From the Collection of Museum of the Southwest

Regional artist Merritt Mauzey (1898-1973) was “raised on cotton” on his family’s West Texas farm near Sweetwater. He saw cotton planted, cared for, and harvested each year of his life until failing crops compelled him to take a clerical job to support his new family. After relocating to Dallas in 1927, his long dormant urge to create was awakened by the urban environment. While still working full-time, he enrolled in classes at the Dallas Public Evening School in 1934, where he studied life drawing and printmaking. This exposure to printmaking led Mauzey to the decision that lithography would be the media best suited to his artistic needs. He purchased a secondhand press and three books on lithography, and proceeded to learn the process. Mauzey became one of the charter members of the well-known Lone Star Printmakers group.

Concerning his work he once wrote, “I think my somewhat primitive, awkward drawing has removed my lithographs from the common stereotype. This is the only way I can draw, but I feel like it has added earthiness to all my art, for all my art comes from the earth of my early days.”

The purpose of this work was to document that period of time referred to as the “last frontier of the dry-land cotton farmer.” Charles T. Bowling, Jerry Bywaters, Perry Nichols, William L. Lester, Everett Franklin Spruce, Alexandre Hogue, and Edward G. Eisenlohr were fellow regional artists influenced by Mauzey. Like Mauzey, their significance lies in the power of their prints to convey messages from a bygone era.

It was this ability to influence others for which Mauzey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts in 1946, the first Texan to receive that honor. Encouraged by the fellowship, he published children’s books as both author and artist, beginning with Cotton Farm Boy in 1955, to be followed by four others. His art has had truly international exposure, and gives all who view it a taste of what it was like to be “raised on cotton” in this region of the world known as West Texas.
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