Remembering Bob Nunn

One of the absolute highlights from our time in Dallas was getting to know Bob Nunn. We met at his studio which took up a large portion of the first level in the Continental Gin building, became friends, and met on a dozen or so occasions over the years. 

When we found ourselves in a new home in North Texas, we began to want to uncover the history of art here for ourselves. Some of it was easy to come by, but we knew there must be more below the surface. Bob Nunn set us on our path of discovery. For that, we are forever grateful.

He introduced us to many of his artist friends including Paul Harris and Marty Ray and we slowly began to know of many of the artists who worked here during the last half of the 20th Century and into the new millennium. 

Aside from being a well-respected teacher, Bob was a working artist who certainly can be said to like painting more than he liked having painted. If you saw the expanse of work in his studio, or later at a show at the Irving Arts Center, he never stopped painting. Each time we visited, there was something new to see. 

It’s all engaging work, but it may be the industrial, twisted tubes and pipes that he will be long known for. 

It was a sad day when we learned Bob had passed on. It’s hard to believe almost a decade has passed since we sat down in his studio for an interview. It lasted almost an hour, but we never ran out of material. I’m sure we could have filled another hour without struggle. 

We’re happy to make this transcript available in hopes those to come will have the opportunity to learn a little more about Bob Nunn and his work. 

Today is May 13, 2014. I am now in the Continental Gin Building with Bob Nunn, a well-known artist who has been practicing art for many decades.

Q: Tell me about yourself, when were you born?

A: I was born in Dallas, Texas. I’m a native of Dallas.

Q: Have you ever lived anywhere else in your life?

A: I’ve always lived very close to Dallas, if not in Dallas. The only times I moved away from Dallas was going to school and I only went as far away as Tyler, Texas, and Commerce, Texas in east Texas. That’s as far away as I ever lived from Dallas. I spent one summer in Houston, but never really lived away from Dallas, always in Dallas.

Q: When you were a kid, did you dream of being an artist?

A: I was very lucky to have lived in Dallas, and to have gone through public schools in Dallas. We had specialty art teachers from second grade, all the way through to seventh grade. I had art virtually every day. Some years it may have been every other day, but we had it and it was always one of my favorite things to do. When I was in the second grade, I had a piece in the Dallas Museum of Art. In those days, they did a joint elementary/junior high/high school exhibit at the museum every year. It was really funny because my older brother, who was not interested in art whatsoever, also had a piece in that same show. So I’ve been very interested in art, and also as a child, the particular school I was going to then was only a couple of miles from Fair Park, and that’s where the Dallas Museum of Art was. We would go there on field trips and I can remember one of the first field trips we went to. It was like second or maybe third grade, and I ran into a little painting by Perry Nichols, a local artist. It was a beautiful, gorgeous little painting with red in it, like a red dragon. As a child, I was totally mesmerized by that little painting. Then, when I went to high school – I went to a five-year high school – Perry Nichols’ murals were all over the third floor of that school. Of course, there were restaurants in town with Perry’s murals in them. I became influenced a little bit by him only from the standpoint of I loved what he did with color. Of course, color is such a strong part of my work.

Q: When you talk about the DMA in Fair Park, when was that?

A: I guess the museum was there in 1936. By the time I was going there in high school, it was a very well-established, beautiful, old wonderful Art Deco building on the lagoon. Then, when I graduated from college, I taught ten years of public school art in Dallas, all different: junior high, elementary school, and high school. At the end of my first year of teaching junior high school, I was invited to become part of the faculty of the Dallas Museum School in Fair Park. There was an addition, a wing that had been added sometime after 1936 that was just a school wing, two stories. I was teaching there in the late ‘60s. I started in 1966, and the school closed about 1972. I taught for the last five or six years the school was in existence and then that program was moved to SMU, but it fizzled very quickly at SMU. It had been going on for many, many years when I was teaching there. We taught special talent students from various schools. We taught a lot of affluent parents’ children who could afford to come because it wasn’t a cheap thing, but we also had scholarship students from the area of South Dallas where the school was at all kinds of levels. It was a great teaching place because we would use the whole fairgrounds to go and draw and just look and talk about things. We had all of the other museums that we could go to. We used the Natural History Museum. We used the aquarium.

Q: In the late 1960s, Jerry Bywaters was the director? 

