Minor Regional Novelist at Nature of Things
This spring, the Dallas gallery Nature of Things opens Minor Regional Novelist, an exhibition that revisits the idea of regionalism through the lens of Texas artists across generations. Bringing together works by members of the Lone Star Regionalist movement, Texas folk artists, and contemporary practitioners, the exhibition asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to make art from a place?
The title borrows from a sweatshirt once worn by Texas novelist Larry McMurtry in the 1960s and ’70s, which itself referenced an early critical dismissal of his writing. Like McMurtry’s self-aware appropriation, the exhibition takes a label that historically carried diminutive connotations, “regional,” and treats it as something worth reconsidering.
For gallery director Tessa Granowski, the question feels particularly relevant today.
“I was particularly interested in what regional means right now, in an age of technology, because so many of us ‘live’ on the internet,” she says. “I think there is starting to be a reaction in artwork against globalization and a return to the local.”
Texas, she notes, has long been fertile ground for artists attentive to the environment around them. The region’s physical and cultural landscape, its weather, vast skies, flat terrain, and layered histories, continues to shape the work of artists living and working here.
“More than any other place I’ve lived or been,” Granowski says, “there’s a recurring curiosity toward the landscape, the weather, the big sky, the flatness, the people, the history here.”
That curiosity formed the foundation of the Lone Star Regionalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s, when artists such as Jerry Bywaters and Alexandre Hogue sought to create work rooted in the realities of the American Southwest rather than in European traditions. Granowski points to a remark Bywaters made after traveling in Mexico in the 1920s that still resonates today.
“I know now that art, to be significant, must be a reflection of life; that it must be understandable to the layman; and that it must be a part of a people’s thought,” Bywaters wrote at the time. “If I had Diego Rivera’s insight, I might have learned my lesson by sitting and studying my dog or by looking at a tree in the backyard.”
For Granowski, the enduring relevance of that idea lies in how intensely local observations can become universal. She points to works that shaped her own understanding of art, from Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, as examples of cultural specificity that ultimately transcend place.
“Both happened to be profound expressions of the local,” she says, “to the point where it becomes universal.”
The exhibition’s structure reflects that philosophy. Works by historical figures associated with Lone Star Regionalism appear alongside contemporary artists working in Texas today, creating unexpected visual conversations across decades.
Granowski has been particularly struck by the continuities that emerge when these works share space.
“I have been excited by the contextual similarities that have started to happen, how a still life or portrait can evoke similar energy even when made ninety years apart,” she says.
At the same time, the contrasts between generations often surface through materials. While earlier works in the exhibition tend toward traditional media such as painting and printmaking, many of the contemporary artists experiment with unconventional materials tied directly to the region.
An example is a piece by El Paso artist Ali Dipp constructed entirely from denim and thread, a reference to the city’s long-standing denim manufacturing industry. Another is Sam Linguist’s canvases made from Texas clay, embedding the material reality of the state directly into the artwork itself.
Together, these works trace an evolving conversation about place, one that stretches from the early twentieth century to the present day while remaining grounded in the particularities of Texas life.
In an era when artists increasingly operate within global networks, Minor Regional Novelist suggests that the local remains an inexhaustible source of meaning. What once might have been dismissed as “regional” instead emerges as a way of paying close attention to the world immediately around us.
Minor Regional Novelist opens March 14, 2026, at Nature of Things in Dallas and remains on view through May 23.