Art of West Texas Women

Representing at once a diversity of style, medium, and scale and an intersection of inspiration and response, Art of West Texas Women celebrates twenty women visual artists living and working in an expansive, rugged landscape—the vast western half of Texas, far from the dynamics of urban art communities and large national markets. Without attempting to serve as a comprehensive catalog—impossible considering the breadth of activity in a huge region—the book is a sampler of creative expression. The painters, photographers, installation artists, sculptors, fiber artists, and printmakers in these pages are as distinctive and independent as the solitary place that nurtures them. But they also share common threads: all of these artists came of age during the feminist movement of the 1970s and find the expansiveness and relative isolation of their landscapes an elemental influence. As with Georgia O’Keeffe, herself an early interpreter of the West Texas Plains, the women featured here find that this land of wind and sky has liberated them and engendered a sense of expressive freedom and artistic strength.