Coreen Mary Spellman: Printmaker, Painter, and Professor of Art

Coreen Mary Spellman

Coreen Mary Spellman, printmaker, painter, and teacher, was born on March 17, 1905, in Forney, Texas, the second of six children of Michael and Carrie (Huffines) Spellman. Her father was a well-to-do Irish farmer and banker. Interested in art from an early age, her parents, neither of whom were artistically inclined, nurtured Coreen's talent. By the time she entered adolescence, her father was driving her to Dallas, which was twenty miles east of Forney, for weekly art lessons. Spellman majored in costume design at the Texas State College for Women in Denton (later Texas Woman's University), where she earned her bachelor of science degree in 1925. She received a master's degree in art from the Teachers' College at Columbia University in 1926. Spellman took art history and museum classes at Harvard University on a Carnegie Summer Scholarship in 1927 and from 1928 to 1929 attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied with notables Charles Locke, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Vyclav Vytlacil. After her year at the Art Students League, Spellman accepted a post in the art department at Texas State College for Women in Denton, where she taught until her retirement in 1974. She continued her art studies in summer classes with Carlos Merida (1932), Charles J. Martin (1933), and Eliot O'Hara (1936) and at the University of Colorado. She attended the University of Iowa from 1941 to 1942, where she earned a master of fine arts degree.

Coreen Mary Spellman
Adobe for Sale
ca. n.d.
Watercolor
15 x 21 inches

Spellman was a versatile artist, skilled in watercolor, etching, aquatint, mezzotint and was especially adept in lithography. She studied watercolor techniques with Chales Martin in Provincetown cand credits him with a masterful understanding of composition, apparent in her work. Her realistic style was suited to represent urban scenes, southwestern landscapes, and portraits. Her work demonstrates her interest in realism, precisionism and abstraction. 

Coreen Mary Spellman
Railroad Signal
ca. 1936
Oil on beaverboard
20 x 16 inches
Collection of Bill and Mary Cheek

Coreen Mary Spellman
Road Signs
ca. 1936
Oil on canvas
 28 1/4 × 36 1/4 inches
Dallas Museum of Art

Many of Spellman's compositions are characterized by a spare, grid-like geometry-an observation of man-made silent industrialism which included both interior scenes and landscapes.

Coreen Mary Spellman
Sun on the Kitchen Floor
ca. 1947
Lithograph
8 3/8 x 4 7/8 inches
Dallas Museum of Art

Coreen Mary Spellman
Krum Weighing Station, Krumca. 
ca. 1947
Lithograph
14 3/8 x 10 1/8 inches
Dallas Museum of Art

Coreen Spellman exhibited her work extensively throughout the Southwest and in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and New York. She won many prizes in competitive exhibitions. In 1932 the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) mounted her first solo exhibition, which was the first of more than thirteen solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Witte Museum in San Antonio (1933), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1933), the Santa Fe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1949), New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico (1949), and the Elisabet Ney Museum in Austin (1950). 

Coreen Mary Spellman
Nudeca. 
ca. 1929
Lithograph
 6 x 9 inches
Dallas Museum of Art

In 1932 one of Spellman's lithographs, Nude, was selected by the Society of Graphic Arts as one of the fifty best prints of the year, and in 1936 the American Artists Congress selected one of her mezzotints for inclusion in an exhibition of contemporary American prints that was held simultaneously in thirty cities in the United States. Her work was also represented in American Prize Prints of the 20th Century (1949).

Coreen Mary Spellman
Boats on the Lakeca. 
ca. 1959
Watercolor
 14 x 21 inches

Spellman was one of eight founding members of the Printmakers Guild (later the Texas Printmakers), a group of printmakers, originally all women, who proposed to inform the public about printmaking and give female printmakers an opportunity to show and sell their work through annual circulating print exhibitions. Spellman was active in the group, serving as president in 1946, until it disbanded in 1965. She was also a member of the Southern States Art League, Denton Art League, Delta Phi Delta,Delta Kappa Gamma Society, Associated Art Instructors of Texas, and National Women's Teacher Association. In addition to her teaching, exhibition, and club activities, Spellman lectured, illustrated books and pamphlets, and traveled extensively. For many summers she taught in New Mexico although she remained a resident of Denton. Spellman retired from Texas Woman's University in 1974. She died on October 15, 1978, and was honored posthumously by a portfolio of twelve lithographs assembled by the National Alumnae Association of Texas Woman's University. Several of her prints were exhibited in the 1990 exhibition The Texas Printmakers, 1940–1965. Her work is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Joslyn Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; the Dallas Museum of Art; the San Antonio Museum Association; Southern Methodist University, Dallas; Texas Woman's University, Denton; and numerous private collections.

Coreen Mary Spellman

The Red Barn 

ca. 1930s

Watercolor

Sources
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Coreen Mary Spellman, Texas State Historical Association, Kendall Curlee, https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsp29, retrieved June 7, 2015.

Peter Hastings Falk, ed., Who Was Who in American Art (Madison, Connecticut: Sound View, 1985). 

Graphic Works of the American Thirties (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977).

 Paul Rogers Harris, The Texas Printmakers, 1940–1965(Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 1990). Vertical Files, Special Collections, Texas Woman's University.

Phil Kovnick and Marian Yoshicki Kovnick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West, University of Texas Press, 1998, p. 287-288.

Dallas Museum of Art, Coreen Mary Spellman, https://www.dma.org/collection/artwork/coreen-mary-spellman, retrieved June 7, 2015.