Overview
The Jerry Bywaters Special Collections Wing is a unit of the Hamon Arts Library, which is located in SMU’s Meadows School of the Arts’ Owens Art Center. The archives include myriad collections concentrating on visual and performing arts in the U.S. Southwest, with a special strength in the papers of renowned Texas Regionalist artists.
Holdings include photographs, correspondence, scrapbooks, art exhibit catalogs, sketches and sketchbooks, lithographs, slides, articles, and manuscripts. The collections document the lives, careers, and/or works on paper of artists such as Jerry Bywaters, Otis and Velma Davis Dozier, Octavio Medellin, Everett Spruce, Edward G. Eisenlohr, DeForrest Judd, William Lester, Olin Travis, Janet Turner, Esther Webb Houseman, Vivian Aunspaugh, and more.
The largest artist’s collection, the Jerry Bywaters Collection on Art of the Southwest, includes catalogs, clipping files, correspondence, photographs, mural studies, slides, and works of art on paper related to Jerry Bywaters' career as artist, director of the Dallas Museum of Art, and long-time SMU faculty member as well as to the work of many of his artistic contemporaries in the region. He is considered to be a Texas Regionalist artist and one of several artists working in this style in Dallas during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
The Bywaters Special Collections: Texas Artists’ Archives digital collection contains a variety of digitized research materials from and about these Texas artists. A small sample of their works are included in the Texas Artists: Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper digital collection; some artists’ collections are also provided separately (click the link at the top to “View more collections”).
Holdings and Highlights
A growing number of research materials from major artists’ collections are being digitized, based on selections from the curators and requests from researchers. Currently, materials in this digital collection are from the following accessions: