Making the Unknown Known: Women in Early Texas Art, 1860s-1960s

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.

VICTORIA HENNESSEY CUMMINS is A. M. Pate Jr. Chair of History, Emerita at Austin College. She is the coauthor, with Light Townsend Cummins, of Francis B. Fisk and the Promotion of the Visual Arts in Texas in Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. LIGHT TOWNSEND CUMMINS, former State Historian of Texas, is the author of many books, including Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas. He is the emeritus Guy M. Bryan Jr. Chair of History at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.