Wall Painting from the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley

by Carol M Highsmith

Title

Wall Painting from the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley

Artist

Carol M Highsmith

Medium

Photograph - Prints, Posters & Canvas

Description

A remarkable image from what is largely a ghost town: Death Valley Junction, just outside Death Valley National Park in Inyo County, California. The community, once a dusty mining, railroad, and mill town, was known as Amargosa, after the desert valley that surrounds it.

In the early 1920s, the Pacific Coast Borax Company constructed a company town there; a complex of Mexican Colonial-style buildings of adobe to house the company offices, store, dormitory, a 23-room hotel, dining room, lobby, and employees' headquarters.

A recreation hall was built at the northeast end of the complex and was used as a community center for dances, church services, movies, funerals, and town meetings. But it would one day become the "Amargosa Opera House," decorated with elaborate wall illustrations such as this one.

Most of the structures in what is now Death Valley Junction are now derelict, but the hotel and opera house live on, and there are still occasional performances in the Amargosa Opera House that stun many who enter, not so much because of the show but because of the auditorium itself.

In July of 1968, Marta Becket, an acclaimed New York dancer, mime, and actress -- and an accomplished painter -- happened upon the little settlement while she and her husband were looking for a repair shop that could fix the flat tire on the trailer in which she and her family was staying while exploring Death Valley.

Before long the couple had decided to move to Amargosa, where Marta took charge of what she called the Opera House. She performed there regularly through early 2012 after painstakingly painting images of an entire audience on the walls, including characters who might have attended an opera the 16th century -- from royalty to bullfighters, monks and nuns, and ordinary observers.

Uploaded

March 16th, 2014

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