A: Jerry Bywaters was the director of the museum then, and was the one who interviewed me. He and Barney Delabano, who was assistant director and the director of the school. They’re the ones who interviewed me for that job.

Q: Were your parents artists?

A: No, my father was a carpenter, but he was a finished carpenter. He did very, very fine finish work on major buildings. He did all of the moldings in the bedrooms for the Hyatt Hotel when it was built in town, so that kind of work. He was not artistic in any way, but he was a very great craftsman. I learned some craftsmanship from him, but not a lot. He wasn’t a good teacher, but I would say “Help me,” and he would do it. My mother wasn’t.

Q: You talked about Perry Nichols. What kind of style was that artist?

A: I can’t remember that much. I was going to look before we talked today, but I forgot to do that. There was a little red dragon, and it was very surrealistic. Very realistic, but it was also very surrealistic. As I recall, the murals were somewhat surrealistic too. There was a wonderful restaurant called Chantley’s on Lemmon Avenue that was completely full of his beautiful murals and they were all undersea creatures and fish, and it burned. 

Q: When did it burn?

A: It burned in the early ‘70s, about ‘75 or ‘76.

Q: Where did you go to college?

A: Well I finished high school in Dallas. I graduated from Samuell High School and had no idea what I was going to do, none whatsoever. [I] had not really prepared to go to college. I worked for a year and discovered I really didn’t know how to do anything. I had an incredibly wonderful teacher in high school – I only took art in high school for one year – and that was Paul Harris. Paul was a fabulous teacher and I really looked up to him. He is still my very, very good friend. After about six, or eight months of trying to keep a job, and trying to work in very bad times in Dallas for non-skilled people to work. There weren’t restaurants to work in; there weren’t places like that. I was doing office work in a not very nice place and finally decided that I just had to go back to school and become an art teacher. I had a brother who was living in Tyler, and so he invited me down there to school at Tyler Junior College. I thought I was going someplace really easy, and it was one of the most difficult schools in the nation, rated second in the nation academically in junior colleges at that time. I ran into a marvelous teacher, Drusilla Bain, who had done her work at the University of Chicago. She had just come in. I went one semester with a little teacher who was a sweet, little old lady but not a very good teacher, and then Drusilla took over the classes. I was lucky to have her for basic design and art for elementary school, and then I also took extra painting classes with her. She was a really wonderful, inspiring teacher, really great, very good at teaching color and working quickly with paint. Just a really wonderful person.

After that, I became very ill for a couple of years. I had a terrible kidney disease, so I couldn’t go to school for a year. Then I had to spend a year trying to make enough money to go back to school. I finally went to school at East Texas State University in Commerce, Texas. It’s now Texas A&M Commerce. I chose East Texas primarily because it was the cheapest place in the state I could find to go to, and I had enough money for one semester when I went there. But I figured something would happen, something would happen. It turned out to be a great place. I had wonderful teachers. One of the great influences of my life was Dr. Paul Kelpe, who was teaching art history and painting there. I ran into lifelong friends. Marty Ray (above right), one of the wonderful potters in Dallas now, has been my friend since those days. We’re very, very close, and other very good friends. It was a great place. I got a good education. It really prepared me well, at least for the classroom.

Q: After you graduated from college, were you practicing art, painting, or teaching?

A: Well I came back to Dallas and then started teaching. I became very involved in the art education group. I held all of the offices up to the present in that group for ten years. It was very difficult for me. I was teaching full-time with DISD and I was teaching part-time at the DMA on Saturdays and during the summer. I was also teaching part-time at SMU a lot of the time, children’s classes there. I was so busy teaching that I really didn’t do much of my own artwork. I did exhibit around in some small places. I spent most of my time really teaching art. At the end of ten years, I decided I had to do something else. So I got a leave of absence from DISD and I was going to go up to North Texas, but I got very little encouragement from North Texas to come to their school. 

