Effie Anderson, 1895

DESERT PARADISE – The Art and Life of Effie Anderson Smith (1869-1955) is the most comprehensive retrospective exhibit ever presented featuring Arizona’s earliest known female desert impressionist landscape painter.  The exhibit will highlight E.A. Smith’s inspiring life story through her art and personal artifacts from her Arizona life, along with more than 50 of her finest desert landscapes which exemplify the artist’s unique contribution to desert art and Arizona art history.  Also included in the exhibit are paintings by several of E.A. Smith’s most accomplished students in the circle of women artists who formed around her in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

Effie Anderson Smith arrived in the Arizona Territory in 1895 as a young bride and became a pioneer settler of the small silver mining camp at Pearce in Cochise County.  There she fell in love with Arizona’s vast deserts, distant mountains, glorious canyons and desert flora.  Her depictions of Cochise Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains, Cave Creek Canyon in the Chiricahua Mountains, vistas around her home in the Sulphur Springs Valley, and especially her paintings of the Grand Canyon won her critical acclaim.  The artist captured on canvas her own personal and colorful emotional response to her Desert Paradise without any signs of human activity or intervention.  Just the raw natural beauty of Arizona as the pioneers first encountered it, and the native peoples revered it.  By the time of Effie’s 80th birthday in 1949 local newspapers referred to her as The Dean of Arizona Women Artists.

Desert Paradise – The Art and Life of Effie Anderson Smith is a joint presentation of the Desert Caballeros Western Museum and the Effie Anderson Smith Museum and Archive.