Landscapes of Extraction: The Art of Mining in the American West

LANDSCAPES OF EXTRACTION: THE ART OF MINING IN THE AMERICAN WEST

NOVEMBER 7, 2021 – MARCH 6, 2022 STEELE GALLERY

UNDER

A NEW EXHIBITION AT PHOENIX ART MUSEUM EXPLORES THE ART, ARTISTRY, AND IMPACT OF MINING ON THE AMERICAN WEST

The modern history of the American West is inextricably linked to the discovery of what lies beneath the region’s rocky cliffs and rugged canyons, with the mining industry forever transforming the West’s hardscrabble landscapes and complex cultures and yielding descriptive monikers like “the Silver State,” “the Golden State,” and more. Here in Arizona, the importance of mining to the state’s identity is memorialized in the 5-Cs mnemonic: citrus, cotton, climate, cattle, and, perhaps most of all, copper.

The long legacy of mining in the American West has impacted the wealth, health, and environment of the region, raising questions about the true costs of humanity’s dependence on mined resources to sustain commonplace and desired technologies. These considerations, too, have influenced the art of modern and contemporary periods, illuminated in a new exhibition opening this fall at Phoenix Art Museum. Spanning more than 100 years, Landscapes of Extraction: The Art of Mining in the American West explores artistic expressions of the mining industry’s long impact on workers, landscapes, and our understanding of the delicate balance between safeguarding the Earth and sustaining humanity’s current way of life. The exhibition showcases more than 65 works featuring a range of subjects and perspectives by artists such as Southwest icons Lew Davis and Maynard Dixon, contemporary artists Edward Burtynsky and David Emitt Adams, and women artists like Helen Katharine Forbes, Louise Emerson Ronnebeck, and Cara Romero. Viewers understand the true breadth of Landscapes of Extraction as they experience two works created 101 years apart that depict the same subject— Utah’s Bingham Canyon Mine. Located southwest of Salt Lake City, the mine enriched its owners for a century and remains the largest open-pit excavation in the world, creating incredible wealth through its stores of copper, gold, silver, and molybdenum. The mining process at Bingham, however, has also destroyed; the surrounding areas have been subjected to arsenic and lead contamination, harming the habitats of animals, plants, and people, including the thousands of mine workers and their families who lived in homes carved out of the canyon’s walls. The locale is first depicted in the exhibition’s earliest piece—a 1917 oil painting by the Norwegian-born artist Jonas Lie, best known for his paintings of Eastern coastlines. A contemporary color photograph by Martin Stupich stands in contrast through its capture of the colorfully striated open pit, disfigured by a recent landslide. The image reveals an otherworldly, unnatural beauty—a sculpted, stair-step canyon created not by the steady erosion of water over eons, but by human need and greed. The largest collection of works in Landscapes of Extraction, however, hail from the Depression era and were funded by federal support from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and its predecessor, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), an aid program developed by the Franklin

LITTLE BOY LIVES IN A COPPER CAMP DEPARTS FROM THE MORE FAMILIAR NEW DEAL STYLE BY PRESENTING A SMALL, NEARLY EMACIATED CHILD, WHOSE FACE IS TURNED AWAY FROM THE VIEW OF THE DRY AND BARREN HILLS OF HIS HOME, HIS BODY CURVED INWARD WITH ARMS CLUTCHING HIS ABDOMEN, PERHAPS ALLUDING TO THE PANGS OF HUNGER.

D. Roosevelt administration to support working artists unable to sustain themselves during the severe economic hardship of the period. Under the influence of these programs, artists were encouraged to capture the landscapes, cityscapes, and life of America. As a result, Philip C. Curtis, Philip Latimer Dike, Lew Davis, Arnold Rönnebeck, and others depicted regional scenes of agriculture and industry, including the workers and their families who labored in the sometimes perilous environments of openpit mines and coal tipples. These images range from the heroic, glorious worker, reminiscent of the symbolism of European socialist propaganda, to scenes of a grimmer reality in mining life. In Paul Sample’s 1936 Miners in the Stope, working men appear like near-mythical, muscular specimens with their ramrod spines unyielding as they excavate the quarry, representing the pinnacle of health and strength while engaged in an act of labor that appears almost holy, sanctified. By contrast, portraits by others like Lew Davis illuminate a harsher existence. Davis’ 1939 oil-on-Masonite painting Little Boy Lives in a Copper Camp departs from the more familiar New Deal style by presenting a small, nearly emaciated child, whose face is turned away from the view of the dry and barren hills of his home, his body curved inward with arms clutching his abdomen, perhaps alluding to the pangs of hunger.

