A Comprehensive Guide to Outdoor Sculpture in Texas


Book Description

Traces the history of outdoor sculpture in Texas, and features brief descriptions of over eight hundred works, each with the artist's name, birth date, and nationality, the sculpture's date, type, size, material, location, and source of funding, and comments. Grouped by city.




Finding Anything about Everything in Texas


Book Description

A crash course in locating information about the Lone Star State. Each chapter begins with an engaging, little known, even quirky story and then shows the reader how to follow the printed and electronic trail to uncover more detail.




Discovering Texas History


Book Description

"'Discovering Texas History' is a historiographical reference book that will be invaluable to teachers, students, and researchers of Texas history. Chapter authors are familiar names in Texas history circles--a 'who's who' of high profile historians. Conceived as a follow-up to the award winning (but increasingly dated) 'A Guide the History of Texas' (1988), 'Discovering Texas History' focuses on the major trends in the study of Texas history since 1990. In part one, topical essays address significant historical themes, from race and gender to the arts and urban history. In part two, chronological essays cover the full span of Texas historiography from the Spanish era to the modern day. In each case, the goal is to analyze and summarize the subjects that have captured the attention of professional historians so that 'Discovering Texas History' will take its place as the standard work on the history of Texas history"--




Where Texas Meets the Sea


Book Description

Demonstrating how the growth of a midsized city can illuminate urban development issues across an entire region, this exemplary history of Corpus Christi explores how competing regional and cosmopolitan influences have shaped this thriving port and leisur







The French in Texas


Book Description

A surprising history of explorers, pirates, priests, artists, and more: “The best overall study of the French experience in Texas ever assembled.” —Jack Jackson, editor of Texas by Terán The flag of France is one of the six flags that have flown over Texas, but all that many people know about the French presence in Texas is the ill-fated explorer Cavelier de La Salle, fabled pirate Jean Lafitte, or Cajun music and food. Yet the French have made lasting contributions to Texas history and culture that deserve to be widely known and appreciated. In this book, François Lagarde and thirteen other experts present original articles that explore the French presence and influence on Texas history, arts, education, religion, and business from the arrival of La Salle in 1685 to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Each article covers an important figure or event in the France-Texas story. The historical articles thoroughly investigate early French colonists and explorers; the French pirates and privateers; the Bonapartists of Champ-d’Asile; the French at the Alamo; Dubois de Saligny and French recognition of the Republic of Texas; the nineteenth-century utopists of Icaria and Reunion; and the French Catholic missions. Other articles deal with French immigration in Texas, including the founding of Castroville; Cajuns in Texas; and the French economic presence in Texas today—the first such study ever published. The remaining articles look at painters Théodore and Marie Gentilz; sculptor Raoul Josset; French architecture in Texas; French travelers from Théodore Pavie to Simone de Beauvoir who have written on Texas; and the French heritage in Texas education. Includes more than seventy photos and illustrations




Life in Bronze


Book Description

A disciple of Classical sculpture in a time of pervasive abstract modernism, Lawrence M. Ludtke (1929–2007) of Houston imbued his creations with a sense of movement and realism through his attention to detail, anatomy, and proportion. As a skilled athlete who played professional baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, Ludtke brought to his art a fascination with musculature and motion that empowered him to capture the living essence of his subjects. As author Amy L. Bacon shows in this sensitive biography, Ludtke’s gentle humanity and sensitivity shines through his work; his sculpture truly projects character, purpose, and personality. Ludtke, a Fellow in the National Sculpture Society (US) and a Corresponding Member of the Royal Academy of British Sculptors, became well-known for his portrait and figurative art. His works grace the halls and grounds of the United States Air Force Academy, Johns Hopkins Medical School, Rice University, Texas A&M University, CIA headquarters, the National Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Pentagon, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, and the National Battlefield Park at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. He has also created significant liturgical art, most notably a life-size Pietá for St. Mary’s Seminary in Houston and a Christ and Child for Travis Park Methodist Church in San Antonio. Based on personal interviews with the artist as well as his family, friends, colleagues, and patrons such as H. Ross Perot, Life in Bronze: Lawrence M. Ludtke, Sculptor places Ludtke’s art within the context of the American figurative art tradition. The author explains how Ludtke was influenced by Italian-born Pompeo Coppini, whose monumental art has especially marked Texas and whose clay Ludtke inherited and used as his own favored modeling medium. Bacon meticulously details how Ludtke’s research into the lives and careers of his subjects was married to his attention to technique and talent. His own life story figures crucially in the creation of those character studies his sculptures so beautifully represent.




Oddball Texas


Book Description

This amusing travel guide to the Lone Star State doesn't waste travelers' time telling them where to find antiques in the Hill Country, take breathtaking hikes through Big Bend, or gaze upon the Alamo. Instead, it guides television fans to a modern replica of the Munsters's mansion, leads the nonsqueamish to the world's only Cockroach Hall of Fame, and points the curious towards a small town filled with hippo statues. Among other things, Texas is home to Goliath-sized roadside attractions, and directions are provided on how to reach the World's Largest Six-Shooter, World's Largest Rattlesnake, and World's Largest Wooden Nickel. The accompanying photographs and maps instruct visitors on how to get to these and other extraordinary spots, including the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the Celebrity Shoe Musuem, Alley Oop's Fantasyland, and the Birthplace of Fritos. A dose of wacky Texas history is also included with answers to questions such as "Did a UFO really crash into a windmill northwest of Fort Worth in 1897? "and "What does an Abilene Kinko's have to do with the early retirement of Dan Rather?"




German Monuments in the Americas


Book Description

This book looks at the many transatlantic bonds which have linked and still link Germany and the United States. German immigrants to the Americas brought with them a good deal of cultural baggage. They cultivated their German heritage in their schools, churches, and clubs. They expressed pride in this heritage by erecting monuments to Goethe or Schiller, Beethoven or Wagner, Alexander von Humboldt or «Turnvater» Jahn. They claimed Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, Carl Schurz, Gustave Koerner, and John A. Roebling as their own. But German-born or German-trained sculptors did not limit themselves to German subjects. They also paid tribute to America by creating sculptures of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and others who occupy a place of honor in American history. While a few German monuments can be found in Canada and in Latin America, the number of German monuments in the United States is surprisingly large. These monuments illustrate the contribution - often overlooked or ignored - of the German-American community to American society and American cultural life.




Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas


Book Description

Winner, 2016 Liz Carpenter Award for the Research in the History of Women, presented at the Texas State Historical Association Annual Meeting At Fair Park in Dallas, a sculpture of a Native American figure, bronze with gilded gold leaf, strains a bow before sending an arrow into flight. Tejas Warrior has welcomed thousands of visitors since the Texas Centennial Exposition opened in the 1930s. The iconic piece is instantly recognizable, yet few people know about its creator: Allie Victoria Tennant, one of a notable group of Texas artists who actively advanced regionalist art in the decades before World War II. Light Townsend Cummins follows Tennant’s public career from the 1920s to the 1960s, both as an artist and as a culture-bearer, as she advanced cultural endeavors, including the arts. A true pathfinder, she helped to create and nurture art institutions that still exist today, most especially the Dallas Museum of Art, on whose board of trustees she sat for almost thirty years. Tennant also worked on behalf of other civic institutions, including the public schools, art academies, and the State Fair of Texas, where she helped create the Women’s Building. Allie Victoria Tennant and the Visual Arts in Dallas sheds new light on an often overlooked artist.