Jerry Bywaters, Interpreter of the Southwest
Jerry Bywaters, Interpreter of the Southwest

Author: Sam DeShong Ratcliffe

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2007-10-05

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1585445916

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In the 1930s and 1940s, along with other members of a loosely affiliated group of artists known as the Dallas Nine, Jerry Bywaters pioneered the style later termed “Lone Star Regionalism.” Working with equal ability in oil, watercolor, tempera, and pastel, Bywaters portrayed the natural world, towns, and people of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and West Texas. This stunning retrospective volume of Bywaters’s paintings—more than forty of them arranged in a full-color gallery—vividly interprets the American Southwest. Underlying all of Bywaters’s work was some perspective on the interaction of people and the land. With character always the central feature, his portraiture featured a wide variety of subjects, from a prominent Dallas architect to two anonymous nuns the artist saw on a train and an unnamed member of the Navajo tribe he met on a visit to Shiprock, Arizona. He also depicted individuals in various tasks of everyday life, whether cowboys at a rodeo, oil field workers wrestling with a drill bit, or Mexican women washing clothes in a stream. In addition to the color gallery, the text is illustrated with letters, photographs, and ephemera from the artist’s papers, the Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest, housed in SMU’s Jake and Nancy Hamon Arts Library. Essays by three scholars who knew and worked with Bywaters—Sam Ratcliffe, John Lunsford, and Francine Carraro—add context and detail about his contributions, and an introduction by William H. Gerdts sets the stage for appreciating the art. Bywaters directed the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) for two decades beginning in 1943. This book originated in conjunction with the exhibition, “Jerry Bywaters, Interpreter of the Southwest,” at SMU’s Meadows Museum of Art, November 30, 2007–February 24, 2008.

Jerry Bywaters
Jerry Bywaters

Author: Francine Carraro

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2010-07-22

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0292789947

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As an artist, art critic, museum director, and art educator, Jerry Bywaters reshaped the Texas art world and attracted national recognition for Texas artists. This first full-scale biography explores his life and work in the context of twentieth-century American art, revealing Bywaters' important role in the development of regionalist painting. Francine Carraro delves into all aspects of Bywaters' career. As an artist, Bywaters became a central figure and spokesman for a group of young, energetic painters known as the Dallas Nine (Alexandre Hogue, Everett Spruce, Otis Dozier, William Lester, and others) who broke out of the limitations of provincialism and attained national recognition beginning in the 1930s. As director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, art critic for the Dallas Morning News, and professor of art and art history at Southern Methodist University, Bywaters became a champion of the arts in Texas. Carraro traces his strong supporting role in professionalizing art institutions in Texas and defendlng the right to display art considered "subversive" in the McCarthy era. From these discussions emerges a finely drawn portrait of an artist who used a vocabulary of regional images to explore universal themes. It will be of interest to all students of American studies, national and regional art history, and twentieth-century biography.

Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas
Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas

Author: Light Townsend Cummins

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2015-09-18

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1623493293

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Winner, 2016 Liz Carpenter Award for the Research in the History of Women, presented at the Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting At Fair Park in Dallas, a sculpture of a Native American figure, bronze with gilded gold leaf, strains a bow before sending an arrow into flight. Tejas Warrior has welcomed thousands of visitors since the Texas Centennial Exposition opened in the 1930s. The iconic piece is instantly recognizable, yet few people know about its creator: Allie Victoria Tennant, one of a notable group of Texas artists who actively advanced regionalist art in the decades before World War II. Light Townsend Cummins follows Tennant’s public career from the 1920s to the 1960s, both as an artist and as a culture-bearer, as she advanced cultural endeavors, including the arts. A true pathfinder, she helped to create and nurture art institutions that still exist today, most especially the Dallas Museum of Art, on whose board of trustees she sat for almost thirty years. Tennant also worked on behalf of other civic institutions, including the public schools, art academies, and the State Fair of Texas, where she helped create the Women’s Building. Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas sheds new light on an often overlooked artist.

Making the Unknown Known
Making the Unknown Known

Author: Victoria H. Cummins

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2024-09-02

Total Pages: 743

ISBN-13: 1648431518

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In Making the Unknown Known, leading scholars throughout Texas explore the significant role women artists played in developing early Texas art from the nineteenth century through the latter part of the twentieth century. The biographies presented here allow readers to compare these women’s experiences across time as they negotiated the gendered expectations about artists in society at large and the Texas art community itself. Surveying the contributions women made to the visual arts in the Lone Star state, Making the Unknown Known analyzes women’s artistic work with respect to geographic and historical connections. Including surveys of the work of artists such as Louise Wüste, Emma Richardson Cherry, Eleanor Onderdonk, Grace Spaulding John, and others, it offers a groundbreaking assessment of the role women artists have played in interpreting the meaning, history, heritage, and unique character of Texas. It places women artists within the larger social and cultural contexts in which they lived. In that regard, it contains an analysis of their varied styles of art, the media they employed, and the subject matter contained in their art. It thus evaluates the contributions made by women artists to defining the nature of the wider Texas experience as an American region. Beautifully illustrated throughout with rich, full-color reproductions of the works created by the artists, this volume provides an enriched understanding of the important but underappreciated role women artists have played in the development of the fine arts in Texas. At last, the unknown story can be known.