LANDSCAPES OF EXTRACTION

The Art of Mining in the American West

THIS BOOK OF MINE

LANDSCAPES OF EXTRACTION EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

$35.99 (MEMBERS) | $39.99 (NON-MEMBERS) Take a bit of Landscapes of Extraction home with you, in this colorful catalogue that captures exceptional works of art by Lew Davis, Helen Katharine Forbes, Martin Stupich, and more.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT PHXART.ORG/SHOP. SEE PAGE 43 IN THIS ISSUE FOR MORE GIFT IDEAS INSPIRED BY THE GEMS, MINERALS, AND DESERT BEAUTY OF THE SOUTHWEST. Viewers also have the opportunity to experience unique views of mining life while exploring Landscapes of Extraction. Jerry Bywaters’ 1940 painting Oil Field Girls, for example, offers a rare glimpse of two young women hitchhiking on the outskirts of a mining town, their lean, long shapes extended to almost surreal proportions, mimicking the stark spires of the oil derricks in the distance, and the curve of their figures echoed in the black smoke of a raging oil-field fire in the background. Whether they’re heading to the center of town or away from it is unclear, but they appear determined to reach their destination, on their own terms. In addition to revealing the role and lifestyle of the region’s miners, works in the exhibition underscore the seismic transformation of the natural landscape at the hands of the mining industry, illuminating the ways in which mines have carved into rock formations and canyons to create alien settings of human design. Arizona-based artist Merrill Mahaffey’s acrylic on canvas titled Morenci Mine features the constructed landscape bathed in the golden light of the setting desert sun. The open-pit copper mine resembles a Greco-Roman theatre carved from stone and appears reminiscent of the theatres of Pergamon and Ephesus, but set here, in the American West. There is a raw, sublime beauty in these humanmade pits and canyons, but there is also something lonely about them, a sense of abandonment. In this way, some exhibition works serve more as memorials to what once was, to the ghostly remains of a previously pristine natural landscape or a thriving town that perished when mining companies depleted the earthly stores of minerals, oil, and metals. This destructive force and the depletion of the environment echoes in the 2003 photograph of Edward Burtynksy. Metal oil pumps, themselves constructed from extracted materials from below the Earth’s surface, dot a flat, desiccated desert plain, filling the field of vision beneath a colorless, dusty sky. This place seems abandoned by all humanity, marred by the tools of the oil trade as the pumps continue pumping. The silence of the work is overwhelming, as viewers are left to contemplate the erasure of elevation, natural forms, and the hands of those who once worked the region. Landscapes of Extraction reminds all who experience its works that the history of mining is a complicated one. The industry has fueled the expansion and innovation of technology through its extraction of oil and metals that make possible humanity’s ability to traverse countries, to circle the globe. It has enhanced

lives while also endangering them. It has enabled astounding discovery and exploration while also irreparably damaging the environment, polluting the air we breathe and the water we drink. In this way, Landscapes of Extraction poetically embodies the push and pull of humanity’s relationship to the planet’s resources, digging beneath the surface of the mining industry and into the lives, the landscapes, and the losses that arise from our determination to extract the precious and rare materials of our shared earth.

Landscapes of Extraction: The Art of Mining in the American West is organized by Phoenix Art Museum. It is made possible through the generosity of Men’s Arts Council, Freeport-McMoRan Foundation, and Ironwood Cancer & Research Centers, with additional support from the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members. image credits: (page 17) John Charles Haley, Mining the Gold Stope [Tucson, AZ], 1936-1937. Tempera on Masonite panel. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Monica Haley. (page 18, left to right) Martin Stupich, Bingham Pit, Aftermath of landslide, April 2013, 2018. Color photograph. Collection of Phoenix Art Museum, Museum Purchase with funds by the Freeport-McMoRan Foundation. © Martin Stupich; Helen Katharine Forbes, Mountains and Miner’s Shack, 1940. Oil on canvas. The Schoen Collection: American Scene Painting. Courtesy of the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. (page 19) Lew Davis, Little Boy Lives in a Copper Camp, 1939. Oil on Masonite. Collection of Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of I.B.M. Corporation. (page 20) Arnold Rönnebeck, Colorado Gold Mine, 1933. Lithograph, edition 17/25. Collection Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, Denver, CO. (page 21) Louise Emerson Ronnebeck, Oil Rigger (competition entry for Amarillo, Texas, Post Office), 1941. Tempera on paper, mounted on board. Private Collection, Little Rock, AR. Courtesy of the Estate of Louise Emerson Ronnebeck. Photo: Camera Work, Inc. (left) Merrill Mahaffey, Morenci Mine, 1980. Acrylic on canvas. Collection of Freeport-McMoRan, Phoenix AZ. (below) Martin Stupich, Morenci Panorama, February 1989, 2010. Monochrome photograph. Museum purchase with funds by the Freeport-McMoRan Foundation. © Martin Stupich.

WHENDIDHUMANS START MINING?

A LOOK BACK AT THE ORIGINS OF AN INDUSTRY FROM “OVERBURDEN” BY WILLIAM L. FOX, FROM LANDSCAPES OF EXTRACTION: THE ART OF MINING IN THE AMERICAN WEST, A COMPANION CATALOGUE TO THE EXHIBITION

It is commonplace to be taught early on in school that the origins of human civilization are rooted in the adoption of agriculture, but in truth, humans were always mining. Some 3.3 million years ago, hominids—the family of primates that includes humanity’s nearest ancestors—created the earliest known tools made of stone, with large, solid pieces used as anvils and chipped flakes of stone cores used as cutting and scraping tools. The earliest known method of mining dates back to at least 100,000 years ago to the gathering of ochre, the iron-rich mineral used in rock art and body decoration. By that time, however, humans living and working in the Blombas Cave of South Africa had already established ochre workshops, indicating that the practice of surface mining was probably much older. By comparison, hominids started gathering favored grains perhaps as early as 105,000 years ago, but agriculture as a practice didn’t begin until about 12,000 years ago. The earliest known mining operation that required tunneling occurred in Swaziland and is dated to 43,000 years ago. There, they mined hematite, an iron ore that produces ochre. From these beginnings, we jump to the present day, when, at the end of 2020, human production of concrete, metal, plastic, bricks, and asphalt exceeded all of Earth’s living biomass for the first time. The materials to produce these resources, whether gravel or lime, iron or oil, are all derived from mining.