Alexandre Hogue moved from Minnesota, where he studied at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, to Texas and then to New York before finally settling in Dallas, Texas. There, he pursued painting full-time, supplementing his income by teaching summer art classes at a local women's college. Hogue traveled throughout the Southwest in the 1920s and '30s, frequently visiting the Taos art colony in New Mexico, where he met Ernest Blumenschein and W. Herbert Dunton, and other artists. These trips helped acquaint him with the American Indian tribes of the region and their shared respect for the land, an idea that permeated Hogue's subsequent landscape paintings. Hogue is best known for a series of landscape scenes he did in the 1930s of the Dust Bowl. These paintings showed the American landscape devastated by drought as opposed to a lush garden of opportunity.