2020 Symposium Speakers
Dr. Amy Von Lintel
Doris Alexander Endowed Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts
West Texas A&M University
Amarillo, TX
Expanding Abstract Expressionism: Women Artists in Texas
"This talk is based on my book project that is under review with Texas A&M Univ Press under the title Expanding Abstract Expressionism: Women Artists and the American West. The book, and the talk for CASETA, will explore how abstract expressionism as a movement can be rethought through the lenses of gender, geography, and media when the Texas work of painter Elaine de Kooning, sculptor Louise Nevelson, and mosaicist Jeanne Reynal is brought into focus."
Eleanor Barton
Museum Curator
Rosenberg Library
Galveston, TX
Early Galveston Artists, 1850s to 1930s
The Rosenberg Library preserves an outstanding collection of works by artists who resided in Galveston during the 19th and early 20th century. Museum Curator Eleanor Barton will share highlights from the Rosenberg Library’s permanent collection, bringing attention to the talented artists who lived and worked on the island.
Shirley Reece-Hughes
Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Fort Worth, TX
Texas Made Modern: The Art of Everett Spruce
This talk explores how Everett Spruce’s artwork countered ingrained perceptions of Texas as strictly a land of cattle herds and cowboy and Indian battles. Viewing nature as a wellspring of mystery and discovery, Spruce organized his pictures according to his deeply felt responses to his surroundings, creating original motifs and spatial rhythms that suggested new ideas and experiences of Texas for twentieth-century audiences.
Randy Tibbits
Art Historian
Texas Modernism(s): Houston/Dallas in the 1930s
In both Houston and Dallas during the 1930s, Modernism became the central focus for two small groups of local artists, made up mostly of youngsters, along with their forward-looking mentors: in Houston, the Cherry-McNeill Group; and the Dallas Nine (plus) up north. Though not even 250 miles apart, the approaches to Modernism of the two groups in the two cities were markedly different, and were in some respects a microcosm of the different paths to Modernism on the national level. The Cherry-McNeill Group brought a “scientific” approach to art (as Emma Richardson Cherry described it in 1920), concerned as much, or maybe more, with the way art is made than with the subjects depicted. Cherry drew her inspiration from extensive study in Paris and New York, and contact with such artists as Marsden Hartley, Marcel Duchamp and Andre Lhote. She enthusiastically embraced the Modernism current in Europe and New York, and her group eagerly absorbed the lessons in modern art she shared with them. The Dallas Nine, on the other hand, founded their art-making on the conviction, as Bywaters put it in 1928, that “art, to be significant, must be a reflection of life; that it must be a part of a people’s thought.” Technique in art-making was not immaterial to them, and indeed they looked for guidance to Italian primitives, landscape artists and even Surrealists, but the subject was all important, and the subject had to be the land and people of their own region. They actively rebelled against the “European domination of American art,” as Bywaters said, and found their chief inspiration in the work of Mexican muralists, and American regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton. Considering these two groups of artists together, both working in parallel to develop modern ways of art-making, demonstrates that Modernism, when it came to America, was not limited exclusively to the art centers of the East and that it was not a single thing, even in a relatively contained region such as Texas. It was, rather a liberating force that could take its disciples along markedly different routes toward the shared ideal of creating a modern art for America.
Betty Moody and Sarah Beth Wilson
Betty Moody
Owner and Director
Moody Gallery
Houston, TX
Sarah Beth Wilson
Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Projects
Art League Houston
Houston, TX
A Conversation: Betty Moody and Sarah Beth Wilson
Betty Moody, Owner and Director of Moody Gallery, will join Sarah Beth Wilson, Director of Exhibitions and Curatorial Projects at Art League Houston, in a conversation about her iconic Houston gallery – celebrating its 45th anniversary in 2020. Moody Gallery is the longest female owned gallery in Texas and one of the longest operating galleries in the country. Moody and Wilson will discuss a selection of Moody’s artists over the years, including Roy Fridge, Luis Jimenez, Lucas Johnson, Jim Love, David McManaway and Arthur Turner. Moody is a long time champion of Texas artists; her gallery has supported and established numerous artists throughout their careers, and has nurtured many collectors as they build their collections. This conversation will examine the early history and founding years of the gallery, as well as Moody’s stable of artists and experiences.
Keith Carter
Carmen Champion
Professor of Art History
Director Central Campus Art Gallery
San Jacinto College
Houston, TX
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