The Texas State Committee of NMWA
April 1983: Founder and President of the National Museum of Women in the Arts Wilhelmina (Billie) C. Holladay met with Texan and Washington D.C. lady of note, Elizabeth S. Hutchinson in Dallas. They began a tour across Texas to meet with prominent ladies who might have interest in the founding of a national museum solely dedicated to women’s art. They were greeted with rapt interest. This nascent commitment of interested women across the state was the beginning of the Texas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The official formation of the Texas Committee was announced at a tea at the Executive Mansion, hosted by Linda Gail White, wife of the Governor and Honorary Chairman of the Committee in October 1985. Contributions and donations flowed from Texas to Washington, D.C. as the museum passed from idea, to floor plan, to steel and stone. A renovated Renaissance Revival Masonic temple became the elegant home of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. The dream of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and her husband, Wallace F. Holladay, was realized when the doors of the NMWA opened in the spring of 1987. For the past thirty years the Texas Committee has embraced the Museum’s mission to celebrate the achievements of women in the visual, performing, and literary arts. The Texas Committee’s mandated membership of forty continues to provide unflagging advocacy—through participation, donation, and support for outstanding exhibitions, acquisitions, and increasingly, through the NMWA’s public programs, which focus on women’s roles in social change. Looking forward, the Texas Committee seeks to extend from the hub of the NMWA a network of connectivity. The Texas Committee’s website is a virtual conduit, providing a flow of information about the NMWA to museums, major galleries, and university and college centers of learning, artists, and supporters of the arts—by providing information of women’s artistic explorations, achievements, and exhibitions at the national level of the NMWA, as well as throughout state and regional levels in Texas. Look for a series of profiles of the founding members of the Texas Committee to the right.
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IN TRIBUTE Caroline Rose Hunt Caroline Rose Hunt needs no honorific before her name: Her accomplishments precede her. Scion of a legendary Texas family, she was born into a position of influence in Dallas but she has not rested on inherited laurels. To begin: she is the mother of five children, grandmother to nineteen, and great-grandmother to 22. Her family is her greatest wellspring of pride. She has been an hôtelière extraordinaire, opening the Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek and founding Rosewood Hotels and Resorts in 1979; a novelist and, as an accomplished gourmet culinarian, a writer of cook books. In 1990 she developed a line of bath and skin products with a signature scent, Tryst. Her entrepreneurship has set a tone of elegance in all of her endeavors. Caroline Rose Hunt holds honorary doctorates from Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, Virginia and the University of Texas, Austin and a notable list of honors that span decades from the 1980’s to the present.
Elizabeth Stafford Hutchinson, 1920-2010 When Elizabeth Stafford Hutchinson met Wilhelmina Cole Holladay in 1956, neither had any inkling of the bond they would one day share over the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Born in 1920 in Palestine, Texas, Hutchinson was a Texan through and through. Her unwavering enthusiasm and spirit had been among the museum’s most valuable tools in its efforts to become a reality and success. Hutchinson was a founding member; trustee, past secretary, and vice president emerita of the museum. |
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© 2018 Texas State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts