Landscapes of Extraction
The Phoenix Art Museum’s exhibit, Landscapes of Extraction: The Art of Mining in the American West is on display until March 6, 2022.
Several of the images caught my attention. My paternal grandparents, Robert S. Oliver, Sr. (1880-1956) and Harriet Mary Pike Oliver (1882-1972) met in Bingham, UT, where my grandfather was a mining engineer and my grandmother was a school teacher. They married there in 1908.
Four images in the exhibit are of the massive Bingham Mine, where copper continues to be extracted. Not long after marrying, my grandparents relocated to Anaconda, MT. The last image “Anaconda Plant” shows the landmark 585 foot tall tower of the copper smelter in that town. My grandfather worked at that facility for for several decades before he and my grandmother departed for San Francisco in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The image below is of a 1917 painting (oil on canvas) by Joans Lie (1880-1940 entitled “Bingham Mine.”
This next image of Bingham Mine was also painted by Jonas Lie in 1917.
The image below is a color photograph from 2013 entitled “Bingham Pit, Aftermath of a Landslide” by Martin Supich (b. 1949.)
The title of the painting shown in the image below is “The Chasm of Bingham.” It was created by Erika Osborne (b. 1978) in 2012.
This final image is a 1936 painting (watercolor and gouache on paperboard) called “Anaconda Plant” by Paul Sample (1896-1974.)
