The collection is a study in the history of south Texas and border life. These art works reflect the cultural interchanges and rapid growth that took place during that time. Founding members included Ruth McGonigle, the first woman to earn a degree in Architecture from Rice University in Houston. Others were widely collected, award winning artists like Calla Lilly Magill and her twin sister Clara Lilly Ely, the group’s first president. Artists from Mexico, other Central American countries, Europe, and throughout the United States traveled to the lower Rio Grande Valley to learn, create, and leave their mark. Several of the artists were schooled in Chicago and other mid-Western cities before settling in the Valley. Most of the works are realistic and depict the local surroundings with technical prowess, skillful use of color, and most of all a love of home, whether native or adopted.
These works were selected as the starting point for research in the Museum’s new facility; this scholarship was funded by the Meadows Foundation of Houston, and Humanities Texas, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities. Through these grants, the collection is being digitally photographed and entered into an electronic database. Furthermore, family members and friends of the artists in the collection are being contacted for oral interviews. Future grants, we hope, will allow the BMFA to have conservation work done on those paintings and drawings that are too fragile for exhibition.
One of the goals of Through the Generations is to involve children in local history and individual family heritage through art and self-expression, using this important collection as a model. Over the last year, 2,500 children have participated in classes and exhibitions introducing them to the BMFA and the historic works in the Permanent Collection. In classes taught here at the Museum and on school campuses, these beautiful portraits, still lifes, and landscapes have been shown to the students as examples of how our environment and our families can be depicted in a variety of media. A series of student exhibitions has allowed the public to see how young people take those lessons and produce their own creative expression of life in the Valley.
This is an exciting journey through the early history of art in the Rio Grande Valley and we are so pleased to have you join us as we learn more about those talented artists who depicted the region, its people, and its culture in such rich and vivid detail.
This project has been made possible through the generous support of the City of Brownsville, the Meadows Foundation, the Raul Tijerina Jr. Foundation, the Strake Foundation, and Humanities Texas.