I had worked with Lyle Novinski who was chairman of the department at the University of Dallas in Irving. So I just stopped by the University of Dallas on my way back to town from North Texas after being told that I could come but it was going to take about two years of undergraduate work before they would talk to me about graduate school. So I stopped in and visited with Lyle, and Lyle said “Oh yeah, come on over.” They did a wonderful thing for me, and called it their “educational experiment.” They allowed me to enter the University of Dallas and take nine hours for the first semester with the understanding that it would be considered undergraduate work or that I would be asked to leave. Those were the things that would happen. At the end of the nine hours, I was given graduate credit and went on and did my MA there and had Juergen Strunck, who was a fabulous instructor in many ways, and very difficult in many ways. UD didn’t encourage the students at all. As a matter of fact, at UD you simply worked and they expected you to work. You got no praise. You got no encouragement. You worked. What they did do, and Juergen in particular, was make you work and do the absolute best that you did. Everyone there was doing what they did; they weren’t doing what the school wanted them to do. There were other schools in the area and you went there you painted as they chose for you to paint, you painted with the colors they liked, you painted the subjects they wanted, and they produced their look with their students. That was not true at UD, and it’s still not true at UD. The students there are selected because they have something to say and then they are allowed to really work at saying that. It was a great experience for me at the University of Dallas.

I left there and then was recruited to go to SMU under a very strange program. They were offering an MFA degree in art education and I don’t think any other school in the nation was doing that at that time. They paid for the degree and paid me a couple hundred a month to teach a course each semester in art ed.

Q: When was that?

A: That was in ’78. I was there from ‘78 through ‘79. I did my MFA then at SMU in art education.

Q: Who was the chair of the department then?

A: I can’t remember who was chairman of the department at the time. I was working under the art ed department and Jay Hardwick was chair of the art ed program. The difference between the degree I was doing and a regular MFA degree was that instead of doing art history courses, I was doing art education courses, but all of the studio courses were the same. I was studying with Roger Winter, and I was studying with Jay of course.

Q: And Dan Wingren?

A: Dan was a painter. I don’t know what happened to Dan.

Q: Wasn’t James Surls also teaching for a time at SMU?

A: About that time, he had been teaching but he was teaching noncredit courses, I believe, at night. James was living in east Dallas close to real good friends of ours, and we saw James some. 

Q: Was it a harder thing to show art than in the late 1960s? What was the art scene back then? Who was organizing the exhibitions?

A: The 1960s was when I was teaching. There were places like one of the big theaters in town, the Festival Theatre. It’s no longer in existence. It’s been torn down, and a big building built there is now over on Maple. They did underground films on weekend nights. It was an art film venue, and there was a really nice area there to exhibit. I had a couple of shows there in the ‘60s. The University of Texas Dallas now was the school for advanced studies in science. They had a really great gallery there and I had a one-man show there during the ‘60s. There weren’t a lot of places then until the ART opened. Of course, the ART then became one of the great local venues for artists to show in. The ART was the nonprofit group that opened over on Swiss Avenue. It was over there for many years and eventually became the Contemporary Museum.

Q: You once said that you lived in a mansion on Swiss Avenue back in the 1970s?

A: I did live on Swiss Avenue back when I was teaching high school art, one of the big mansions there. Four of us shared a house.

Q: Were they all artists?

A: No. One was actually a student in dental school. The fellow who owned the house taught high school music but was a pianist/organist. The other fellow was a cellist, but he was really working at that time installing hi-fi systems through one of the local companies.

Q: Was that common for the mansions then?

A: It was mixed. There were still people who lived there who had built the houses. There were some where the families were still there but a lot of the houses were being rented. People were moving north at that point. Swiss was on a spiral downward, before it was rediscovered.

Q: I guess that was a very unique experience, living there?

A: It was fabulous. It was a wonderful old house. It was great. We were just a block down the street from the Aldridge home and I had a friend who was a pianist who practiced on her piano. I would go down and visit with him. She had her own private museum. I don’t remember who all was in there now, but she would have say a Degas and next to it one of her granddaughter’s works. It was a very eclectic little museum.

Q: Have you ever been back to that mansion?

A: I’ve been through them. I’ve been on tours. I’ve been in the Aldridge house plenty of times for parties and such.

Q: Let’s go back to the shows in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the theater on Maple. Was it a seedy or scary area back then?

