The Crow Museum of Asian Art debuted a new exhibit with a tie to the State Fair of Texas at its Richardson location at the University of Texas at Dallas.
"New Deal Texas and the West" displays federally funded art created under New Deal programs, including materials from the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition and the construction of key buildings at Fair Park, the site of the State Fair. The exhibit, which will be open until July 18, features about 75 artifacts from the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection and marks the third exhibition partnership between UT Dallas and the museum.
The overview
The exhibition is inspired by the 90th anniversary of the New Deal, said curator Erika Doss, an art history professor at the university.
The New Deal, the federal relief programs launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, aimed to stimulate the country’s economy and provide jobs during the Great Depression. These included federal art programs that provided work for thousands of artists across the country, including many in Texas who created prints, murals, buildings and more.
“Many of these [pieces] have never been shown before,” said Tamara Wootton Forsyth, the Marcus-Rose Family deputy director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “Together, these works explore one of the most significant eras of federal support for the arts in American history.”
Per a release from the museum, Texas received over $100 million through New Deal programs, funding projects like Fair Park, Dealey Plaza, the San Antonio River Walk and close to 70 post office murals across the state.
“The works offer perspectives on communities, landscapes, labor, identity and everyday life during a period of extraordinary economic and social change,” Wootton Forsyth said.
A closer look
The exhibit includes three galleries of prints, textiles, magazines, artifacts and large-scale reproductions of posters and murals. The first gallery includes artwork about various forms of work, the second covers Texas-specific art during the New Deal and the third gallery expands to works across the southwest.
“I wanted to create an exhibit that would inform and educate about what was produced during the New Deal, why the New Deal existed in the first place, how it applies to art and artists and get Texans around the state to see how they benefitted,” Doss said.
A central part of the exhibit covers New Deal-era work at Fair Park, which has hosted the State Fair of Texas since the 1880s, Doss said.
Fair Park received millions in federal funding in 1936 as part of the Texas Centennial Exposition, the hundredth anniversary of Texas’ independence from Mexico. This led to the construction of many of the buildings that still host the State Fair today, covered in the exhibit through artifacts, postcards, renderings and other materials.
Many of the artworks also show a transformation of Texas' identity during this period from a southern state into a western state, Doss said.
Some context
The Crow Museum of Asian Art is located in the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum on the UT Dallas campus. The museum opened two special exhibits earlier this fall, including “Unseen Worlds: Southeast Asian Textiles from the Spancake Collection” and multimedia exhibition “The Hedge of Halomancy.”
