Mt. Carmel

In 1933, artist-partners Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) and Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) took a family trip to Zion National Park with their two children. They camped in Mt. Carmel Junction, which sits just a few miles to the east of the park. Dixon in particular was indelibly impressed by the surrounding landscape with its red, peach, and white sandstone cliffs, scrubby foliage, and wide blue sky. His lush paintings of the American West often express these dramatic landscapes and sweeping vistas, where the sun alters the canyons’ palette depending on the time of day and casts deep purple shadows on the craggy faces that toy with our perception of distance and height. He captured billowing clouds moving across the azure sky along with glowing trees, Native Americans, cowboys, horses, and more atmospheric impressions of the desert.

In 1935, Dixon and Lange divorced, and then in 1937, he married artist Edith Hamlin (1902-1992). In the late 1930s, when Dixon and Hamlin visited this area, it would not have looked much different than it does today, and Dixon’s work responded to the starkness of the landscapes he sought. “My feeling is toward the thing I do, and austerity and clear definition are the dominating character of the arid lands I work in,” he said.

Dixon and Hamlin purchased 20 acres of land in 1938, containing only a small shed-like garage, just outside of Mt. Carmel. With the assistance of a local builder, they began work on a rustic timber-and-stone house on which the paint for the windows and doors reflected Dixon’s own palette—iron-red and turquoise—along with chinking between the logs reflecting the color of the sandstone cliffs nearby. The artists used the house between May and November every year between 1939 and 1946, when Dixon died, and the rest of the time they spent in Tucson. A year after Dixon’s death, Hamlin added an adjacent studio building to the Mt. Carmel property and continued to paint, inviting friends and luminaries such as Ansel Adams and others to stay and work.

I had been staying on a small ranch on the Arizona Strip for a couple of weeks by the time I learned that Dixon and Hamlin’s former home and studio were but a 45-minute drive from where I was staying. I was also in the area to explore Zion National Park and was awed by the drive through largely undeveloped land between Colorado City and Mt. Carmel Junction. The road curved through Rosy Canyon (home to some wonderful Indigenous petroglyphs and cliff dwelling ruins of the pre-Ancestral Puebloan Basket culture) around bulbous, cascading, strangely eroded rocks and then opened onto a broad plateau.

Just past the junction of the road that heads to Zion National Park’s east entrance, I pulled into the parking lot of a surprisingly contemporary building with an illuminated, red sign outside that read “Maynard Dixon Property Open Daily.” Inside, I met gallerist-artist-collector Susan Bingham, who along with her husband Paul, had purchased the Dixon-Hamlin property in the late 1990s and established the Thunderbird Foundation for the Arts in 1999, preserving the property. Paul passed away in 2022, and since, Susan has continued to run the contemporary gallery featuring mostly regional artists who make gorgeous representational work of the Southwest. But what I really wasn’t expecting was a firsthand look inside the lovingly restored buildings that Dixon and Hamlin built more than three-quarters of a century ago.

The homestead looks out over the modern highway toward timeless, fleshy bluffs—in particular, a boulder-topped cliff called Sugar Knoll. Before the Binghams purchased the property, it was the home and studio of watercolorist Milford Zornes (1908-2008) who added acreage in the 1960s. Despite macular degeneration that began to set in around 1989, Zornes continued to paint for two decades. In an essay titled Demand to See, Zornes wrote, “When eyes fail, the spirit can take over. After all, the eye is only the instrument for seeing. It is through the mind and spirit, fed and served by the senses, that one’s life is lived with understanding and reward.” When Zornes could no longer care for the small ranch, and he sold it to the Binghams, and its artistic legacy continues.

The log home is a real treasure, with a small loft, fireplace, and bedroom that wraps around the back. It’s modest yet airy, and the Thunderbird Foundation keeps a number of photographs, books, and knick-knacks on the cabin’s many shelves, plus a number of high quality reproductions of Dixon’s work. Adjacent to the house is the original garage and a cool house, used for storing food and wine, beyond which is a bunkhouse (built in 1941) that is occasionally still used for hosting visiting artists.

Dixon and Hamlin’s property is on the National Register of Historic Places and open year-round. Self-guided tours are available—weather permitting—with a $20 donation, and docent-guided tours are available by appointment. ✧

All images by Kate Mothes.