Heritage Trails

 

Cubistic Longhorn

Cubistic Longhorn

Artist: Evaline Sellors
Date created: 1936
About: The cubistic longhorn cast stone plaques were designed in 1936 to decorate a shelter house on the grounds of Fort Worth’s North Side Senior High School.

About the Artist

Evaline Sellors (1903-1995)

Born in 1903, Evaline Sellors was an active, innovative and dedicated member of the Fort Worth art scene all her life. As a child in Fort Worth, she was enrolled in private art classes and later attended prep school for girls at Texas Wesleyan college, where her art teacher was Samuel Ziegler, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Sellors’ first experiments with sculpture began in classes at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. There, she was twice-awarded the highest scholarships a woman student could win at that time, and studied in Europe during 1929 and 1930. Studying in Paris, Sellors was introduced to the work of avant garde writers, musicians and visual artists. The Great Depression cut short Sellors’ European stay, preventing her from continuing her education in Philadelphia or New York, as originally planned.

Sellors, graphics artist Blance McVeigh and painter Wade Jolly ran the Texas School of Fine Arts, Fort Worth’s first fine arts school. Located at the Woman’s Club on Pennsylvania Avenue, the enterprise was run jointly by the three artists until 1938, and then Sellors ran it alone until 1941. The school presented ground-breaking exhibitions, introducing Fort Worth to works of leading contemporary painters, sculptors and graphic artists whose work had never been seen in the city.

During the Depression years of the 1930s, Sellors was an artist under the Works Progress Administration hired to create relief sculpture decorations for many of Fort Worth’s Moderne  government-sponsored buildings, schools, parks and monuments. Her Cubistic Longhorn cast stone plaques were designed in 1936 to decorate a shelter house on the grounds of Fort Worth’s North Side Senior High School. Sellors larger-than-life size athletic figures atop Fort Worth’s Farrington Field stadium on University Drive have become Fort Worth icons, along with many of her other public and private commissions.

Throughout her long life, Sellors exhibited, taught and worked with arts organizations within the city and state to further arts education and appreciation.

 

Links for Evaline Sellors