Local Programs

Finding Bingham

Finding Bingham: Rediscovering the Life and Paintings of George Caleb Bingham


Portrait of George Caleb BinghamKansas City Public Television, KCPT, will shine a light on our region’s greatest artist of the 19th Century, George Caleb Bingham, through the production and broadcast of a high-definition documentary feature about his life and work.

Although the Bingham name is widely recognized and many people know his well-composed landscape and genre paintings such as Emigration of Daniel Boone (1851), Bingham was also a prolific painter of portraits—documenting more than a thousand of Missouri’s most prominent individuals and families. Many of these paintings are being located and brought together in a large, dedicated collection for public viewing at the Jackson County Courthouse in Independence.

The Bingham story and its connection to the present will be revealed through the experiences of people working to assemble this collection. The search for original works has art historians and Bingham aficionados running down leads. A dilapidated mansion near the Missouri River, for example, reputedly contains three Bingham’s in distressed conditions. And forgeries spread by unscrupulous dealers have begun to emerge too! Finding Bingham will bring viewers along on the hunt, piecing together traces and artifacts from his colorful life. Along the way they will develop a deeper understanding of his significance as a painter and an appreciation for his skills.

Re-enacted scenes will chronicle Bingham’s formative experiences in Arrow Rock, enabling viewers to ride along through his life as a traveling landscape and portrait artist, politician and Police Chief of Kansas City, Missouri. And the program will take us to see what remains: the home in Independence, his tomb in Union Cemetery, and of course, his many paintings and what they say about the individuals and society they portray. National Emmy Award winning documentarian (Best Documentary, 2004—Be Good, Smile Pretty), Randy Mason, will executive produce. KCPT will develop and execute a multi-media promotion plan to build an estimated year-one Kansas City area audience of 160,000.

KCPT will also provide PBS stations across America with captioned “air-masters” and a satellite feed for no-cost broadcast rights. KCPT has had good success extending the reach of other station-produced documentaries, such as Bad Blood, and expects a similar reception for Finding Bingham as the painter’s subjects and legacy extend far beyond Missouri and Kansas—putting the total anticipated year-one reach into the many hundreds of thousands of viewers. KCPT will also provide DVD copies of the documentary to all of the region’s libraries and place Finding Bingham into the station’s Internet-based classroom video collection serving some 120,000 school children across the region.

Additionally, KCPT will produce a 6- to 10-minute primer on the life and work of George Caleb Bingham which will provide necessary background and context for visitors of the Bingham Gallery and the Bingham House in Independence. This shorter piece will also be distributed to the region’s school children via KCPT’s school video services.