This article first appeared in the Idaho State Journal by BRAD BUGGER Correspondent on Mar 6, 2026.
POCATELLO — The Caccia children grew up in Pocatello with a creative mother. That much they knew.
But it wasn’t until years later, as she neared the end of her life, that they discovered just how creative.
It was while moving her from Pocatello to Northern Idaho to be closer to her daughter and the medical care she needed more frequently in the early 2000s that they discovered the depth and breadth of their mother’s incredible artistic abilities.
Those abilities are celebrated in an Idaho PBS documentary called “SARA: A Life in Dreams and Symbols,” which will air again as part of the station’s annual fundraising campaign Sunday at 6 p.m. Mountain Time on KISU, Channel 10.
The Emmy Award-winning look at Sara Joyce’s work first aired in December 2023, produced by Idaho PBS’ Marcia Franklin and directed and edited by Andy Lawless. It shined a light on what is, outside the Idaho art world, still the relatively unknown creative genius of the woman who preferred simply to be called “SARA.”
“I went to an exhibition in Ketchum at the Sun Valley Museum of Art featuring several female Western artists,” Franklin recalled of how she became inspired to create the documentary. “I was really mesmerized by the work of Sara Joyce, which I saw there. Some of her family members were there. I thought, ‘This could be an interesting piece,’ and one thing led to another.”
The Caccia family — perhaps better known as the sons of former Idaho State football coach and athletic director I.J. “Babe” Caccia — grew up in Pocatello appreciating their mother’s artistry, but she was a very private creator and not even her daughter and two sons were allowed a full peek behind her creative curtain.
SARA later divorced Babe Caccia and lived and created in the North Idaho town of Genesee for a period between stints in Pocatello.
Her work was remarkable on several levels. It was deeply personal, much of it inspired by her own dreams, which she meticulously recorded in her journals. It was incredibly versatile — she painted in oils and acrylics, molded ceramics and created her own distinctive art form called “half bodies,” which, for lack of a better description, is the formation of a human torso made from fabric.
And it was colorful — the colors based on feeling or intuition of the moment, as noted by Idaho State University adjunct art professor Iris Gray. “As SARA herself states, ‘I am not so interested about what is in front of the eyes as I am about what is behind the eyes,’” Gray noted in an article she wrote about her students studying SARA’s work.
“My mother had been doing art her entire life,” said her son John, a former all-Big Sky Conference wrestler at ISU who has worked as a silversmith in his own artistic pursuits. “She was very skilled, highly developed in five mediums,” he said. “She created her own art form, the fabric half-bodies, and that was really impactful.”
John, who was operating his own gallery in Ketchum in the last years of his mother’s life, was approached one day by the owner of one of the most prestigious galleries in Sun Valley, who began noticing some of SARA’s paintings in the shop.
“He said, ‘I like that, who did that?’” recalled John. “I said my mother did that. Then he saw another one and another one, and two more in the back room. He said, ‘I’ve got to meet her.’ That’s when I got my eyes open” as to the quality of his mother’s work.
It wasn’t until Bill and his family began moving SARA to Northern Idaho shortly before her death, however, that he started understanding the depth of his mother’s artistry.
“We discovered 140 acrylic paintings in boxes that none of us had ever seen before,” said Bill. “They would have gone right into the garbage if we hadn’t opened them and looked in them.”
Shortly before his mother passed away, she gave her children permission to explore her journals, which contained about 300 distinctive pieces of art themselves, as well as cross-references to many of her other pieces. The journals, which recorded and explored her active dream life, provided clues to SARA’s complicated thought processes behind many of her pieces.
As the value of her work steadily became more apparent after her death in 2010, SARA’s family — Heidi, now 77, John, 75, and Bill, 73 — began the complicated effort to understand just what they had and what to do with it.
When Bill was still living in Pocatello, he took 140 of those acrylic paintings and painstakingly matted and framed every one, cleaning out the inventory of a local frame shop that was going out of business.
Much of his mother’s work is now in a climate-controlled facility in Helena, Montana. The family has hired a consultant, Robin Ohlgren of Moscow, who has created a database cataloguing all of SARA’s works, documenting her letters and the exhibitions arranged to display her work and journal pages. Ohlgren has also built a website — sarajoyceart.com — where the public can view her work.
“There’s no road map or textbook, it’s been a learning process for us all,” said Bill. “My sister Heidi has been a major part of all of this.”
For an artist who was reticent to share her work with anyone, it is ironic that it has been displayed at six different regional museums since her death, with more scheduled in the near future.
“I’ve never met a family that is as organized as this family is in preserving their mother’s legacy,” Franklin said.
Her documentary won a 2024 Northwest Regional Emmy Award and, in 2025, a National Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Regional Content.
Franklin spent several years pulling the documentary together, interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Reflecting on the time she spent with SARA’s family, her favorite moment occurred at an exhibition of SARA’s work in Helena.
“At the exhibition, SARA’s grandson showed us a tattoo on his arm of one of SARA’s works,” she said. “Seeing that go down through the line from her and into two generations down, that was really special.”
The Caccia family is grateful to many Pocatellans who have helped tell their mother’s story over the years. “They set up exhibits, unloaded crates, helped in so many ways — we have such heartfelt friendships in Pocatello,” said Bill. “It really helps us to stay connected to the community.”
Reflecting on his mother’s work and life, John says the art, while impactful, remains secondary to his relationship with her as his mother.
“What she did for me as one of her sons, the love and the support and her always being there for me, right up to the end, will far outlast anything that comes from her artistic legacy,” John said.
For Bill, SARA’s lasting legacy will be the spirituality of her work. “I feel like her work had an aura, a spirituality — not in a religious sense — but in a spiritual sense,” said Bill. “Her work has a social conscience to it. … Some of that social conscience, through the imagery and the quotes, has helped me to become a better human being, and a more conscious human being.”
Bill Caccia has compiled a collection of his mother’s works in a book called “Night Sea Crossing,” available to the first 20 Idaho PBS donors who make a one-time gift of $90 or $7.50 monthly. John Caccia has created a bolo tie based on the painting “Night Sea Crossing,” which will be given to the first donor who makes a gift of $1,000 or more.