Allie Tennant Profile on KUT Radio

 

Today KUT Radio in Austin is running a biographical piece on Allie Tennant as part of the celebration of Women's History month. This sketch is part of a series of radio spots dealing with outstanding women in the history of Texas sponsored by the Ruth Winegarten Foundation. These short radio biographies are designed to increase awareness about the role women have played in building the state as we know it today.

 

Click Here to Listen to the Allie Tennant Biography

 

 

 

 

 



Finalists for the Ramirez Family Award of the Texas Institute of Letters

Allie Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas has been named as a finalist for the 2016 Ramirez Family Award presented each year by the Texas Institute of Letters. This award recognizes the best scholarly book published during the previous calendar year, in this case 2015. The three books named as finalists must meet at least one of two criteria: the volume must have content centered on some aspect of Texas or it must have been written by someone who has lived in Texas for at least two years. This award is endowed by Renato Ramirez. Mr. Ramirez and his family support this award as part of their continuing commitment to Texas letters. Mr. Ramirez himself is a master of the lively art of la declamación, the Spanish language oral poetry tradition of the Texas/Mexico border region.

The other two books named as the finalists for this award are Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 by Andrew Torget. It was published by the University of North Carolina Press. Dr. Torget is a faculty member in the history department at the University of North Texas. The other finalist is Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empires by Abigail Swingen. She is a member of the history department faculty at Texas Tech University. It was published by the Yale University Press. 

The award will be presented to one of the finalists during the Texas Institute of Letters spring banquet that will be held in Austin at the Bullock State History Museum on the evening of April 16.

To learn more about the books that share TIL finalist status with the Allie Tennant volume, please click below.

Click here for Press Page

Click Here for Press Page

Signing books at the annual meeting of the Texas State Historical Association

The Liz Carpenter Award for the best book dealing

with Texas Women's History published during 2015

A Double Winner Today of the Liz Carpenter Award

Today I received the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Women at the Annual Meeting of the Texas State Historical Association. The Liz Carpenter Award is given annually for the outstanding scholarly book on the history of women in Texas published during the calendar year. Today's award dealt with books published during 2015.

This year two books shared the award. I was associated with both volumes that were co-awardees today. I was the sole author for one of them, Allie Tennant's biography, and for the other co-authored a chapter with Victoria Cummins in an anthology entitled, "Texas Women."

My co-winning book "Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas" was published by the Texas A&M University Press. It is the first volume in a new publication series "Women in Texas History" underwritten by the Ruthe Winegarten Foundation for Texas Women's History.

My wife Victoria Cummins and I are also contributors to the book of essays that was the co-winter of the Liz Carpenter Award today. That volume is "Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives," edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless, published by the University of Georgia Press. Victoria Cummins and I wrote the chapter in this book dealing with Frances B. Fisk and the promotion of the visual arts in pre-World War Two Texas.

Click on the links below to read about these two books at their respective Press websites:

Allie Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas

Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives

I have been involved in receiving the Liz Carpenter Award on two previous occasions before today. My biography of Emily Austin won the award in 2009. I also had an essay on the Runaway Scrape in the volume "Women and the Texas Revolution" edited by Mary L. Scheer, which won the Liz Carpenter Award in 2012.

Receiving the 2009 Liz Carpenter Award for "Emily Austin of Texas"
Elizabeth Turner and Hal Smith present me with the award.

Contributors to "Women and the Texas Revolution"
winner of the 2012 Liz Carpenter Award.
Sitting: l. to r..Mary Scheer and Jean Stuntz. Standing: l. to r.
Ron Christman (UNT Press Director), Angela Boswell,
me, and Lindy Eakin

Waldine Tauch, Texas Sculptor

Waldine Tauch, 1936. She and Allie Tennant both worked on
Centennial Sculptures

This week I presented a paper at the fall meeting of the East Texas Historical Association. This presentation dealt with another female sculptor from the era of the Texas Centennial: Waldine Tauch. She knew Allie Victoria Tennant. Both of them worked on centennial projects as female sculptors. Tennant modeled two sculptures for the monuments program of the centennial: Jose Antonio Navarro and James Butler Bonham. Tauch executed the sculptor of Moses Austin that sits on the grounds of the San Antonio City Hall. My paper dealt with the efforts of Tauch to secure the commission to model a statue of the Pioneer Woman that today is located on the campus of Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas. Tauch became involved in a very public controversy when the commission for this statue went to New York sculptor William Zorach. Waldine Tauch felt strongly this sculpture should be the work of a female artist and certainly not that of a male sculptor. She wanted badly to be person who sculpted it. Accordingly, she undertook a campaign designed to award her this commission. She contacted leading politicians, cultural figures, civic leaders, and educators across the state in her attempt to secure this contract, even to the point of attempting to enlist the support of J. Frank Dobie.  Tauch wrote a long memorial to the Centennial Commission outlining her views about the history of women in Texas and detailing why a female sculptor ought to receive this commission, pointing out in some detail why she should be the person selected to do it. This rather lengthy document represents an interesting expression of how one significant female artist of the 1930s saw the history of women in Texas. In the end, a male sculptor, William Zorach, received the commission. Tauch and her supporters thereupon embarked on a campaign of criticism and public complaint against his plans for the sculpture. They loudly objected because the model proposed by Zorach was highly stylized and abstract to the point, they said, it depicted a women without visible clothing – a statue of a nude women. This thus provoked a state-wide barrage of negative publicity and strident vituperation against the proposed Zorach statue planned for female college in Denton. The State of Texas accordingly pulled Zorach’s commission and gave it to a male sculptor from New York, who made the fully-clothed statue that still stands today on the TWU campus. This “nude women controversy” and Waldine Tauch’s role in it says for the historian much about how women were perceived in that era, and how one female sculptor attempted – albeit unsuccessfully – to express her viewpoints about the historical role of women in Texas and its history. This paper is based on research in the Coppini-Tauch Papers at the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas, the Evaline Sellors Papers at the Old Jail Art Center and Archives, and the Women’s Collection at TWU.

The Texas Art Collectors Organization

I recently spoke to a meeting of the Texas Art Collectors Organization about the life and career of Allie Tennant. Members of this group are all avid collectors and afficiados of early Texas art. Some of them have impressive personal collections that contain works by many noted artists from the southwestern region. I also the chance to sign a number of books. It was a pleasure to talk before this fine group. Some of the members who attended my presentation kindly posed with me during the event.

First Book Signing at the East Texas Historical Association.

It was my pleasure to sign copies of this book for the first time at the fall meeting of the East Texas Historical Association in Nacogdoches.