif, Perwana. "The Jeweled Isle: Art from Sri Lanka at LACMA," Ocula, March 25, 2019.Solnit, Rebecca. Pé Túkmiyat, Pé Túkmiyat (Darkness, Darkness), San Jose, CA: San Jose Museum of Art, 1991.New Museum. Lewis deSoto, People. Retrieved May 7, 2025.Friedman, Martin, et al. Visions of America, Landscape as Metaphor in the Late Twentieth Century, Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum/Columbus Museum of Art, 1994. In 2024, deSoto was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Life and career DeSoto was born in San Bernardino, California in 1954.Nolan, Ruth. “Famed Western Love Story of Willie Boy and Carlota Gets Told Through A Native American Lens,” KCET, August 24, 2016. Retrieved May 7, 2025.Sweeney, Erin Michaela. "The Inland Empire in Photographs and Essays," Terrain, June 14, 2017. He lived the first half of his life in the surrounding Inland Empire region; his family's roots trace in part back to the area's Cahuilla people.Torres, Anthony, "Lewis deSoto's Arbor/Ardor," Whitehot Magazine, March 2017. DeSoto studied at the University of California, Riverside, receiving a BA in studio art and minor in religious studies in 1978, and at Claremont Graduate School, earning an MFA in 1981. He began teaching in the 1980s at schools including Otis Art Institute, Cornish College of the Arts, California College of Arts and Crafts, and San Francisco State University (1988–2020), where he is professor emeritus.San Francisco State University. "Emeritus-Emerita Faculty," Retrieved April 17, 2025.
In addition to his 2009 retrospective, deSoto has had solo institutional exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art (1991), Artpace (1996),Cross, Dorothy and Lewis deSoto. "Heat and Cold," tate, Winter 1996, p.48–52. Columbus Museum of Art (2004), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (2008),Villano, Matt. "Di Rosa Preserve Shows Cars As Art," San Francisco Chronicle, July 11, 2008. Palm Springs Art Museum (2011),Czap, Nick. "A Visual Artist’s Land Yacht Beaches in Palm Springs," The New York Times, June 23, 2011. Retrieved May 7, 2025. Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2016) and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2018), among others.Santa Barbara Museum of Art. "Lewis deSoto: Paranirvana (Self-Portrait)," Exhibitions, 2016. Retrieved May 7, 2025.
Work and reception Critics identify heterogeneity in terms of cultural references, themes and media as a significant aspect of deSoto's work.Rinder, Lawrence. Generosity of Spirit: The 2003/2004 Flintridge Foundation Awards in Visual Arts, Flintridge Foundation, 2004. His influences include conceptual and land art, Buddhist, Cahuilla, Catholic and Muslim cosmologies, the visionary literature of Hermann Hesse, phenomenology and scientific theory. This plurality results in a free play of metaphor, symbol and language in which objects and relationships are neither merely metaphorical nor merely representational, leaving the work open to a multiplicity of ideas and meanings, inexplicability and humor.
Thematically, deSoto's art is often likened to spiritual journey involving transcendence or identity. He often sets up confrontations between the mortal world of bodily and sensory desire and the infinite realm, or between contrasting cultures, eras and philosophies.Frank, Peter. "Tahquitz," The Huffington Post, June 2012. Rebecca Solnit contends that deSoto's approach liberates his art from Eurocentric conceptual binaries, such as nature versus culture, sacred versus quotidian, and perfection versus fallenness.
Performance and interaction are also significant aspects of deSoto's work. His photographic series approach landscape from an experimental position centered on documenting encounters between camera and environment rather than composing images. He turned to installation and sculpture in the 1990s, seeking embodied viewer participation in his work involving movement, sound and space. These efforts also involve presenting work in non-art-world contexts such as car shows and showrooms, parking lots and national parks.
Early photographic projects DeSoto's early experimentations with photographic exposure, light and materials explored landscape as an experience. The blurred and crowded, slow-exposure Botanica images (1980) emphasized the light-responsiveness shared by flowers and photographic film, creating a metaphorical and reciprocal relationship that upended oppositions of organic to mechanical. In his "Site Projects" series (1981–86),.deSoto responded to the earthworks of sculptors like Robert Smithson. Rather than physically alter locations, he shot long exposures of moving light sources at night to create time-lapse effects suggesting ideas of infinity and the transience of humanity (e.g., Ellipse Tide, 1982).Van Proyen, Mark. "Carleton Watkins and 'Another West' @ Fraenkel," September 23, 2019. Retrieved May 7, 2025.
With Tahualtapa (1983–1988), deSoto shifted toward sculpture. The mixed-media series centered on the shifting essence and perceptions regarding a San Bernardino County mountain that had been leveled. Its four works each featured an inscribed title and frame filled with materials (feathers, marble dust and slabs of cement) representing its role across three cultures: as the Cahuilla "Hill of the Ravens," Spanish colonial "Cerrito Solo," and American "Marble Mountain" and Slover Mountain cement quarries.Straight, Susan. "Finding a Geography of Home in the Inland Empire," Los Angeles Times, January 17, 2019. Retrieved May 7, 2025.
Installations, 1990–present DeSoto's early sound and projection installations drew upon Native American culture, California settings and enigmatic arrangements of objects in order to examine traditional and modern attitudes about land and universe. In Haypatak, Witness, Kansatsusha (1990/1995), he again explored landscape as a locus of cultural change (in this case, Drakes Bay, Sir Francis Drake's California landing site). Titled with the Miwok, English and Japanese words for "witness," its wall-sized video projection featured contrasting sounds and visual styles—close-ups of flora and water, chaotic sweeping pans, and meditative skyscapes—portraying three cultural modes of consciousness. As viewers approached the dimly lit installation via a jetty-like strip of slatted wooden flooring over a bed of stones, their shadows became part of the work. In Pe Tukmiyat, Pe Tukmiyat (Darkness, Darkness) (1991) and Tahquitz (1994–96), deSoto created symbolic representations of Cahuilla creation myths as austere, quasi-domestic scenes accompanied by moody lighting, video and sound. Tahquitz referenced the story of a mountain demigod that feeds on human souls; the installation featured a long, galvanized table supporting two large blocks of ice that melted into ceramic vases, bounded by real-time and time-lapse videos of the San Jacinto Mountains.Michno, Chrisopher. "Tahquitz: Culver Center for the Arts," Artillery, April-May 2012.
In the later installations End of Desire (2001–09) and Lament (2009–15), deSoto delved into broader themes involving sensory desire and transcendence. The former—deemed a "Zen joke" about temptation and resistance in one review—consisted of a wooden pier elevated above a room strewn with overpoweringly fragrant cocoa hulls. Lament was a cathedral-like meditation on transience; it featured a narrow corridor lit by a dim ray of blue light, which reverberated with a haunting melody improvised by an opera singer to words from the Hermann Hesse novel, The Glass Bead Game.
DeSoto returned to Native American folklore in the public installation Carlota (2016, Joshua Tree National Park), taking up the 1909 true-life, tragic "Willie Boy" incident in which a Chemehuevi–Paiute pair of lovers lost their lives amid one of the largest manhunts in the history of the West. He reoriented prior Eurocentric versions of the story—told in words, sound and graphic line drawings on plaques along the park's trail—to reflect Native perspectives, particularly Carlota's.
Sculpture and custom cars