A Beautiful Friend and a Moral Force: JoAnn Verburg Remembers Sally Dixon

Minneapolis-based photographer JoAnn Verburg remembers her friend, curator and arts supporter Sally Dixon, who passed away November 5 at age 87.

Internationally, many people will remember Sally Foy Dixon for creating a groundbreaking experimental contemporary film program in Pittsburgh. (Sal told me that the only thing like it 50-plus years ago was a program at MoMA that Willard Van Dyke was running, and that he’d helped her shape it.) Closer to home—St. Paul, Minnesota—many Americans will remember her gentility and fairness administrating artists’ fellowships at the Bush Foundation. Many of us, myself included, know Sally is part of what made us who we are and are grateful to her for being a dear devoted friend and a moral force.

I met Sally when she drove down from Boulder to Breckenridge, Colorado, where I lived in the late ’70s. That night, I made a few 5×7 black-and-white portraits of her. We and her friends laughed a lot, and most of those images include jiggling faces. Sally was a person whose default states were deep contemplativeness and joy. Even after she lost her use of language, she still laughed and touched and kissed and smiled and laughed.

When I left Colorado to create the visiting artist program at Polaroid, Sally visited me in Cambridge, and a few months later I found an excuse to visit her in St. Paul. That trip was the beginning of my relocation to Minnesota. Since then, Sally and I have been in close touch, and from my first time in Minnesota, I started to hear about her American journey: born in California, where among other things, she learned to fly a private plane—no license required; her move to Pittsburgh, where her father was a steel executive and traveled extensively with his wife but without the children; dropping out of school to marry her volatile first husband against her parents’ wishes; three beloved sons and a divorce; throwing one of her son’s weed into a mailbox; needing money and a job and, with the support of a museum director friend of the family in Pittsburgh, creating the Carnegie Museum of Art’s film department. Sally’s was one version of An American Story—with privilege and a wild need for originality and adventure. She developed both her skills and intuitions and was able to earn the confidence and admiration of arts administrators as well as devotion and even love from experimental filmmakers. She also stayed in touch with her spiritual self and projected as a moral—but never guilt-trippy—force.

In the late 1970s, Sally was in Colorado, having followed avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage to the mountains of Boulder. By the time I next saw her, she had taken a temporary replacement position as director of Film in the Cities in St. Paul, a scrappy brilliant organization that brought all of us—artists, performers, writers, techies, curators, film lovers—together through contemporary film and photography. I had flown out from Cambridge to do a lecture and thought: “What’s the big deal about winter? This place actually supports artists the way other cities support sports!”

When her yearlong directorship of FITC ended, Sally visited me back east, where I was working at the Polaroid Corporation. She had taken a job at the Bush Foundation and asked me to be a panelist. I came out again to St Paul, stayed with Sally and her husband, and was completely besotted by her charming generous spirit, her silliness and seriousness, her contagious laughter, her fierce support of her ideas, her sense of style in the way she did little things (cooking and creating a fun beautiful table, for example). And when we loaded up all the panelist notebooks and went to work, she was an efficient, thoughtful coordinator of the panel, focused, encouraging us, and giving us everything we needed to do our work as best we could.

How could I not move to Minnesota? As seen with Sally as my escort, the art scene seemed much more exciting than the bigger name-brand cities. And Sally was someone I liked so much and admired. I pursued a job opportunity, and I was offered a one-year position as visiting artist at MCAD and spent my first month here in Minnesota house-sitting Sally’s apartment. This meant being surrounded by stuff: everything from her canary to the mysterious black-and-white photos she had made of her sons to two Rodin drawings from Camerawork, as well as flat smooth gray stones from the North Shore, an implacable bowsprit on her mantle, antique furniture, wind-up toys, folk art, her own drawings, a bird’s nest with three little blue eggs, and a thousand personal mementos, all mixed in gorgeous arrangements on desks, walls, bookshelves, tables, etc. Sally and her husband were taking their yearly monthlong trip to explore a beautiful part of the world together and visit with artists.

Sally’s favorite holiday was Easter. She believed in many of Jesus’s and other religious leaders’ teachings, in particular the resurrection story, a story of renewal and rebirth that gave perspective to the darkness in life. She was an ardent, vocal, proactive believer in peace.

Sally also believed in books, reading, publishing. She loved and supported local Minnesota presses as well as our writers. She advocated for the Center for Victims of Torture and was on its board. She was a Quaker and went to meetings of the Friends.

She loved the artists she met in the Twin Cities and religiously attended every dance, reading, opening, play, and experimental performance she could. She delighted in the success of all the filmmakers she had known from her Pittsburgh days, and they adored her. I saw it up close, as I passed her mailbox packed with artists’ mail and in her dining room, where I met a number of the early avant-garde filmmakers. She also loved, respected, and followed the artists she met here, and expanded the Bush fellowships to be more available to more people from more disciplines and a larger geographic area. She emphasized “wonder” when she proclaimed that a show she’d seen was “wonder-ful,” that the artist was darling, that I must go see it. In public, she seemed endlessly enthusiastic and positive.

Until fairly recently, Sally’s days were spent at home or visiting with her family and friends. Although her access to words had failed, her ability to communicate and share bliss and joy was as strong as it had been in 1978 when we met, or, if anything, stronger.