Art in a Mining Camp – Effie Anderson Smith and the Pioneering Women Artists of Southern Arizona with Steven Carlson

Free Online Program

Art in a Mining Camp – Effie Anderson Smith and the Pioneering Women Artists of Southern Arizona with Steven Carlson

Saturday, June 13, 2026, 11:00 am -MST

Effie Anderson Smith (1869-1955) is recognized as the earliest resident artist of her kind in the Arizona Territory beginning with her arrival in Cochise County in 1895. We see forerunners of Effie who came to Arizona for a time and painted landscapes and botanicals, but they were here briefly before moving on. In the early 1900s, many other women artists started creative lives in mining camps, some inspired by Effie, others setting up and beginning on their own.  Through the Women’s Clubs, Churches, Lodges, and Civic Groups, they developed a social and educational community across the region which enabled them to share their art.   As the boom years of many mining camps faded, the economic wealth that supported these early Arizona women artists also faded, and their art is now under-appreciated and even largely undiscovered to this day.  In this presentation, Steven Carlson – President of the Effie Anderson Smith Museum & Archive – and a great-grandnephew of the artist – will highlight key figures in this network of women artists who lived highly creative lives in the shadows of the mines, smelters, and related industries that once dominated Southern Arizona.

Steven Carlson is an art and music historian based in California. While others in his family had artistic gifts for drawing and painting, Steven initially gravitated toward music. A graduate of the University of San Francisco and UC Irvine, Steven’s career has mainly been as a classical music radio presenter and manager at commercial and public radio stations from New York to Phoenix to Los Angeles. He was also a co-founder of arts-related online companies, including Fine Arts News Service and InstantEncore.com.

After several decades on the air and online telling the stories of renowned musicians and composers, Steven realized there was a historically important artist in the family whose story had not been told and was largely forgotten by the art world. Discovering that there were hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles on Effie Anderson Smith and hundreds of her paintings in the families of people whose parents and grandparents knew the artist personally, Steven set out to reconstruct the narrative and revive interest in Effie’s timeless desert art, embodying the Arizona experience.

In the process, Steven discovered a circle of early women artists who formed around Effie in the 1930s and 40s. After co-curating several exhibits of Effie’s art in cooperation with historians in Arizona and Effie’s birthplace in Arkansas, in 2023 Steven and the growing community of supporters assisting him for over a decade in uncovering E.A. Smith’s artistic legacy – formed the Effie Anderson Smith Museum & Archive – dedicated to preserving and perpetuating the artist legacy of Effie Anderson Smith and other early Arizona women artists of her era. Steven Carlson currently serves as President of the Museum.

To register or for more information, visit: https://tinyurl.com/BisbeeOnline06132026