A: Of course, there were all of the galleries, but there were galleries that were popping up, particularly in Deep Ellum. There were lots and all of the artists were moving to Deep Ellum at that point in time. I had a gallery further up Elm Street for seven years before I moved to this space. That was in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. There were lots of galleries. The 3200 Main Street building had opened up and Michelle Hurling had opened her pre-Columbian art gallery there. Then the Dallas Women’s Co-op – a fabulous gallery – was over there also. There were a couple of smaller galleries in this area. Barry Whistler moved in over on Canton. Conduit was on Elm Street and there were lots and lots of other really good galleries, small galleries where emerging artists could be shown. There were places like the ART, where you could apply for space there and have a show there or they did lots of group exhibits. They also had a wonderful show each year called “Critics’ Choice.” They brought in three critics, whether they were museum directors or newspaper critics when we had newspaper critics in Dallas, or art professionals of some sort to jury local artists for a major show that happened every year. They came and critiqued the work and talked to the artists. It was a very inclusive kind of thing. I don’t know that that’s happening anymore. That went on for many years. They of course had a membership show. When the MAC opened up, we thought it was going to be more that way. It certainly was local art for a long time. Slowly but surely, it seems to me at least that they’ve gotten a little further away from that original intent of when it was opened: a venue for the local artists because there really are so few places. 

In the ‘50s and even in the ‘60s, the Dallas Museum of Art showed local artists. Every year, they had a major competition whether it was painting or printmaking or craft or sculpture. They had a major show every year that anyone could enter, and often got in, with major critics coming into jury those shows. Then it all went to the wayside. 

We had two major newspapers that both had really good art writers who reviewed all of the exhibits that were shown in town. They did articles on artists and covered events. Virtually none of that happens anymore. A stranger coming to town and opening up our paper to look for art venues would be shocked to find that there’s a page that might list six places to go see art in this great city where there are a million things going on. It seems like it was better in a way back then.

Q: Who was buying back then? Were specific styles very popular?

A: I don’t know. That’s an interesting question. I don’t know that the buying public has changed that much. Now there are a lot more younger people with more money now who may be buying. 

Q: Were there superstar collectors who came to buy?

A: I probably wasn’t selling much back then, so I don’t know that I was running into many buyers. With the artists back then, everyone was very supportive of everyone else. I was very lucky in the fact that I moved into these wonderful studio situations. My first studio was over on Harwood Street right after I graduated from SMU. Linnea Glatt, a wonderful sculptor, was there with her husband. Dara Goodman was there. Sid Romeo, a wonderful painter, was there. I got in there and met them. Bobby Munguia came along a little later and shared part of that space with us. Then we lost that building to developers of course, and moved into Deep Ellum. We had Bobby Munguia next to us. I was sharing space with Nancy Terry who I had gone to school with at the University of Dallas. We had Mark Lavatelli who was teaching at the University of Dallas at the time and his wife Polly Little, who is a wonderful artist. They’re now in New York and have been there for a number of years. We still stay in touch with each other. Then we moved on down here. When we got here, Frances Bagley and Tom Orr were there. Bert Scherbarth was here. Sherry Owens moved in about a year after I did. Lots of other artists of course were in the building. We were always, back then, very supportive. We had building meetings. People would bring exhibits, and we went to their exhibits. People gave talks, and we went to their talks. I don’t know that that’s happening as much now as it was. Now I’m not getting out as much as I once did either. In those days, there was just something going on all the time. We had really great things going on. We had Paul Harris around also at that time who was organizing lots of independent shows that were being shown at various venues. For instance, the Trammell Crow Building had two galleries there that were open to public buildings. 

Q: In downtown?

A: Downtown in the Trammell Crow building across from the Nasher. In those days you applied for a show there or Paul would do juried shows there. We did two or three shows with him in that venue. TDAA used to use his gallery for their yearly shows. Of course, we had the ART that was doing juried shows independent shows and curated shows.

Q: When did the ART become the Dallas Contemporary Art Museum? 

