New Museum – Maynard Dixon and Native American Art Museum

Mark Sublette’s Medicine Man Gallery opens a museum dedicated to the work of legendary Western painter Maynard Dixon and Native American art.

The Maynard Dixon and Native American Art Museum is now open in the Tucson Catalina Foothills at the corner of Sunrise Drive and Kolb Road. The Maynard Dixon Museum has long been a feature of Mark Sublette’s Medicine Man Gallery but now has a dedicated space for expanded display of the collection. Mark and Kathleen Sublette have amassed the largest collection of drawings, sketches, oil paintings, hand-written poems, letters, and ephemera related to legendary Western artist Maynard Dixon (1875-1946). Also, an impressive world-class collection of Native American jewelry, pottery, baskets, kachinas, weavings, artifacts, and other crafts are featured in the new museum.

The new space additionally contains a beautiful gallery featuring rotating exhibits of contemporary Western Art available for purchase. The opening exhibition in the gallery, Those Who Follow, showcases work made by 14 artists who have been directly inspired by the work of Maynard Dixon, including a monumental Arizona landscape by Dennis Ziemienski, a brand new oil by G. Russell Case titled Hidden Away, as well as paintings by Amery Bohling, Tony Abeyta, John Moyers, Terri Kelly Moyers, and others. Those Who Follow is on view through November 29, followed by Dixon/Ziemienski: The Illustrators, opening December 6 featuring two of the greatest commercial illustrators ever to live: Maynard Dixon and Dennis Ziemienski.

Maynard Dixon was a noted illustrator, landscape, and mural painter of the early 20th-century American West, especially the desert, Indians, early settlers, and cowboys. He was the first painter of the American West to bring a modernist aesthetic to his grand Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada landscapes. Combining elements of cubism, color field, abstraction, and traditional landscape in one canvas, his works link the historic West with the Modern Industrial Age. The Maynard Dixon and Native American Art Museum is proud to have on loan until August 2025 an absolute Maynard Dixon masterpiece: Wild Horses of Nevada, 1927. This large 44×50 oil on canvas painting depicts a bird’s eye view of a team of wild horses painted in an array of blues, reds, and browns, cutting across the bottom third. The mesa at the top of the composition shows Dixon’s cubist approach to depicting the Western landscape. The painting won a silver medal at the 1928 Pacific Southwest Exposition in Long Beach and was exhibited extensively throughout the United States in the following years. It has been included in most major exhibitions of Maynard Dixon’s work recently, including the Nevada Museum of Art and the Scottsdale Museum of the West.

Highlights of the Native American art displays at the museum include masterpiece pots by the greatest Puebloan family of potters, Maria and Julian Martinez, their son Popovi Da, and grandson, Tony Da. The collection houses Tony Da’s first art pottery, which he made when he was still a teenager, as well as exquisite pots made at the top of his creative prowess. There is a large collection of Navajo and Zuni jewelry, and a unique collection of Hawaiian artifacts.

The Maynard Dixon and Native American Art Museum is open Monday through Friday, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors, $6 for students, and children and military with ID are free. There is also a year membership for $40.