Texas Scene

Media - 2016.38.68 - SAAM-2016.38.68_1 - 127065
Copied Jon Serl, Texas Scene, 1975, oil on board, 34 3⁄8 × 48 in. (87.3 × 121.9 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Margaret Z. Robson Collection, Gift of John E. and Douglas O. Robson, 2016.38.68, © 2000, Randall Morris

Artwork Details

Title
Texas Scene
Artist
Date
1975
Location
Not on view
Dimensions
34 3⁄8 × 48 in. (87.3 × 121.9 cm)
Copyright
© 2000, Randall Morris
Credit Line
The Margaret Z. Robson Collection, Gift of John E. and Douglas O. Robson
Mediums Description
oil on board
Classifications
Keywords
  • Figure group
  • Occupation — domestic — laundry
  • Landscape — Texas
Object Number
2016.38.68
Linked Open Data
https://edan.si.edu/saam/id/object/2016.38.68

Artwork Description

Jon Serl was born in upstate New York into a large family of itinerant vaudeville performers. He spent his youth performing and traveling, often playing female roles. He settled in the California desert south of Los Angeles and began an engagement with painting that consumed him for over forty years. Serl’s surreal imagery recalls his theatrical upbringing, flexible notions of family, views on gender binaries and fluid identities, and his own experience of low-income struggle and marginalization. Semi-narrative paintings like Texas Scene show a diverse array of characters, presented in a palette that favors emotion and psychological states of mind over realism. As the artist himself once explained, “You don’t see my paintings, you feel them.”
(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)

Exhibitions

Media - 2016.38.43R-V - SAAM-2016.38.43R-V_2 - 126225
We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection
July 1, 2022–March 26, 2023
Smithsonian American Art Museum
We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection traces the rise of self-taught artists in the twentieth century and examines how, despite wide-ranging societal, racial, and gender-based obstacles, their creativity and