Women and the Promotion of the Visual Arts in Texas, 1920s-1940s



Ethel Drought Obituary

Victoria Cummins and I have both been on a research sabbatical during the spring semester of 2013. We are  researching a book with the tentative title "Muses to Modern Culture: Women and the Advancement of the Visual Arts in Texas, 1920-1940." A major thesis to be advanced in this book is that women involved in the visual arts in Texas during the interwar period during the 1920s through the 1940s played a significant role in advancing the cause of Texas culture as artists, art museum curators, art critics, art educators, and club women interested in art. One of them was Ethel Tunstall Drought of San Antonio, whose obituary appears to the upper left. Our project will survey the considerable and varied activities that women's clubs and club women played in the promotion of Texas visual arts.We will examine the role that women played as art instructors, starting with the work of Vivian Anspaugh, Eva Flower, and others.  We will survey the major art critics of the period who were women, including Frances B. Fisk, Esse Forrester O’Brien, Goldie Capers Smith, Minnie Cameron, and Stella Shurtliff. Our book will also examine the activities of women in founding art museums and serving as curators, including Eleanor Onderdonk and others. Thus far this spring, we have conducted research in over two dozen Texas libraries and archives.