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Exploring local art and artists: A look into archives of Texas modernists
Mar 19, 2025
When I started my position as associate archivist at the Carter, I knew remarkably little about art, much less about the local art scene in Texas. While I was born and raised in DFW, my experiences went little beyond a few visits to museums and school art classes. But I was thrilled when, within a month of being on staff, I was introduced to a handful of local artists that became the backdrop of my first projects. Processing my first collection, the papers of Everett Spruce, and seeing an exhibition for Charles Truett Williams that included archival materials led me to try to learn more about the local modern artists whose archives the Museum houses.
Everett Spruce, Portrait 6, Audio/Visual Materials, Catalogue Raisonné, Alice Spruce Meriwether. Collection of Everett Spruce Papers, Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Everett Spruce was an Arkansas native born in 1907 who found inspiration for his art working on the family farm and in the surrounding countryside. After moving to Texas to attend the Dallas Art Institute, Spruce worked as a gallery assistant at the Dallas Museum of Art. In 1932 he began to exhibit works with a group of eight other artists known as the Dallas Nine and, by 1936, had started gaining national attention. Through his papers, compiled by his daughter following his death in 2002, we see a photographic inventory of his works, a series of sketches, and correspondence with family and friends that display who Spruce was and his artistry.
Bror Utter by Ron Ennis, Personal Photographs, Photographic series. Bror Utter Papers, Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Following Spruce and the Dallas Nine, a local group of artists known as the Fort Worth Circle formed in the 1940s. Though members filtered in and out of the group, Bror Utter was one of the constants through the 1940s and 50s. A lifelong Fort Worth resident, Utter’s artistic journey began in high-school art classes before enrolling in the Fort Worth School of Fine Arts in 1933 where he studied under Blanche McVeigh and Wade Jolly. Utter started to exhibit his works, which are largely abstract with vaguely human and plant-like shapes, in 1936. In addition to these more abstract pieces, Utter also completed a series based on local architecture. Looking at the art he created as well as the archives he kept, the Carter has a unique perspective into the lives of local artists that made up the Circle through correspondence and photographs.
Charles T. Williams, Photographs – Artist and Family. Charles Truett Williams Papers, Amon Carter Museum of American Art
A late joiner of the Fort Worth Circle, Charles Truett Williams began his life as an artist early through childhood cartoons and drawings that evolved into sketches and linocut prints made during his time in the Army Corps of Engineers in the years after World War II. After moving to Fort Worth following the death of his first wife, Louise, Williams joined the remaining members of the Circle, who provided him an introduction to other local artists as well as a blueprint for a career in the field. By the 1950s, the Fort Worth Circle made way for the formation of the Scene, which gathered in Williams’s studio. Art was at the epicenter of Williams’s life, and he infused the Scene with a simultaneously playfully yet structured vibe. His papers bring out these themes in the carefully maintained logs of sculptures and photographs of parties and gatherings that show the story of an individual whose spirituality was his art, and an environment shaped by the stoic ideal of living in the moment.
As an archivist going through a collection, I’m often thinking about the organization and interests for potential researchers. As a local who has lived in DFW for most of my life, though, seeing these papers in particular has been a journey through the history of my home in a way that I’d never seen before. While the art found in the Carter’s collection provides a glimpse into the inspirations and lives of these Texas modernists, it is their archives that can provide us a deeper understanding of who they were as people and tell a more complete story of the art and the area in which it was created.
