See Houston's Early Black and White Artists Exhibit in One Room for the First Time
In the 1930s , every day except Sunday, you could find four dozen or more of Houston’s most cutting- edge artists exhibiting their works. They were part of the Houston Artists Gallery , or HAG, as they referred to themselves. Most were well-off Houston women who assembled, organized and sold their works from two renovated basement apartments , even in the darkest moments of the Great Depression. The gallery found legitimate commercial success from the basement of that still- standing Beaconsfield Apartment Building on Main Street, and artists pushed boundaries , establishing one of the first places in Houston you could sketch and paint from a nude model. Oh, and every artist was white. This was, after all, taking place in Texas, at the time the heart of the segregated South. The combination of Jim Crow and de facto racism meant black Houstonians were barred from HAG, instead relegated to display their work in the “ Colored Carnegie Library ,” a segregated branch of the m...