Known for his images featuring single words suspended in space, Los Angeles-based artist Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) has experimented with a diverse range of media and styles throughout his career. Invited to work at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in 1969, as he began to gain notoriety for his Pop Art approach, Ruscha embraced lithography as a means to explore recurring themes from his paintings and screenprints.
Marie Cosindas (b. 1925) did not intend to be a photographer. The eighth of ten children in a modestly situated Greek family living in Boston, she studied dressmaking in school and took up a career designing textiles and children’s shoes, also acting as a color coordinator for a company that made museum reproductions in stone. On the side, she created abstract paintings filled with atmospheric color.
This installation of Texas paintings captures a pivotal moment in the state’s cultural history. In the 1930s, a group of young artists—including Jerry Bywaters, Alexandre Hogue, William Lester, Thomas Stell, Harry Carnohan, and Coreen Spellman, among others—gained national recognition for their scenic and ideological interpretations of the local environment. Although they depicted the people and landscapes of Texas in identifiable and representational manners, each artist possessed their own style, often combining realism with modernist influences ranging from Cubism to Surrealism.
In conjunction with the exhibition Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, the Amon Carter will display a work by Fort Worth artist Sedrick Huckaby (b. 1975), who credits Bearden as an important influence. Huckaby’s 18-by-14-foot oil painting Hidden in Plain Site (2011) will be on view in the museum’s atrium through October.
