The far West Texas town of Marfa — population 1,500 or so — first gained national notoriety as a desert art colony. Today you can walk the streets and pop into the kind of gallery you might expect to find in New York, Houston, or Santa Fe.
There is art in hidden places around Marfa, too, though. But you have to know where to look.
Rob D’Amico, reporter for the Big Bend Sentinel, recently wrote about such a place. He spoke to the Texas Standard about its history. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Tell us more about this mysterious locale you recently visited around Marfa. What are we talking about here?
Rob D’Amico: Well, I’m not going to tell you the location, and I’ll tell you why in a bit, but it’s down on the border, and the border’s about 60 miles south of Marfa, and it’s an abandoned, crumbling adobe house, and has something that’s kind of secret — although some people know about it.
But it’s also amazing, which is a series of, we call them murals, but they’re paintings on the wall, and they’re kind of… It’s not high art. They’re depictions — kind of whimsical depictions — of far West Texas ranch life.
Wow. Well, describe some of these in more detail. You say it’s not high art. Are we talking about spray-can art or what kind of art?
Well, no, they’re paintings and they’re painted on plastered adobe walls and they are depictions of this ranch life. They’re kind of like, again, kind of cartoonish scenes.
There’s one where a cow is chasing a rancher and the cow’s got a hot brand in his mouth so he’s turning the tables on the rancher. There’s a bunkhouse where all these ranch hands are playing pranks on each other about to light gunpowder and tickling each other’s feet and there’s a couple that’s having their first romance on the the plains.
And the mystery was who did these paintings? Couldn’t figure it out because they weren’t signed with the exception of one and it was kind of a signature that you wouldn’t recognize unless you did a lot of research.
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Who was it? Was it somebody that was recognizable or what?
At first we thought it was a local cowboy artist who was famous for doing kind of ranch scenes in Alpine. Then we discovered it wasn’t and the clue actually came from my neighbor, former county judge Monroe Elms, who knew the owner of that house and once he told me who the owner was.
We kind of contacted the family and they said, this is who did it: It was their grandmother, Evelyn Davis, who’s actually famous for painting these kinds of scenes around Marfa, but more astoundingly the other person was a nationally syndicated political cartoon artist named Etta Hulme — the first female syndicated political cartoon artist in the U.S.
Wait a minute, do you have any rough date for when this art was made?
We did, because the one painting that was definitely done by Etta Hulme was dated 1950.
So this was just way back when and apparently these two women struck up a temporary, but close, friendship and they would go down to this adobe house on the border when it was 108 degrees outside and drink a little libations and just paint away the days, just to kind of get away.
That is incredible, absolutely incredible. And so through the years, this house just sat there, what, crumbling? Was anyone living there or what do you know about this house?
Now, when the last occupant died, it became empty. And yeah, when you say “crumbling,” I mean, when I step over the boards with nails and I’m in the broken glass, I am cognizant that the roof might fall at any point.
Yikes.
But it is remarkable in that Etta Hulme, you know, she went on to work for the Texas Observer briefly, and then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram for many, many years until 2008. And she died in 2018, but she did thousands of political cartoons and was very well-known.
So to kind of have this snapshot of her in the middle of nowhere… She was not from here. She spent a lot of time at Disney studios in California actually working on some of their productions like “Song of the South.” So to kind of picture how these two women got together in the middle of nowhere for just this brief period of time and did these scenes is pretty outstanding.
Did they seem to be living in the house or did they just go off on day trips? Is there any way of knowing?
From what I heard from the relatives, it literally was like day trips, like “let’s get out of town.” And to tell you the truth, I can’t be certain if it wasn’t just one trip or they were there for quite a while.
I mean, there’s numerous scenes painted on the walls. But again, from what I understand, they just used it as kind of a getaway.
Is it on a main thoroughfare? I know you’re wanting to be careful about this, for I presume you want to preserve this. You don’t want people coming down there, the possibility of vandalism, that kind of thing, right?
Yeah, I mean, there’s no main thoroughfares out here.
I’m just exaggerating, but the house is definitely off the beaten path. It’s kind of tucked into some high mesquite trees. Unless you were just very careful in what you were looking for, you’d never see it.
How many people know where this is, would you guess?
Well, it’s interesting because there’s what we call the signature wall where people have come in and it’s amazing that the place hasn’t experienced any significant graffiti. No one’s marked over it or anything, but there are hundreds of signatures, most of them in pencil.
So it’s almost like they had a pencil there where you could sign one of the walls and it has the names of the people and the dates and they’re just over the decades. And you could tell some people also used it as a party house, you know, there’s no sofa and everything. And so people at least knew about it through time, but in my encounters out here with people and the people that have also toured the house with me were totally unaware of it. And the people we’ve talked to were unaware as well.
The Presidio County Historical Commission, knows about it now and they really want to do something to preserve it — both against vandalism, but also just because this house may fall to the ground. So the idea is being, can we get this plaster off these walls? You know, could we actually transport these paintings somewhere where they were on display for the public and protected, too?
And some of the archeologists around here are very familiar with adobe and plaster and they’re like scratching their heads. So the historical commission at least has commissioned a really good photographer to at least go ahead and document these walls.
Rob, if I were in your shoes, I’d be a little afraid to go with the story that you did. Are you concerned that maybe the story or our conversation might attract unwanted attention?
You know, we gave that a lot of thought and we’ve been sitting on this for months and months. And in the end, we felt that it might be good to just give kind of a peek at this because it might get more momentum going to actually doing something to preserve them.And it is so hidden that anyone who actually was smart enough to find it would probably not be the kind of person that was going to do any damage.
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