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Description

Rare Pictorial Map of Texas State Women's College by noted Texas artist (and TSWC Art Professor) Coreen Spellman.

Oriented with east at the top, the map provides a lively pictorial look at the campus of TSWC, the first all women's public university in Texas.  The campus buildings and streets are shown, as are a number of the local shops, the Gallopin' Goose bus, althletic fields, golf course, etc.

The map provides a rich imagery of the campus and its students -- a remarkably different imagery than those of most of her contemporaries.

The map is signed at the top of the title cartouche by Coreen Spellman, who majored in Costume Design at TSWC in 1925, when it was still called College of Industrial Arts., returning to the school as an Art Department Instructor in about 1930 (see complete bio below), where she taught until 1974.  A skilled artist and lithographer, she produced at least 2 pictorial maps of the campus, the first in 1928 and this second map in 1947, after the campus had more than doubled in size.

Texas State Women's College / Texas Woman's University

In the late nineteenth century, several Texas-based groups, including the Texas Press Women's Association, the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, the Grange, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, sought to esatablish a state women's college focused on a practical education, including domestic skills young women would need to prepare as wives and mothers.

In 1901, the creation of the school was authorized by the Texas Legislature. Originally named the Texas Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences, the school opened in Denton in 1902 .  The school was soon renamed the Girls Industrial College in 1903 and conferred its first degrees the following year. In 1905, the name changed again to the College of Industrial Arts and expanded its programs to include liberal arts, fine arts, and sciences.

The school was primarily focused on rural and small town women seeking vocational training.  The school was the first in Texas to offer instruction in home economics, supplying an overwhelming majority of the state's high school teachers in home economics in the early twentieth century. In 1914, the school implemented its first four-year college curriculum, and the first bachelor's degrees were conferred in 1915.

By 1929, the college had expanded its programs sufficiently to be accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, the American Association of University Women, and the Association of American Universities. In 1930, the school began offering its first master's degrees. In 1934, the school underwent another name change to the Texas State College for Women (TSCW) to reflect its growing reputation as a premiere institution of higher education for women in the state.

In 1950, TSCW developed the first nationally accredited nursing program in the state, opening at the original Parkland Hospital in downtown Dallas in 1954, and joining the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies in the 1960s, receiving a series of research grants from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study the health effects on humans in space flights.

In 1956, it established the first building in Texas dedicated solely to the instruction of library sciences. Finally, in 1957, the school changed its name for the fourth time to Texas Woman's University, and expanded its health sciences programs to a campus in Houston in 1960.

The college also enjoyed a close relationship with Texas A&M University in College Station in the early and mid-twentieth century. As the only gender segregated public colleges in Texas at the time, the schools generated considerable media attention for their institutional-supported fraternizing at major sporting and social events; for several decades, a "Tessie" was named the "Aggie Sweetheart" at A&M's football rivalry matchup. The practice ended in the 1970s when each school began admitting both male and female students

TSCW originally admitted only white students. The university integrated in 1961.  

Rarity

We were unable to locate any other examples of the map.

OCLC locates a single example of her 1928 map at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Condition Description
Several marginal tears, entering the printed image, expertly repaired on the verso.
Coreen Mary Spellman Biography

The following is excerpted from the Texas State History website.

Coreen Mary Spellman, printmaker, painter, and teacher, was born on March 17, 1905, in Forney, Texas . . . Coreen was interested in art from an early age, and her parents, neither of whom were artistically inclined, nurtured her talent. By the time she entered adolescence her father was driving her to Dallas, twenty miles west of Forney, for weekly art lessons with Vivian L. Aunspaugh. 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. She received a Carnegie scholarship to study at Harvard University in 1927m attended th Art Institute of Chicago, and from 1928 to 1929 attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied with 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 was skilled in watercolor, etching, aquatint, and mezzotint and was particularly fluent in lithography. . . 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 like 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). 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).

 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. . . . 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, she lectured, illustrated books and pamphlets, and traveled extensively. For many summers she taught in New Mexico. Spellman retired from Texas Woman's University in 1974.

[Spellman] 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.