Better than Expected

Wednesday, June 19th
Day Off #3

I'd wanted to visit the Bingham Gallery, which showcases the work of Maynard Dixon,
ever since reading about it several years ago.   We had intended to stop Monday on the way to Escalante but missed the sign.  Canceling the Phipps Arch hike cleared our agenda for today, so we made the gallery our destination. 

What fortunate timing! We arrived a few minutes after 10:00, just as the owner was  unlocking the doors.  He told us the docent-led tour requires a reservation but the self-guided tour doesn't and Mrs. Bingham, at the house preparing for a day-camp group, could answer our questions.  The house is a small, simple, straight-forward cabin set in a shaded cove well-watered by an irrigation ditch with a spectacular view of southern Utah's iconic cliffs.                

 

 

 

 

Dixon's Thunderbird insignia above door to his studio

 



We encountered Mrs. Bingham inside the cabin and talked with her for 20 or 30 minutes.  She told us much of what you'd learn in the guided tour as well as how they came to own the property.  After working for Xerox in California during the dot.com era, they became art dealers specializing in works by Dixon and his contemporaries. 



'The Navajo'

They bought the home, studio and additional acreage following the death of Milford Zornes, a watercolor artist, who purchased it from Dixon's widow.   In 1999 they created the non-profit Thunderbird Foundation to preserve and maintain the property as a living history museum.

 

Dixon requested that his ashes be brought to Mt. Carmel.

They are buried beneath this boulder.

Touched and impressed by what we'd seen, we returned to the gallery and offered to take brochures and a poster to display at Parry Lodge.  Mr. Bingham told us about the collection of John K. Hillers* photographs they had purchased in the late 1990's  and showed us several of his portraits of Native Americans.  The collection will be sold at auction in the near future and the Binghams desperately want it to remain in this area.  In addition to the advertising materials, he sent us home with eight of Hillers' Native American prints and a book about Hillers' experiences traveling in the Southwest.

*Hillers served as the photographer for John Wesley Powell's second expedition (1872)down the Colorado River and for the Bureau of American Ethnology.

 



'Indian Boy and His Dog'

 



All that culture made us quite hungry so we stopped at the Thunderbird Restaurant for lunch and their Ho-Made Pie.

 

Fred, the Ho and the Pie