The Role of Regional Women’s Universities for Building Women Artists: The Case of Coreen Spellman

This paper examines regional women’s universities as a career-building strategy for women modern artists working in the US during the mid-century. One such example is Coreen Spellman, one of the key women modernists who lived and worked out of North Texas. Teaching and practicing out of a modernist art department at Texas State College for Women, now known as Texas Woman’s University (TWU), Spellman fundamentally shaped the region’s outlook on art. As the professor of printmaking and painting at TWU from 1929 to 1974, she grappled with the notion of modernist form throughout her career, while educating and influencing the thousands of women that passed through her classroom throughout her tenure at TWU. This paper examines the turn toward abstraction in Spellman’s late works, including her intellectual exchanges with visiting lecturers such as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and with her departmental colleagues Carlotta Corpron, Toni LaSelle, and Kenneth Loomis. Overall, this paper argues that Spellman was a methodical and experimental artist that expertly shaped various media to synthesize regional shapes with modernist forms, and that the stability of her employment made this possible. Through this endeavour, the paper will pose the possibility of Spellman’s inclusion in the broader canons of postwar American art history, and by extension, the significance of regional histories for the broader national narrative.