High Tea and Texas Regionalism

This week I spoke in McKinney at a special “High Tea” to a group of art patrons as a run-up to the Texas Regional Art symposium to be held at the Heard Craig Center for the Arts on October 10 of this year. That symposium will feature talks, among others, by Lonn Taylor, former Curator of the Smithsonian Institution; Francine Carraro of Abilene’s Grace Museum; Sam Ratcliff of the Bywaters Collection at SMU; Carol Roark of the Dallas Public Library; Victoria Cummins of Austin College, and me.

My topic for the High Tea was an overview of Texas regionalism during the 1920s and 1930s. I covered not only art, but history, literature, architecture, and other manifestations of regionalism in the Lone Star State during that era. I also linked southwestern regionalism to the larger regional movements that were occurring across the nation at the time. In that regard, I reviewed the regionalist ideas of Lewis Mumford, Howard Odum, and others, all of whom postulated in the 1930s that the United States was an amalgamation of distinct regions. I surveyed the writing of the southern regionalists, including Agrarians such as Robert Penn Warren, as a context for the emergence of regional southwesterners. In so doing, I considered the works of Walter P. Webb, J. Frank Dobie, and Roy Bedichek as examples of southwestern regionalism, while I also examined the architectural works of Atlee B. Ayers, David R. Williams, and O’Neil Ford in a similar manner. Of course, I paid particular attention to regional artists including Jerry Bywaters, Alexandre Hogue, Olin Travis, Allie Tennant, and others. My central point rests on the proposition that Texas regionalism was a broad-based, interlocking intellectual movement during the interwar era that concurrently informed Texas history, literature, art, music, and architecture. No compenent part of that movement can be fully understood in isolation from the others.

Click Here for the Texas Regional Art Symposium