Bywaters Brown Bag

Ellen Buie Niewyk and Sam Ratcliffe
Curators, Jerry Bywaters Special Collections
Southern Methodist University

Jerry Bywaters played a major role in establishing the Texas Regionalism movement of the 1930s and 1940s. From his early days as a student at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in the 1920s and his association with the University’s Southwest Review, Bywaters looked within his immediate southwest surroundings for inspiration and interpretation of regional subject matter and later incorporated it in his art work. Two concurrent exhibitions (November 30, 2007 through March 2, 2008) at the Meadows Museum, SMU, will showcase Bywaters work. The curators of these exhibitions and authors of two separate upcoming books on Bywaters, Sam Ratcliffe and Ellen Buie Niewyk, will present a "gallery talk" about the artist, his work and their research in writing the books and curating the exhibitions.

Jerry Bywaters, Interpreter of the Southwest, curated by Ratcliffe focuses on a lifetime spent participating in and studying the cultural life of the American Southwest by Dallas art figure Jerry Bywaters (1906-1989); the title is drawn from an unpublished essay about Bywaters by his longtime friend, Dr. John Chapman. Professor Bywaters served for thirty-five years as a faculty member in SMU's Division of Fine Arts and as Director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts from 1943 to 1964. Each of the four walls of the museum’s downstairs galleries will be devoted to a different facet of Bywaters’ paintings--landscape, studies of architectural and urban themes, portraiture, and genre scenes—while a small area adjacent to the galleries will examine Bywaters’ career as a mural painter. The forty-five paintings will be supplemented with archival holdings from the artist’s personal papers, the Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest, housed in SMU’s Hamon Arts Library.

In May 1938, Bywaters was one of sixteen Texas artists who formed their own printmakers’ organization, the Lone Star Printmakers, which was loosely patterned on the Associated American Artists organization. As a printmaker and a founding member of the organization, Bywaters supported the growth of interest in printmaking in Texas. The printmaking medium allowed Bywaters to produce multiple copies of his art and to further his campaign of regionalism by circulating his images to a wide audience. Curated by Niewyk, the exhibition, Jerry Bywaters, Lone Star Printmaker, reveals this facet of his art career beginning with his lithographic drawing entitled Lunch Table and the first lithograph he documented in his printmaking notebook - “ ‘Gargantua’ first litho made 1935,” for the lithograph, Gargantua, an image of the Lomax House in Denton, Texas. This launched a thirteen-year career in printmaking. Bywaters recorded in his printmaking notebook a total of thirty-nine prints, all lithographs, except for five color linoleum block prints, between 1935 and 1948. This exhibition chronicles that aspect of Bywaters’s career by placing all thirty-nine prints on view for the first time. Supporting archival material illuminating the Dallas art scene during the 1930s, preliminary sketches for his prints, and pages from Bywaters’s printmaking notebook will also be on view.