CANADIAN—Before there were highways, galleries, or easy access to major art centers across West Texas, there were women making art.

This fall, The Citadelle Art Museum will bring their work together in The West in Her Hands: Early Women Artists of West Texas, an exhibition featuring 42 works by 29 women whose paintings, prints and sculpture captured the landscapes, communities and everyday life of West Texas while helping establish an artistic culture across the region.

The exhibition opens with a reception Thursday, September 17, at 6 pm, at The Citadelle Art Museum in Canadian and will remain on view through December 2026.

The collection is on loan from the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas.

“This exhibition gives us a chance to look at West Texas through the eyes of women who were here early, paying attention and putting what they saw on canvas and paper,” said Wendie Murfee Cook, Executive Director and Curator of Art at The Citadelle. “They painted the canyons, ranches, flowers, churches and towns around them, but their contribution went much further than that. They helped create a place for art in West Texas.”

Creating Art at the Edge of the Frontier

For early women artists in West Texas, geography shaped nearly every part of becoming an artist.

Roads were few and often poor. Major museums, art schools, and exhibitions were hundreds of miles away. Early exposure to art frequently came through books, publications, reproductions of Old Master paintings, and objects families carried with them west.

The expansion of railroads across West Texas by the early 20th century changed that access. Women traveled to art centers including Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia to study new techniques, encounter major collections, and learn from contemporary artistic movements.

Then many came back.

They returned to communities across West Texas carrying what they had learned with them. Women who taught passed that knowledge to their students. Others organized local art associations and exhibitions, creating opportunities for artists to show their work in places where formal arts institutions were still developing.

By the early 1920s, women were helping organize art communities from Dalhart and Amarillo through Lubbock, Abilene, and San Angelo and farther west to Alpine and El Paso.

Their role was both artistic and cultural.

The writings accompanying the exhibition describe these women as keepers of a cultural and spiritual flame across the American West. Their isolation sharpened the way they saw the land around them, while their education and determination connected West Texas to a much larger world of art.

Breaking Into the Texas Art World

Recognition outside West Texas came slowly.

San Angelo artist Mollie Crowther became the first West Texas woman to exhibit in Fort Worth’s annual Texas artists exhibition in 1923. She later exhibited at the first San Antonio Competitive Exhibition in 1927 alongside fellow West Texas artists Berla Ione Emeree of El Paso and Jessie Palmer of Amarillo.

At the Texas Centennial Central Exposition in Dallas in 1936, works by Floy Hooper and Bess Bigham Hubbard of Lubbock and Isabel Robinson of Canyon were accepted by the exhibition’s all-male jury.

A few years later, the Fort Worth Public Library established the annual West Texas Art Exhibition. By 1939, West Texas women including Troy Allen, Elizabeth Keefer, Polly Hoffman, Helen King Kendall, Isabel Robinson, Juanita Tittle and Vera Wise had established themselves as professional artists.

Their work recorded what one contemporary writer described as the region’s “native surroundings and familiar customs,” preserving a visual history that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.

Forty-Two Works, Many Views of West Texas

The West in Her Hands brings together work in oil, watercolor, etching, lithography, gouache, pastel, acrylic, bronze, and other media.

Visitors will encounter landscapes, wildflowers, ranch scenes, architecture, portraiture, still lifes, and images drawn from communities across West Texas and the Southwest.

Among the works are:

• Anna Keener’s 1926 Untitled [Saddleback Mountain]

• Isabel Robinson’s 1927 watercolor Untitled [Cows, Barn, and Windmill]

• Margaret Seewald’s 1937 etching Prairie Flowers

• Juanita Tittle Pollard’s Abilene Country [Mesquite in Spring]

• La Wanda Murfee’s 1950 Episcopal Church – Ft. Stockton

• Olive Vandruff’s Untitled [Bluebonnets]

• Jessie Palmer’s Untitled [West Texas landscape]

• Bess Bigham Hubbard’s Harp of the Western Wind

• Alice Welty Nichols’ 1937 lithographs Untitled [Cotton] and Untitled [Wheat]

• Margaret Scruggs-Carruth’s 1930 etching Original Headquarters of T-Anchor Ranch

Other artists represented in the exhibition include Elizabeth Baker, Elizabeth Keefer Boatwright, Dorothy Bryan, Regina Tatum Cooke, Alwyn I. Dysart, Pattie Richardson East, Jessiejo Eckford, Leo Bernice Fix, Polly Hoffman, Amy Jackson, Marjorie Johnson, Helen King Kendall, Conny Martin, Viola Craig McNabb, Blanche McVeigh, Ora Thompson Newlin, Evaline Sellors, Lois Hogue Shaw and Fern Thurston.

Together, the works offer a broad view of the region and of the women who interpreted it across different decades, communities and artistic traditions.

Opening Reception Features Art Historian Michael Grauer

The Citadelle will celebrate the exhibition with an opening reception Thursday, September 17, at 6 p.m.

Art historian Michael Grauer will serve as guest speaker, discussing artists represented in the exhibition and the larger history of early Texas art.

Grauer serves on the board of the Center for the Advancement and Study of Early Texas Art, or CASETA, an organization dedicated to the study and appreciation of Texas art and its history.

The evening will include light bites, an opportunity to view the exhibition, and Grauer’s presentation.

Tickets are $35 per person. RSVP is required.

Reservations: https://thecitadelle.org/events/opening-reception-the-west-in-her-hands/

About The Citadelle Art Museum

The Citadelle Art Museum grew from the vision of Dr. Malouf Abraham Jr. and Therese Browne Abraham.

The museum occupies a historic red-brick church constructed in Canadian in 1910. The Abrahams purchased the former church in 1977, restored it, and made the building their family home for 30 years. 

Their art collection began with the purchase of Norman Rockwell’s First Day of School during a trip to New York in 1972. Over the following decades, they built a collection that today includes more than 150 paintings as well as sculpture and fine antiques. 

In 2008, Malouf and Therese donated their home, art collection, and surrounding property for the creation of a public art museum. The Citadelle officially opened its museum doors in 2009.

The permanent collection includes work by artists including Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Saul Tepper, Steven Assael, and Larry Calgagno. The museum also presents rotating exhibitions in the Iris & “Oofie” Abraham Gallery and carries art education beyond its walls through programs serving students across the Texas Panhandle.

Exhibition Information

The West in Her Hands: Early Women Artists of West Texas

September 17 through December 2026

Opening Reception

Thursday, September 17, 6 pm

The Citadelle Art Museum

520 E Nelson Ave., Canadian, Texas 79014

806-323-8899 | thecitadelle.org

Museum Hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Admission: $10 adults | $8 seniors 65+ | Free for children under 18