Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, artist Daniel McCoy is known for his  offbeat style in which pop art, cartoons, sign painting and murals intersect in a world of zany characters referencing the culture of Northern New Mexico, where he now lives and works. These days, McCoy’s life runs along the Rio Grande—from his work at the Poeh Cultural Center in Pojoaque to visiting friends and family who live along its course, the river forms the connecting thread. This has given the artist an intimate familiarity with the river throughout all of its ebbs, flows, and changing aspects. 

“You can look in any direction during any time of the day, and the light changes,” McCoy says. “Shadows get longer and take on this lavender quality and it's just never ending.”

This show will feature large-scale landscapes interspersed with smaller flatstyle pieces, marking a return to the flatstyle art McCoy was introduced to when he was first starting out as an artist in Tahlequah, Oklahoma under the guidance of Cherokee artist Mary Adair. Flatstyle painting is a type of Native art developed in the early 20th century, characterized by an emphasis on form and shape with minimal perspective and shading. McCoy’s work skillfully incorporates a wide breadth of styles and aesthetics, drawing especially on the aesthetics of late-sixties posters, comics from the seventies and early eighties, and the landscape techniques established by the Taos Society of Artists. While McCoy’s work sometimes veers towards the psychedelic, this show has a more realist bent, returning to traditional landscape colors and including more imagery from McCoy’s background in the American southeast and Oklahoma.

McCoy never thought he would become a landscape artist, but over time he has realized landscapes’ potential to convey a vast breadth of emotion and meaning, from activism and social commentary, to humor, narrative, and the deeply personal. 

McCoy has found himself drawn to the Rio Grande and the stories and lore that surround it. The river offers a constant source of wisdom: just when McCoy thinks he’s heard all the river’s stories, he’ll learn a new one, or learn another traditional name for an area. The river also gives access to a realm of imagining: what did these familiar places look like thousands of years ago? How does the river’s topography quietly shape our lives to this day? 

McCoy’s scenes range from as far south as Diablo Canyon to as far north as Abiquiu. The place he returns to time and time again in his paintings is the view overlooking the Jemez Mountains and Santa Clara Canyon. “I use that spot endlessly,” McCoy says. “I get up and look at it every morning, and I always feel like there's an event going on in nature that I can't comprehend because I'm an earthbound human.”

From where he lives about a hundred yards from the river, McCoy observes the Rio Grande’s eternality even in times of extreme drought. For McCoy, the river gives a sense of reassurance in its timelessness: “I could paint here for the rest of my life, and probably will.”

Scenes Along the Rio Grande will open at Hecho a Mano on Friday, August 1 and will be on view until September 1, 2025.