Lewis deSoto

Lewis deSoto, Cahuilla, customized General Motors pickup truck with tapestry upholstery tonneau cover, audio program, automated flashing lights, custom emblems and paint scheme, 6.5' x 6.75' x 18', 2006.

Lewis deSoto (born 1954) is an American conceptual artist, based in Napa, California. His art explores cosmology, the human connection to landscape, and sociocultural histories related to being an American of Hispanic and Native American Cahuilla descent. DeSoto's artistic output includes video and sound installations, photography, prints, public art and sculptural objects such as giant inflatables and drivable custom cars. Critics characterize his approach as reflexive and "syncretistic" 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." Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Seattle Art Museum. 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. In 2024, deSoto was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. 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. 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. Columbus Museum of Art (2004), Palm Springs Art Museum (2011), Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2016) and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2018), among others.

Work and reception Critics identify heterogeneity in terms of cultural references, themes and media as a significant aspect of deSoto's work. 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.

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.

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.

Lewis deSoto, End of Desire, cocoa shells, wooden plank and colored lamps, various locations, 2001–09; photograph: Headlands Center for the Arts, 2001. 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. He pursued that theme further with Paranirvana (self-portrait) (2003–16), a 26-foot-long inflatable reclining Buddha with his own image superimposed onto the face, which reinterpreted a 12th-century stone monument at the Gal Vihara in Sri Lanka. Mining divergent references, deSoto modified the car's emblem and styling with representations of a sword and pox virus (historical agents of destruction) and colonial detailing, aggressive extended wheels, and interior embellishments of ostentatious luxury. An exhibition (Fullerton Museum of Art, 2015) presented panoramic images (some 12 feet wide), each created by digitally merging up to 200 handheld photographs to simulate vistas viewed from a moving car. California Museum of Photography, Center for Creative Photography, Columbus Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Petersen Automotive Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art, and Seattle Art Museum,

He has received a John S. Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (2024) and awards from the Flintridge Foundation (2003), Fleishhacker Foundation (1999), National Endowment for the Arts (1996) and California Arts Council (1992). He has been awarded artist residencies from organizations including Artpace, Headlands Center for the Arts, Institute of American Indian Arts and MIT List Visual Arts Center.

DeSoto has been commissioned to produce a number of public artworks, in cities including Phoenix, San Antonio, San Francisco and San Jose. They include: Lineage of Wings (1992), a series of 22 etched glass panels at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport; the multi-pronged project On the Air, including light projections at San Francisco International Airport (2000–06); and the suspended steel sculpture and shadow work Labyrinth Gateway (University of Texas San Antonio, 2003).