Art, Faith, and Texan Identity

For many people, faith is a unifying force that shapes daily life and provides community connection. The 11 artists featured in the Bullock’s Texas Art Gallery use this power to examine how places of worship not only carry meaning for their congregants, but capture a place’s unique past and visual character.

Churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship carry significance both for the faiths they represent and for the places in which they were built. In Texas, colonial settlement and immigration patterns historically centered on religion. Institutions of faith often serve as landmarks that connect towns and shape communities’ relationship to the people and land around them. Many artists incorporate religious sites into their work to evoke a hallowed atmosphere or a specific sense of place that adds a personal dimension of emotional significance for the viewer.

These pieces on display in the Texas Art Gallery represent a creative trend among Texan artists in the early to mid 20th century to transform iconic (and often religious) places into widely recognizable symbols of regional identity. Many featured works are products of Texas Regionalism, a movement that foregrounded elements of local culture and environments in modernist compositions. Regionalists moved away from the idealized genre scenes that previously typified popular depictions of the American West and instead derived significance from more realistic depictions of everyday life. Other artists selected their subjects for their historical relevance with the intention of preserving (at least in image) religious landmarks at risk of loss to reconstruction or natural disaster.

Aside from centering local sites and symbols in their work, each of these artists contributed to the Texan art scene by using their influence to cultivate creative communities throughout the state. Blanche McVeigh, Verda Ligon, and Mary L. Lightfoot encouraged generations of female artists in Fort Worth through their involvement with the Printmakers and Fort Worth Artists Guilds. Lowell Daunt Collins devoted his career as an artist, gallerist, and professor to nurturing emerging talents in Houston. Charles Taylor Bowling was a crucial figure in the Dallas Nine, a group of influential interdisciplinary artists with national reach in the early 1930s–40s. But whether they were experimenting with a viewer's sense of place or recording the changing architecture of modernizing cities, each of these artists looked to local spaces for worship to capture a distinctly Texan visual identity.