This lithograph depicts a roadside weighing station outside of Denton, Texas, where Spellman taught painting and printmaking at Texas State College for Women (today Texas Woman’s University) from 1930 to 1974. Spellman arranged a single telephone pole against an empty sky, creating a flat, gridlike pattern of wood and wire. Her subject—Texas’s rapidly expanding highway system—touted the growth of the state’s communications and transportation infrastructure in the wake of the Great Depression.

Like other precisionists such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, as well as fellow Texan George Grammer, Spellman explored through her art the promise and cultural significance of American industrial society. Representational yet subtly abstract in style, regional yet nationally relevant in theme, works such as Krum Weighing Station situate Spellman in the vanguard of early Texas modernism.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)