A: That goes back to the ‘50s. When I was in high school with Paul Harris as my teacher, he was very, very instrumental in opening the Contemporary Art Museum. Janet Kutner who was the art critic for the Dallas Morning News for many, many years was also one of those early people who was really involved with the opening of the Contemporary Museum. They were in a storefront in Preston Center when I was in high school. Because Paul was my teacher, he would invite us, his senior students, to come to openings at the Contemporary Art Museum, to go to speeches, to go to slide shows, which was just a fabulous thing for someone as young as we were to meet the real artists and the wonderful people who were supporting this. They did film series, and when I went off to college I continued to come back and be involved in things. Because Paul was involved, he would invite me to come. Eventually, they opened their beautiful, beautiful building right off Cedar Springs in the Hall area there. I’m not sure exactly all of the politics that went on, but the Dallas Museum finally absorbed the Contemporary Museum with the understanding that there would be a separation and eventually of course, it all became one.  I was teaching at the museum about the time that that merger happened. One of the things that happened is the big, major open space in the DMA became a contemporary gallery. When that first opened, the Gerald Murphy pieces came. The Contemporary Museum had done a one-person show for Gerald Murphy, whose work hasn’t been shown in the United States for years and years. When the show ended, Murphy just gave the Contemporary Museum two of the paintings. He said “They’re just rolled up in my attic and nobody wants to see them or look at them,” so he just gave them. There are only about eight paintings of Gerald Murphy that exist now. That big clock painting of his was very instrumental in influencing me somewhat in my subject matter – the old machine parts here. At East Texas, I had a fabulous teacher, Paul Kelpe, who was also a surrealist and used some machine parts in his work. I didn’t know I was copying him. I don’t think I ever did, but he was certainly a major influence for me.

Q: What kind of artists were shown in the Contemporary Art Museum back in the 1960s and 1970s?

A: I don’t remember specifically. The first big show I saw was Bernard Dubuffet, a one-person show of his. I had never even seen his work before. Who was this? It was very exciting, someone new to see. I can’t tell you specifically who was shown. I know they did a fabulous Fauvist exhibit that was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen at that point. 

Q: So they were showing European and American art?

A: The Contemporary Museum was strictly contemporary art: not American art, contemporary art.

Q: When you look at Texas art and how the artists migrate, you find that many of the Dallas Nine artists moved to Austin or New York. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was there any connection between here and the rest of the U.S.?

A: In the ‘60s, it was basically understood that almost all artists had to go to New York. You had to go to New York. One of the things that happened in Dallas was DFW. I believe when DFW happened, more people were coming in. There was more support. More major corporations were coming in, so there was more support happening here for art. That kind of support was happening for major shows of art. There were major things of art going on here. You didn’t have to go to New York anymore to see a good art exhibit because you had the Kimbell at that point, you had the DMA at that point, and they were both expanding and they were both buying really great works of art. They had lots of money because all of the corporations were coming and helping to infuse the money. You had all these fabulously rich people in town who decided they wanted first-class art in town. People like Margaret McDermott and the Clarks were giving these major pieces of work. Possibly the migration stopped happening as much as it did only because there was more going on.

Before then, I think everybody felt like they had to go somewhere else if they could afford to. 

Q: Did you ever think of doing that too?

A: It didn’t work for me. Of course, I was stuck here teaching. My focus was teaching for ten years. That’s what I did. I thought about moving to New York certainly. I thought about going to other places. It ended up being ten years of teaching and all those years of graduate school and then I was teaching again.

Q: Generally speaking, when people think about Texas art, they think of cowboys, bluebonnets, etc. Do you have any reaction when people call you a Texas artist? Is this unavoidable? Do you think there are any characteristics associated with Texas artists or Dallas artists?

A: I just want to be an artist. I don’t necessarily think that Dallas or Texas has a lot to do with my particular work. We are what we are. We are what we have been. Our work is all of those experiences that we have had. Certainly, I think traveling to various places, seeing new things, seeing new exhibits, seeing new art, all those things add to what we do, but as far as Dallas or Texas influencing me, I don’t think that has anything to do with it. Also, I have always kind of worked independently of any of the other artists around. I’ve never been working with other artists, trying to do the same things other artists were doing. I may have been doing it and not knowing it, but I didn’t knowingly try to work like other artists. Maybe that’s the reason I don’t have a particular feeling for that.

Q: Looking at the paintings here, these are from the recent years. Were you working in a similar style back then in the 1960s and 1970s?

