Queer Places:
Restland Memorial Park
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas, USA
Florence McClung (July 12, 1894 – 1992) was an American painter,
printmaker, and art teacher. She was the daughter of Charles W. and Minerva
(McCoy) White and was born at
St. Louis,
Missouri,
on July 12, 1894. She moved to
Dallas in
1899 and lived there until her death. She was related to the Dallas Nine, an
influential group of Dallas-based artists.
After having studied for a career as a concert pianist, McClung studied pastel with Frank Reaugh in the early 1920s and then learnt from Olin Travis and Alexandre Hogue.[1] She painted for periods of time in Taos between 1928 and 1932, thus joining a circle that included Hogue, Mabel Dodge Luhan and Tony Luhan and the Taos Society of Artists.[2]
McClung became an active member of the Printmakers Guild (renamed Texas Printmakers in 1952) in the 1940s and 50s. This guild was a small group of Texas Women artists founded as a consequence of the exclusion of women from the Lone Star Printmakers of Dallas, headed by Hogue and Bywaters. In 1945, she was elected the Director of Texas Fine Arts Association, now known as the Texas Visual Arts Association. In 1946, she was elected to the board of directors of the Southern States Art League.[3]
McClung's later works were mostly serigraphs. As she approached her early sixties in the mid-1950s she began to lose her sight and decreased her productivity. She eventually became blind in her right eye following an operation in 1986. Another possible explanation of her decrease in activity was that it became difficult for her to "reconcile her love for rural countryside with the growing urban character of Dallas".[3]
Her art always remained deeply linked to the Texas identity: "Underlying the work and reflected in all its manifestations is a clearly defined purpose: to make a vivid, permanent record of those phases of southwestern life which even now are disappearing".[4] Before she died, McClung gave several of her paintings to the Dallas Museum of Art.[5]
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