Coreen Mary Spellman Papers

Coreen Mary Spellman (1905-1978) was born on March 17, 1905 in Forney, Texas. She was the second of six children of Michael and Carrie Huffines Spellman. Her father was a successful farmer and banker. Coreen was interested in art from an early age, which her parents nurtured, driving her to Dallas for weekly art lessons with Vivian Aunspaugh. She later enrolled in the College of Industrial Arts in Denton (later Texas State College for Women, now Texas Woman's University), where she received a baccalaureate in costume design in 1925. The following year, she earned a Master of Arts degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Spellman began teaching at the College of Industrial Arts upon her return to Texas and would continue teaching watercolor painting, printmaking, life drawing, and design in the art department there until her retirement in 1974. She also taught at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts School in the 1940s and was a visiting professor at Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville, Texas, Sui Ross State Teachers College, Alpine, Texas, and New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

Spellman continued her art studies while teaching. She received a Carnegie Scholarship for study at Harvard University during the summer of 1927. In 1928 and 1929 she studied under Kenneth Hayes Miller, Vaclav Vytlacil, and Charles Wheeler Locke at the Art Students League of New York. She studied under Carlos Merida at the Academy of San Carlos, Mexico City, during the summer of 1932, Charles J. Martin in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1933, and Eliot O'Hara in Goose Rocks Beach, Maine, in 1936. She also studied with William E. Schumacher in Colorado and attended the Art Institute of Chicago. She obtained a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa, Iowa City in 1942.

Spellman exhibited her work throughout the Southwest and in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Kansas, and New York in both solo and group exhibitions. Her first solo exhibition was in 1932 at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art). She had additional solo exhibitions at 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 included in the exhibition Between Two Wars: Prints by American Artists 1914-1941 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1942). Her work was also represented in American Prize Prints of the 20th Century (1949).

Spellman was a national officer of Delta Phi Delta and the founding sponsor of the chapter at Texas Woman's University (T.W.U.). She was the recipient of the President's Pioneer Woman Meritorious Service Medal and the Diamond Jubilee Huey Inaugural Medal from T.W.U. in appreciation of the many designs and illustrations she completed for the University, including the brick mural design for the Library Sciences building (1956). Her illustrations were also included in Spanish textbooks and maps published by D. C. Heath Company in the 1930s and 1940s. She was a founding member of the Printmaker's Guild, serving as President of the organization in 1947-1948, and had additional active affiliations with the Denton Art League, Southern States Art League, the Texas Fine Arts Association, and the Texas Watercolor Society.