A: Of course, this is kind of a transition here. I don’t have one of the finished newer pieces here. When I was teaching public school art, it was very difficult for me to do a lot of work. When I lived in the big house on Swiss, I did have a studio and I did paint a lot there. I did a lot of work at school with the students, but I could only do small things. I’d work at my desk while they were working at their tables. So I did a lot of drawing. I did a lot of collages. I did a lot of watercolors, things that I could do small. When I started graduate school, I didn’t know what in the hell I was going to do. The first painting I did was under Bob Cardwell at the University of Dallas, who was a great art history teacher. I learned so much about painting from that man in art history. I didn’t learn very much about painting in painting class. In art history, he taught painting beautifully. It was a wonderful experience. The first painting I did, he finally came over to me and said “What are you doing in this painting?” I said, “Well I’m…” He said “Well you’ve achieved that. It’s a great achievement, you’ve done that. It may be the most boring painting I’ve ever seen in my life, but…” Then he said, “What are you going to do? What do you want to do? You’re in grad school, what are you going to do?” I was sort of at a loss for what to do. He said “Bring me all your sketchbooks,” so I took in all of these books of things I had been doing. So the paintings I started then were from sketches I had done all of those years that I had been teaching public school art. The one up behind you, Mechanical Parts, is an outgrowth of all those old drawings. I was doing very surrealistic pencil drawings with lots of organic and mechanical forms in those drawings. I did those in undergraduate school, so that led to the work there. Slowly but surely, the mechanical things became various things and went to various places and eventually became landscapes and flowers and whatever else I was doing. I don’t know why art happens. You start painting one day and something happens and that’s what you do for a while.

Q: As far as I know, one of the first modern and contemporary galleries that opened in Dallas was Betty McClean, who became Betty Blake. Later on she sold the gallery to Kevin Vogel which became Valley House. Did you have any interaction with either Valley House of Betty McClean back then?

A: I didn’t know Betty Blake. I’ve heard many stories of Betty Blake. Of course, Betty moved from Dallas to Houston. I don’t remember why she left Dallas, I really don’t. That was all going on before I was really involved in Dallas art. Early on, I knew the folks out at Valley House, which was of course started by Kevin’s father. He was a wonderful painter, and he was lucky enough to buy that fabulous land out there. As a graduate student at UD, we would go out and visit with him. My good friend Barney Delabano who was with the DMA was very good friends with him. I even went out and visited him on occasion with Barney. He was a very interesting man, a beautiful painter, and a very good representative of artists, but he was also very cynical about art. He was not very supportive necessarily of young artists. But he was a wonderful, interesting man. He built that fabulous gallery, which is still going on with young Kevin and his wife. One of the people who was very, very involved in art back then also and had a wonderful Delahunty Gallery was…the name has gone completely away. He eventually opened up several other galleries.

Q: That gallery still exists in some form or is it totally gone?

A: No. Delahunty was very, very popular in the late ‘60s into the ‘70s. It eventually went away, and Murray Smither was the power behind that. I believe he was associated with Betty Blake early on. He left there and then they had a wonderful gallery on Canton Street for a number of years. Delahunty was on Canton Street. 

Q: Let’s talk about something more recent. You moved into this building more than twenty years ago?

A: I’ve been here for, we think, about twenty-six years.

Q: Were you the first artist-in-residence back then?

A: No. When I came in, Frances Bagley, Tom Orr, Bert Scherbarth, and David MacWithey, who has worked at the DMA, were all in the building. My studio mate Nancy Terry and I came in, and there were woodworking and furniture refinishing people in the building. There was furniture storage in the building, all kinds of stuff like that. Eventually, all of those people moved out and so more and more artists moved in. It was a very rough building when we moved in. The roof was full of major holes and rainstorms were a great deterrent to making art, but we worked around it because it was cheap.

Q: So what made you choose this building then?

We moved in because it was available and we could afford it. I moved into this space – I have 3,200 square feet – and when I moved in, the rent on that was only $200 a month. We borrowed money to build all of the walls. There were no walls. There was no electricity. There was no water. There was no gas. There was no heat. All of that had to be put in, which cost quite a bit of money. So we borrowed for that. We were paying $400 a month in rent but for 3,200 square feet. It certainly is not that anymore [laughs]. 

Q: Since then, you’ve seen generations of artists move in and out. Is it getting bigger?

A: There are lots more artists. The spaces are getting smaller. In those days, Tom and Frances had virtually a whole floor. They actually had a third of the first floor and a third of the top floor just for the two of them. Bert Scherbarth had a third of the first floor. When Sherry Owens moved in a few years later, she had a third of the second floor. So you could afford to have a great, giant space. Over time, as the artists moved out, those spaces were divided into smaller spaces. The smaller spaces in this building now cost a lot more than what I paid for 3,200 square feet when I moved in. It’s still an affordable building, it’s just not as inexpensive as it was when I moved in. I have sub-tenants that I lease out space to that help pay that rent now.

