West Texas Historical Association Meeting, 2012

This weekend marked the annual meeting of the West Texas Historical Association in Alpine, Texas on the campus of Sul Ross State University. My friend Bruce Glasrud presided over the meeting at the president, in the process delivering a very interesting address on the history of the West Texas Historical and Scientific Society. My relative E. E. Townsend was one of the founders of this group back in the 1920s. The society ceased to exist in the 1960s. At this meeting, Vicki Cummins presented a paper on the life of artist James Swann, who had attended Sul Ross in the late 1920s. He was a native of Merkel, Texas near Abilene and graduated from Sul Ross in 1927. There he studied with Elizabeth Keefer and Anna Elizabeth Keener. He was the art director for the Sul Ross yearbook and the president of the art club. He received most of his formal art training in Alpine. In the early 1930s, he settled in Dallas and became a recognized print-maker, studying with noted East Texas artist Frank E. Klepper. He moved to Chicago in 1935, where he spent the rest of his career. He maintained his ties with the Texas art community and many of his etchings reflected his west Texas origins. My paper dealt with the life of Frances B. Fisk.  She lived in Abilene in the 1920s and 1930s  before moving to Alpine, where her sister Willa was the wife of Horace Morlock, President of Sul Ross. Fisk, although not an artist, worked very hard to promote painting and sculpture in West Texas. She wrote a landmark 1928 reference book "A History Texas Artists and Sculptors" that is still used today. While in Alpine during the 1940s, Fisk worked closely with the artists at the Summer Art Colony, and with Militia Hill, chair of the Sul Ross Art Department. Mary Bones of the Museum of the Big Bend gave a paper in our session that dealt with the summer art colony at Alpine from the 1920s to the 1950s.The Art Department at Sul Ross State Teacher’s College established an Art Colony in 1932 by inviting guest artists and students to the high desert to challenge themselves in an unfamiliar landscape.  For over 15 years, the Art Colony was a successful and popular summer course