The Roswell Museum Federal Art Center

Exhibitions

The exhibition schedule included traveling shows assembled by the Federal Art Project (FAP), and locally-organized installations. Shows rotated quickly, with the main gallery usually featuring at least two FAP-organized exhibitions per month. Exhibitions were often combined, allowing visitors to see different types of work at once.  FAP shows often traveled by train, and art centers adhered to a specific schedule to ensure that they reached their destinations on time.


Paperwork accompanied every exhibition, which included checklists, shipping receipts, and schedules. Although the federal government usually paid for the shipping, individual art centers were responsible for making sure that each exhibition was shipped to its next destination on time. 



The exhibitions included an eclectic range of materials, from contemporary artwork produced by FAP workshops, to historical lithographs and photographic reproductions. Single-artist shows, such as a selection of watercolors from Erica Karawina (1904-1989), were frequent, as were group exhibitions or thematic topics.



The Roswell Museum also showed historical and anthropological materials, such as an exhibition on Mayan civilization organized by Tulane University. While most exhibits featured original art work, the Mayan exhibition included casts of sculpture, and a show of contemporary drawings from 1939 featured only reproductions. Some subjects were shown on multiple occasions, as was the case with the Index of American Design, which was exhibited on at least three occasions in 1938, 1940, and 1941. Locally-organized exhibitions included archaeological materials, antiques, and paintings by area artists. In 1930s Roswell, a museum visitor could view contemporary lithographs produced in New York, antiques from local collectors, and more. During the summer months of 1938 alone, the Roswell Museum hosted exhibitions about contemporary California mosaics, Currier and Ives prints, and oil and watercolor paintings.



 

Other shows explored New Mexico’s different cultures. Native American exhibitions appear in the schedule regularly, and encompassed historical artifacts as well as student painting from the Santa Fe Indian School. Hispanic traditions were also addressed, with examples including an exhibition highlighting santos, and a selection of plates from the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design, a set of fifty hand-colored woodblock and linocut prints illustrating different examples of Spanish Colonial decorative art in New Mexico. 



Something about local exhibitions.

Locals were periodically encouraged to supplement touring exhibitions with their own art or artifacts. In the case of the 1938 showing of the Index of American Design, for instance, the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution organized a show of antiques to be exhibited at the same time. Roswell residents were also invited to submit their objects for consideration in the Index, with qualified objects being recorded through watercolor renderings. Later that year, the Roswell Museum invited locals to bring their own Currier and Ives prints to supplement an exhibition organized by the Library of Congress. In perhaps the most elaborate example of community participation, a traveling exhibition of flower paintings was augmented with both a selection of local, juried flower paintings, and several arrangements of cut flowers from the Roswell Garden Club. By inviting residents to supplement rotating exhibitions with their own material, the Roswell Museum encouraged the community to contribute to exhibition content, a proactive role that underscored the participatory, educational focus of community art centers. The Roswell Museum presented itself as a collaborator even as it sought to educate visitors about its own beliefs regarding what constituted good art.  

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