{"id":188826,"date":"2026-03-03T19:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T19:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/188826\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T19:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T19:40:10","slug":"letter-from-the-publisher-texas-topographies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/188826\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter from the Publisher: Texas Topographies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Here are a few things you may or may not know about Texas: It is big, about 800 miles in diameter. It is many states, subcultures, ideologies, and ways of thought, all crammed into one landmass.\u00a0It is unwieldy. It isn\u2019t all cowboys. But it isn\u2019t not cowboys, either. It is one of the best places in the U.S., and dare I say the Americas, for art.\u00a0It has, as I learned from Glasstire\u2019s William Sarradet, 10 distinct ecoregions.\u00a0It is home to 3 of our country\u2019s 10 most populous cities.\u00a0It is woefully overlooked by many who either think it is a backwater, don\u2019t understand its sophistication, or actively dismiss it.<\/p>\n

For March, as part of Glasstire\u2019s 25th anniversary celebration<\/a>, we\u2019re looking at what Texas is. This in itself is difficult to do because Texas is many things to many people. It\u2019s hard to pin down a common ideology or through line that everyone can agree on, in part because a person\u2019s landscape and the surrounding culture it fosters shapes their experiences, and West Texas is a far cry from the Piney Woods.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But still, there\u2019s a spirit that, though nearly undefinable, snakes its way<\/a> through Texans, both native and adopted. For both better and worse, it\u2019s a sort of rugged, proud individualism that feels markedly different from the rest of the U.S. It\u2019s what makes Texans feel like they have the power to secede \u2014 a \u201cyou can\u2019t tell us what to do\u201d defiance of everything else.<\/p>\n

This bleeds into the aesthetic of the state\u2019s artists. While I think defining a specific Texas art style is near impossible, for the same reasons listed above, in my recent essay on Robert Rauschenberg<\/a>, I took a stab at it this way: \u201cArtists who were raised in or adopt the state have a shared sensibility that\u2019s hard to pin down. It is a bit, but not entirely, a visual aesthetic; similarly, it is an ideological ruggedness and independence \u2014 not from anything particular, but from everything, altogether.\u201d<\/p>\n

Glasstire\u2019s work, as I see it, has always been to catalog and critique the many different ideas imbued in the art coming out of our state, and to reflect those ideas back at both Texas\u2019 citizenry and our international audience of readers. We try to stay away from grandiose statements, instead favoring reflection, analysis, consideration, and, yes, maybe just a touch of mythologizing. (With Texas, it\u2019s hard not to.)<\/p>\n

As such, this month, our writers are taking a magnifying glass to what this state promises itself to be and actually is. You can expect an Art Dirt podcast episode in which Glasstire\u2019s Editor-in-Chief, Jessica Fuentes, and I try to pin down how to define Texas; essays about how the state\u2019s distinct regions manifest themselves; and the kickoff of our statewide panel discussion series, Talking Texas Art<\/a>, in Dallas-Fort Worth. <\/p>\n

You can follow all of our 25th anniversary content by clicking\u00a0here<\/a>. Thanks for reading, and go see some art!<\/p>\n

\u2014 Brandon Zech, Publisher\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here are a few things you may or may not know about Texas: It is big, about 800…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[66845,75178,27,29,28],"class_list":["post-188826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-glasstire-25","tag-glasstire-25-texas-topographies","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}