Q: Let’s talk about when you began to teach at the DMA back then. Jerry Bywaters was still the director and he did a lot of contemporary shows with local artists. He did the Purchase Award for the annual exhibition. Do you see that as some kind of legacy, he left that doesn’t exist now because the DMA no longer does those shows? Is that a tradition that should be kept, for a local museum like the DMA to conduct annual exhibitions surveying local artists?

A: You’re asking about local art at the DMA. It varied: one year it would be painting and drawing, and then the next year it would be printmaking, and the next year it might be crafts. They had major jurors coming in to give major awards. All of the college teachers were around; there were people from the whole state. I think it was a state exhibit. I don’t think it was from out of state, but the major painters of the state. Of course, back in those days, there was a very strong group of printmakers also in Texas. There was a group of women printmakers in particular that are just now being rediscovered. I think David Dike is showing a lot of those people now. I was lucky enough to do my student teaching under one of those printmakers, Barbara Maples, who was a great influence on my teaching. When I started teaching, Evelyn Beard was the art consultant for the Dallas school district and she was one of those women printmakers as well. They were the kind of people who were showing at the DMA. One of the interesting things was that you could go to the DMA and see these wonderful pieces of art by people you knew. It wasn’t somebody from Paris or New York, it was somebody you knew and could go up and ask about the art. For a young artist, that was a very liberating kind of thing. It wasn’t something foreign. It was something you knew, something you could deal with.

Q: You have been teaching art for many, many years. Were you teaching at North Lake College?

A: Yeah, I taught at North Lake College for about twenty-eight years in all. I was also the director of the gallery there for about twenty-four years.

Q: When you see a student who doesn’t have much talent as an artist, what do you say to them? Do you still encourage them to pursue art as a career?

A: It depends on the student. At the community college, of course, you’re dealing with such a wide range of students. A lot of my students were older students who were coming back after having had careers or after having the children leave the house and finally having time to themselves. A lot of them came back simply working for their own pleasure. I was taught at UD and in my early years in college to do what you do and do the best you can. So I tried to find out what the students wanted themselves and then work with that. Many of them I encouraged to go on to graduate school or go on to finish their degrees and go to graduate school in art. I had some who ended up being artists. I had some who ended up working in the art field, but not necessarily as artists. A lot of them simply continued to paint for pleasure and a lot of them never painted once they left the class. Without self-discipline, you’re not going to do anything anyway. In the junior college, you have such a range of students. I had great students. I loved my students; they were wonderful. If I just had to deal with students, I might still be teaching, but I got tired of all the rest.

Q: If I asked you to summarize in a very short paragraph the difference between the art scene in the ‘60s and ‘70s in Dallas and the art scene now, how would you describe it?

A: The art scene in the ‘60s and ‘70s was probably not as frantic in that you could go to a gallery show and: meet friends, see wonderful art, meet the artist, go out for dinner afterwards, and discuss what you’d seen. Today, I don’t go out as much as I did, but it seems like so many of the shows are full of people who are having such a good time and visiting and talking about everything except the art that’s there. There seems to be a whole lot of socializing involved, particularly with the younger groups that are coming in. I don’t know how serious they are about the art. It seems like we were maybe a little more art-oriented back then or more interested in the actual pieces on the wall rather than in each other which seems to be happening a little bit now. At least, that’s what I observe. 

Laura Carpenter, one of the Carpenter ladies, owns this wonderful building on Canton. She was a partner to Murray Smither in the Delahunty Gallery. Murray really scoured and looked for local artists, local being from this part of the country at least, who were not necessarily getting the exposure they should have. He was one of the people who discovered the lady from Louisiana, Clyde Connell, who had her first one-woman show in New York at the age of seventy-five. Murray found her in a little bayou outside of Shreveport, Louisiana where she had been making these incredible totem poles out of cereal boxes and Elmer’s Glue for years. I think the DMA owns some of her work now. He was very good at ferreting out those unknown people and bringing them in for people to see and share their work.

Q: Is she still alive?

A: No, she died. He was showing her again in the ‘70s and she was in her seventies or eighties then. We were lucky enough to visit her in her home a couple of times.

A retrospective of Bob’s work was held at the Irving Arts Center in 2021.