Self-stylized artist, children’s book author-illustrator, and art teacher Merritt Mauzey documented rural life in twentieth-century Texas, primarily through his lithographs of Depression-era dryland cotton farmers. An associate of the Dallas Nine—a group of painters, printmakers, and sculptors active in Texas during the 1930s and 1940s who were inspired by the Southwest—Mauzey bought a lithographic press to print his own work and that of his colleagues. A curator from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, described his artwork as “the translation of cotton into art.”
Source: University of Southern Mississippi Library, Southwest Review
