ABILENE, Texas — A special reception and gallery talk with special guest Michael Grauer is planned for 5 p.m. Friday, May 3, at The Grace Museum, 102 Cypress St.
The Grace will be celebrating its main gallery art exhibition, For Love of the Land: Painting the Texas Landscape, on view through Sept. 21. The event is open to the public but the museum says RSVPs are respectfully requested and can be directed to Erika Parker at collections@thegracemuseum.org.
Curated as a visual dialogue focusing on the longstanding tradition of art, the exhibition is an expression of the lore, lure and love of the Texas landscape, the Grace says. The paintings, inspired by the beauty and majesty of the state’s ever-changing terrain, dating from the late 19th century through the early 21st century, reveal images as distinctive as the individual artists who captured on canvas the changing seasons, native flora, forests, deserts, rivers and mountains they encountered.
Many important historic and contemporary Texas painters are represented including Edward Eisenlohr, Robert Onderdonk, Frank Reaugh, L. O. Griffith, Otis Dozier, Everett Spruce, Dennis Blagg, Bob Stuth-Wade, Scott Gentling, Jim Woodson, Randy Bacon and many others.
Guest speaker Michael Grauer is the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture, Curator of Cowboy Collections & Western Art at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. He worked at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, before becoming curator of art and Western heritage and associate director for curatorial affairs at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Texas, from 1987 to 2018. He was also adjunct lecturer in Western American Studies at West Texas A&M University.
In September 2018, Grauer joined the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City as the McCasland Chair of Cowboy Culture & Curator of Cowboy Collections & Western Art. He has curated more than 150 exhibitions on Western art, culture, and history and authored 65 publications.
Grauer lectures on art, history and culture across the American West.
