Mohave Indian Images And The Artist Maynard Dixon

Maynard Dixon embellished themes that encompassed the timeless truth of the majestic western landscape, the humanity of its memorable people, and the religious mysticism of the Native American. In an attempt to uncover the spirit of the American West, Dixon roamed its plains, mesas, and deserts—drawing, painting, and expressing his creative personality in poems, essays, and letters. Written in a very personal style, this biography includes anecdotes from Dixon’s children, historical vignettes, and interviews with those who knew the artist.

Presents reproductions of the 42 black-and-white drawings by Maynard Dixon owned by the University of Museum of Art, accompanied by an essay on the artist by Adeline Karpiscak.

Western painter Maynard Dixon once pronounced "Arizona" "the magic name of a land bright and mysterious, of sun and sand, of tragedy and stark endeavor." "So long had I dreamed of it," he professed, "that when I came there it was not strange to me. Its sun was my sun; its ground was my ground." The California-born Dixon (1875-1946) first traveled to Arizona in 1900 to absorb what he believed was a vanishing West. Dixon found Arizona a visually inspiring and spiritual place that shaped the course of his paintings and ultimately defined him. A Place of Refuge: Maynard Dixon's Arizona is the first exhibition to focus solely on the renowned painter's depictions of Arizona subjects. As early as 1903 Dixon referred to Arizona as home. Although he spent most of his life in San Francisco, Dixon lamented to friends that he longed for Arizona and the solitude of the desert, and he frequently traversed the land's varied expanses. In 1939 he made Tucson his winter home and spent his remaining years painting his beloved desert landscape. In the confluence of Arizona's natural and cultural landscapes, Dixon would become one of the West's most distinctive painters, creating a body of work that established his place among the vanguard of artists who portrayed western subjects. Thomas Brent Smith explores Dixon's remarkable departure from traditional depictions of human conflict in the "Old West" rendered by such predecessors as Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, and Charles Schreyvogel. Smith's essay describes this shift in artistic ideology and analyzes the tranquil images that emerged on Dixon's canvases. Donald J. Hagerty's biographical essay highlights Dixon's travels and his affinity for the people and landscape of Arizona.

In these visual, historical, and analytical historical essays of an all-too-frequently overlooked artist, Gibbs begins with an account of the Dixon collection at Brigham Young University, then explores the reality, ideology, and abstraction at work in Maynard Dixon's images of Native Americans and the western landscape. In the final essay, photo historian Deborah Brown Rasiel grapples with the complex artistic influences at play between Dixon and his second wife, photographer Dorothea Lange.

Despite the centrality of ceramics to Mojave culture, Mojave pottery is virtually unknown today. Museums have mostly small, unrepresentative, and largely undocumented collections, and the works have received little attention from scholars and collectors.This comprehensive volume brings to light the wondrously inventive clay people, mythological creatures, and effigy vessels of the Mojave people, recording this Southwest Indian ceramic art in more than 50 full-color plates, 25 color and black-and-white illustrations, and a complete catalog of the Dillingham Collection of Mojave Ceramics, one of the largest and most complete Mojave assemblages in the world, at the Indian Arts Research Center of the School of American Research. Jill Leslie Furst takes an ethnohistorical approach here, drawing on written literature about the tribe that ranges from seventeenth-century Spanish documents to ethnographic accounts from the 1970s. The stories of the Mojaves-along with descriptions of family life, gender roles, subsistence activities, clothing and personal adornment, shamanism, and the afterlife-form the context for Furst's exploration of the Mojave ceramic tradition.