Contributors
Rent from DeepDyve- Contributors
Authors
Ashley Bourne is an assistant professor at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
John Alba Cutler is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. His research and teaching focus on US Latino literatures, especially Chicano literature. He has published in Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies and has an article forthcoming in American Literature.
David Holmberg is currently pursuing his doctorate in English at the University of Washington. He has published in the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature and co-edited a special edition of The Great Plains Quarterly devoted to HBO's Deadwood.
Neil Schmitz is a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His books are Of Huck and Alice: Humorous Writing in American Literature and White Robe's Dilemma: Tribal History in American Literature. "Mark Twain, Traitor," in Arizona Quarterly, Winter 2007, is his most recent work on Mark Twain.
Phillip A. Snyder is an associate professor in the English Department at Brigham Young University, where he specializes in autobiography, contemporary literature, and western studies. He recently taught a senior seminar on "The Great American Cowboy," which combined all three of these primary interests. Utah State University Press just published a book he co-authored, Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1889–1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff.
Artists
Jerry Bywaters (1906–1989), one of Texas's most famous artists, studied life drawing at New York's Art Students League with John Sloan, who encouraged him to think about region as a focal point for his work. In 1930s Dallas, he was at the forefront of this still developing Regionalist movement, which captured the nation's workers, the harsh landscapes of the West, and the locations people called home. In 1938, Bywaters was one of the founding members of the Lone Star Printmakers. He promoted Dallas's burgeoning art scene and emphasized printmaking as a way for anyone to own an original work of art. [End Page 194]
Fra Dana (1874–1948) is considered by many to be one of the leading artists of the Rocky Mountain West, a woman who challenged the social norms of her time. In 1896, she married a successful rancher, Edwin Dana, with whom she developed a large purebred Hereford operation located in Montana and Wyoming. Her desire to create great artworks was often in conflict with her role as a ranch wife. Throughout her life, she traveled to cities such as Chicago, New York, and Paris to study, paint, and collect art. Fra Dana studied and painted with some of the greatest Impressionists: Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, and Joseph Henry Sharp. During her lifetime, she amassed an extraordinary collection of artwork, which she donated to the University of Montana in 1947.
Bertha M. Landers (1907–1996) cofounded in 1939 the Printmakers Guild in Dallas with Coreen Spellman when she was denied admission to the all-male Lone Star Printmakers. The group survived for twenty-five years through volunteer labor, admitting their only male member, Paul Harris, in 1962. In 1944, Landers's work was exhibited alongside Jerry Bywaters's art at Southern Methodist University. Her paintings and prints have been displayed in over seventy-five museum shows across the nation.
Nasario Lopez (1821–1891) of Cordova, New Mexico, made death figures which likely predate the first ones documented in 1860 because he used rawhide, wooden pegs, and mortise-and-tenon joints to join the carts. He is credited with making a death figure formerly located in the church at Las Trampas, New Mexico. The penitential Brotherhood of New Mexico frequently used death figures during Holy Week ceremonies as an act of penance and as a reminder of their own mortality. Lopez's work no doubt influenced that of his son José Dolores Lopez, considered the founder of the Cordova style of unpainted, chip-carved, and finely incised religious and secular woodcarvings made of cottonwood or aspen.
Coreen Mary Spellman (1905–1978) cofounded the Dallas Printmakers Guild with Bertha Landers. Spellman's subjects were buildings and industrial landscapes in a style combining realism and abstraction. She received a Carnegie Scholarship...
