WTAMU Art History

09/23/2025

Art in the Park is coming up!! Sponsored by TPAEA, this event in Medi Park on Saturday Oct. 4 will be SO fun!! Sign up if you want to create some chalk art (deadline for signup is Sept. 26 for guaranteed spot and t-shirt!). Link for signup is in the comments. Thanks to Shawn Kennedy for planning this. See you there!

09/17/2025

I am so excited to share this event with you all. My WT colleagues in music Conor and Kathleen Bell have organized a concert of brand new music composed in response to Georgia O'Keeffe's art and letters from her time in the Panhandle. I will be reading from some of her letters (from my book Georgia O'Keeffe's Wartime Texas Letters published by Texas A&M Press) in between movements of the pieces performed by Conor, Kathleen, and Sarah Rushing, and we will also be projecting images of O'Keeffe's paintings in tandem with the music inspired by them. Mark your calendars!! Oct. 7, 6pm, on WT Campus. FREE and open to the public.

09/08/2025

We invite all to help us celebrate the completion of our newly sculpted baptismal font statues. These statues have been artfuly created by the renowned sculptor, Tracy H. Sugg, MFA. https://www.tracyhsugg.com/

Join us on Thursday, September 11 for an opportunity to meet Tracy and listen to her special presentation about her process. We will also have a Ceremony & Prayer Service, as well as a Reception.

3-4:30 PM | Parish Hall | Tracy will give a special presentation to artists, the community, and St. Andrew’s, sharing insights into her
creative process behind the newly sculpted baptismal font statues.

6 PM | Nave | Ceremony & Prayer Service to unveil the statues

7 PM | Parish Hall | Meet & Greet Reception

08/25/2025

We are wasting NO time starting great events this semester. On Wednesday is a concert you shouldn’t miss, but also a lunchtime round table with the leading WT faculty with research knowledge that can shine new light on Soviet composer Shostakovich’s place in history! I’m leading the round table of these scholars! 😊 Join us!

08/07/2025

As always, it’s such a pleasure to work with Ann Daly on O’Keeffe-related projects!! Here’s our latest!

| The Georgia O’Keeffe Mystery: Who Made the Fakes? | My Georgia O'Keeffe My Georgia O'Keeffe | Ann Daly | by Ann Daly PhD

08/05/2025

This week in Art of this Region summer class is MURALS. We looked at ones that are no longer extant, having been painted over by other great murals, but that live on in memory and photography. We talked about the transitory nature of these paintings, as well as the public aspect of them. How they mean something different to different audiences, how they respond to place and time. And we looked at the design process of murals, like the ones on Old Tascosa Brewing Company that involved the reuse of maps. One reworked a map of Tascosa with drawn images of Boot Hill Cemetery, but changed to have the artists' names on the tombstones. And the other used the city map of Amarillo as the background. Our murals have so many layers to explore! On Friday, we are taking a walking mural tour of downtown Amarillo and 6th Street.

07/31/2025

Still more Dynamite Museum Signs... photos taken July 2025 by my students (and one that lives at the house of my former student who shared a current photo with us). The art lives on in Amarillo!!

07/28/2025

More Dynamite Museum Signs found and photographed on Friday, July 25, 2025. The thing about this public art project is how it has changed since the idea and initial introduction of the signs into the Amarillo area in the 1990s. This work by my students shows what they are NOW, but what is "now" anyway. We learned about Derrida's Deconstruction Theory and how there is no pure now - past, present, and future are all wrapped up in each of these photos. And if Amarillo art stands for anything, it stands for a complication of what art is, what time is, and what place is.

07/27/2025

Round one of the Dynamite Museum Sign photos from Friday's class on Decay Art and our visit to Mariposa, including ones from San Jacinto neighborhood and the one that Jon Revett painted with "Flesh Eaters" on it. Which was an extra credit activity to find. Anyone know where they found it?

07/25/2025

Today for our Art of this Region class we journeyed to Mariposa Eco-Village just northwest of Amarillo. What are those white things in the grass, just past that industrial rock crusher you might ask? signs of course! Laid in the Sign Graveyard 2.0, the first one being on Toad Hall property until a few years ago. regaled us with stories of being on the sign crew in the 1990s and how there were nearly as many legends about the meanings of the signs as there were signs! Our students are creating a zine for their final project with some of the legends retraced, but today they are now on a sign scavenger hunt. So stand by for fun sign photos.

07/22/2025

Student drawings from our trip to the canyon last week for the summer class "Art of the Region." We were thinking about the categories of naturalism and abstraction, about drawing "in" and "on" nature. Aren't these great!?