William Dickerson, Churchyard at Canyoncito or Church at Canyoncito, 1942

This luminous lithograph by the Kansas regionalist painter William R. Dickerson depicts the little church of Nuestra Señora de la Luz in the village of Cañoncito, New Mexico. The adobe church, built in the 1880s, has attracted artists and photographers for decades. With its picturesque location and churchyard cemetery, Nuestra Señora de la Luz has represented for many artists something quintessential about the rural heritage of Northern New Mexico embodied in the simple rustic churches of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Dickerson sought to capture the characteristic forms of the New Mexico landscape with “light, shade, shapes, colors and textures that [are the] combined products of man and nature.” The church in profile is nestled against the dark valley of Apache Canyon, its brightly illuminated roof contrasting sharply with a range of richly inked grays and blacks of the surrounding hills.

Dickerson was, above all, an artist dedicated to conveying a sense of place, and as with many artists of his generation, he had a special attraction to New Mexico. “Part of New Mexico’s allure,” writes Bill North, “was practical and economical—the geographic proximity of Kansas to New Mexico and the relatively reasonable cost of travel and lodging made the art centers of Taos and Santa Fe popular destinations for artists working in the lean years of the 1930s. Also, many artists in Kansas . . . found a certain familiarity in New Mexico’s broad treeless vistas, profuse light, dramatic topography, and desert vegetation.”

William Dickerson grew up in Wichita and as a youth worked for C.A. Seward at Western Lithograph. Both Seward and Ed Davis urged Dickerson to attend the Art Institute of Chicago where, in 1929, he attended Bolton Brown’s lectures on lithography. In 1930, Brown returned to the Institute to teach lithography and Dickerson became his classroom assistant. Although he was offered a teaching position at the Institute, Dickerson instead chose to return to Kansas and teach at the School of the Wichita Art Association, where he served as a guiding force until his retirement in 1971. As Barbara Thompson recounts, “The Dickerson . . . home and backyard studio served as the first printmaking studio for the Wichita Art Association classes and as the informal gathering place for Wichita based and visiting artists. B.J.O. Nordfelt developed a long and enduring friendship with Dickerson and his family.” The Association eventually moved to a larger facility and became one of the most important art centers in the region, attracting painters and printmakers nationwide.

In 1931, Dickerson visited the studios of Nordfeldt and Walter Ufer in Santa Fe and made a return trip to the Southwest the next year. He was so taken with the landscape and its humble byways that in 1938 he and his family began spending a portion of every summer in New Mexico. During his first summer in New Mexico, Dickerson sketched the church in Cañoncito, the subject that he would return to four years later when he produced the present lithograph as an annual gift print for the Prairie Print Makers.

Dickerson’s artworks are held in a number of important collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Great Plains Art Museum, the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Refs.: Clinton Adams, Printmaking in New Mexico, 1880–1990; Bill North, ed., The Regionalist Vision of William Dickerson; Barbara Thompson O’Neill and George C. Foreman, The Prairie Print Makers; Barbara Thompson, In the Middle of America.