Newly Expanded Maynard Dixon Museum in Tucson Celebrates Artist's 150th Birthday
By Chadd Scott on
Mark Sublette was first bitten by the Maynard Dixon bug in late 1995, early 1996 when a Dixon painting came into his Tucson gallery.
“I just fell in love with it, and I said at that moment in time, ‘I'm always going to have Dixon in my gallery,’” Sublette remembers.
He remembers the painting, too: Late Light on the Catalinas, 1943, 16 x 20.
Sublette recites the details with the speed and certainty of a father recalling a child’s birthday and weight. Sublette bought the painting, then sold it, then bought it back.
“The Catalina Mountains. It was just the most beautiful rendering of what I see every day out my windows,” Sublette said of the artwork depicting the Santa Catalina Mountains which form Tucson’s eastern boundary.
Throughout the 30 years since that first Dixon painting walked into his gallery, Sublette has researched Dixon, written books about Dixon, curated and participated in Dixon exhibitions, given talks on Dixon, and bought and sold and bought and kept enough Dixon artworks and ephemera to open a Dixon museum. He did that initially over 20 years ago, creating a small Maynard Dixon museum inside his Medicine Man Gallery – so named as a nod to Sublette’s previous career as a physician.

Maynard Dixon and Native American Art Museum Interior.
“The more I learned, the more I read, the more I understood this is a very important individual, historically as well as artistically. I decided I would start trying to – when I had the opportunity to get pieces that told the story of who this man and his life and career was – that I would purchase those and keep them and let other people see them and display them,” Sublette said. “It was a slow attrition of putting pieces together over the next 20-plus years – and not selling them. It's always easy as a dealer to sell, it's a lot harder to go, ‘No, I'm going to keep this.’”
In late 2024, Sublette moved his Dixon museum out of the gallery and into a 3,000-square-foot space in a separate building in the same complex. On January 24, 2025 – what would have been Maynard Dixon’s 150th birthday – the Maynard Dixon & Native American Art Museum will host an official grand opening celebration from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM, free and open to the public.
“It's two museums for the price of one. It's the Maynard Dixon and Native American Art Museum,” Sublette said, Native American art being another enduring obsession of his. “It has a reproduction of Maynard Dixon's 728 Montgomery Street studio (in San Francisco) which he started occupying in 1912. We have things like his easel and his walking cane with a sword in it, and his big Zia pot, and his chiefs blanket. We have items that would have been in his actual studio, and then we have period pieces of furniture and Native American art that would have also been in there. We know what it looked like because there's photographs of his studio.”
The night will also feature the opening of the Museum’s latest temporary exhibition, “Howard Post and Teal Blake: Paintbrush Cowboys!”

Maynard Dixon and Native American Art Museum Interior.
Maynard Dixon Museum
What makes the cut among all the Dixon artwork and objects coming across Sublette’s desk to be acquired for the Museum?
“If it adds to the (Dixon) story, then I'm interested in it for the museum. That can be something as simple as a little brochure that he might have illustrated. It could be as significant as a major painting if I'm not encumbered by the cost. There's always cost factors to take into consideration because these things aren't going to be sold,” Sublette explained. “If it improves the story and tells the story, especially that story around Arizona and New Mexico, because those are areas I'm very interested in, then it's going to potentially end up in the museum. We have ephemera like his writings, his drawings, his letters, his poetry, all his books that he illustrated, as well as paintings and other pieces of history that are his as well.”

Maynard Dixon and Native American Art Museum Interior.
Dixon’s (1875-1946) life spanned a fascinating time period. An era of change unprecedented in human history. From the Gilded Age to the Nuclear Age. A baby during Custer’s Last Stand; nearing the end of his life when the atomic bomb was dropped on imperial Japan. From horse and buggy to jet airplanes.
Trends in contemporary art were moving just as swiftly.
Born into French Impressionism, Dixon’s professional life saw Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism and abstraction all ebb and flow. Cézanne to Pollock. Oh, and the popularization of photography, for which his one-time wife Dorothea Lange would become particularly esteemed, and movies as well. Radio and television for that matter.
As an artist, Dixon embraced the advancing modernity. Among Western painters, he was nearly alone in doing so. While Dixon had all the personal pangs of nostalgia for the “Old West,” as a painter, he was never beholden to the old school.
For that reason, his popularity continues growing.
“(Dixon) continues to find more and more of an audience, especially in younger painters,” Sublette said. “If you talk to any landscape painter, or even somebody who tries to chronicle what the West looks like today, the majority, if not all of them, will say Maynard Dixon was an influence because he was a guy who was doing contemporary sensibilities in his paintings of the West when other people weren't.”
All due respect to the godfathers of Western art, C.M. Russell and Frederic Remington, every Western artist owes something to them, but when looking at contemporary Western art, Dixon is revealed as a greater influence. He was the originator of the genre.
“Younger artists can appreciate what he was trying to do and make in a way that if it's just cowboys and Indians and fighting scenes, they're not going to be able to relate to that as much as a desert vista with cubist influence in the clouds and mountains; that they can go, ‘Oh, that's something different. That guy was doing it way before I was,’” Sublette said.
The Maynard Dixon & Native American Art Museum is located at 6866 East Sunrise Drive, Suite 150, in Tucson. It’s open Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Adult general admission tickets are $12.00 with discounts for seniors, students, military, and children.