A Book Maker's Art
A Book Maker's Art

Author: William E. Reaves

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2018-08-14

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1623496667

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A significant collection of Texas paintings and prints hangs humbly and inconspicuously throughout the offices, conference rooms, and hallways of Texas A&M University Press. These works comprise the Frank H. Wardlaw Collection of Texas Art, named in honor of the Press’s founding director, who was one of the genuine publishing icons of his day. Established in 1983 at the dedication of the new headquarters of Texas A&M University Press on the campus of Texas A&M, the collection began with twenty inaugural contributions that came as gifts from respected Texas artists whose art appeared in the books Wardlaw had shepherded to publication at the Press. Since then, the collection—which continues to be linked to artists published by the Press—has grown to house more than one hundred paintings, photographs, and illustrations. Among the noted artists featured in the collection are E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz, Otis Dozier, Michael Frary, Everett Spruce, Emily Guthrie Smith, Jerry Bywaters, and, among more recent additions, Dorothy Hood and Richard Stout. Through interviews with longtime staff and research into the Press’s book files and correspondence, William and Linda Reaves have uncovered the captivating history of this unlikely collection. In A Book Maker’s Art, they present the freshly assembled story of the Wardlaw collection, from its modest yet unique beginning to its present-day status as one of the university’s excellent collections of Texas art, reflecting the exceptional bond of arts and letters that has come to distinguish Texas A&M University Press.

Discovering Texas History
Discovering Texas History

Author: Bruce A. Glasrud

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0806147849

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"'Discovering Texas History' is a historiographical reference book that will be invaluable to teachers, students, and researchers of Texas history. Chapter authors are familiar names in Texas history circles--a 'who's who' of high profile historians. Conceived as a follow-up to the award winning (but increasingly dated) 'A Guide the History of Texas' (1988), 'Discovering Texas History' focuses on the major trends in the study of Texas history since 1990. In part one, topical essays address significant historical themes, from race and gender to the arts and urban history. In part two, chronological essays cover the full span of Texas historiography from the Spanish era to the modern day. In each case, the goal is to analyze and summarize the subjects that have captured the attention of professional historians so that 'Discovering Texas History' will take its place as the standard work on the history of Texas history"--

Texas and Texans in World War II
Texas and Texans in World War II

Author: Christopher B. Bean

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2022-08-24

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 1623499704

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Texans in World War II offers an informative look at the challenges and changes faced by Texans on the home front during the Second World War. This collection of essays by leading scholars of Texas history covers topics from the African American and Tejano experience to organized labor, from the expanding opportunities for women to the importance of oil and agriculture. Texans in World War II makes local the frequently studied social history of wartime, bringing it home to Texas. An eye-opening read for Texans eager to learn more about this defining era in their state’s history, this book will also prove deeply informative for scholars, students, and general readers seeking detailed, definitive information about World War II and its implications for daily life, economic growth, and social and political change in the Lone Star State.

The Artistic Legacy of Buck Schiwetz
The Artistic Legacy of Buck Schiwetz

Author: William E. Reaves

Publisher: Texas A&M University Press

Published: 2023-12-14

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 1648431178

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E. M. (Buck) Schiwetz (1898–1984) could be called a “favorite son” among Texas artists working in the twentieth century. Schiwetz ranks among the state’s best-known early artists, having left behind an important body of iconic Texas imagery produced over a prodigious career spanning some seven decades. Educated as an architect at A&M College of Texas, he parlayed this training with natural acumen to become a consummate draftsman, prominent illustrator, and celebrated artist. In the mid-twentieth century, Schiwetz distinguished himself as an active participant in the rise of Texas art. As the Texas art scene experienced a period of dynamic growth and development, his artwork evolved across successive movements of Lone Star Impressionism, Regionalism, Modernism, and Expressionism. During his lifetime, the artwork of Buck Schiwetz arguably graced more publications than that of any other Texas artist. Featured in popular journals such as The Humble Way or published in the pioneering art books issued by academic presses at both the University of Texas and Texas A&M University, Schiwetz’s Texas imagery has long been employed to portray and celebrate Lone Star history and culture. The Artistic Legacy of Buck Schiwetz provides a long-overdue examination of this important Texas artist and his legacy: the first authoritative treatment of Schiwetz’s career as both fine artist and accomplished illustrator, and the first scholarly examination of his full body of work. See the art exhibition traveling Texas from 2023-2025: Stark Galleries, Texas A&M University: September 21 to December 18, 2023 Tyler Museum of Art: January 19 to April 14, 2024 The Grace Museum, Abilene: April 27 to September 15, 2024 The Capitol of Texas, Austin: October 25, 2024, to January 31, 2025