The Dallas Country Club isn’t a venue that’s typically associated with cowboy art. But the country club’s ballroom was filled with it one day last week, when Alan White and PlainsCapital Bank presented a one-day exhibition of paintings and bronze sculptures by members of the prestigious Cowboys Artists of America organization.
The 25 artworks, which were shipped to Dallas from the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, where they’d been on exhibit, were in North Texas only briefly en route at White’s expense to Oklahoma City, where the CAA has its headquarters. There, some of the pieces will be put up for auction at the group’s annual show at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum October 9-12.
The September 8 event at the DCC attracted more than 240 guests with interests in the West and Western art, including Sarah and business titan Ross Perot Jr.; R. Gerald Turner, president of Southern Methodist University; banker Elaine Agather; cowboy poet and western entertainer Red Steagall; and energy magnate Trevor Rees-Jones. Rees-Jones, who’s a Western art collector of some renown, spotted CAA member Martin Grelle at the door and pumped his hand. “I’ve got some of your pieces,” Rees-Jones said to the Clifton-born artist, whose oil painting, “Plans Against the Pecunies,” was on display nearby.
Grelle had just been talking with another CAA member, Bruce R. Greene, whose painting, “The Heroes at Home,” was also hanging in the show. (In all eight CAA artists attended the exhibit.) Greene had been praising White and PlainsCapital, which donated the money for the Dallas exhibit two years ago in conjunction with the CAA’s golden anniversary.
“PlainsCapital also got on board with us” to help bankroll a 50th anniversary book titled “The Sons of Charlie Russell,” Greene explained. The book was written by B. Byron Price, director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma. Price and White, it turns out, went to high school together in Lubbock.
Guests at the DCC show received complementary copies of the “Sons of Charlie Russell” book, which also was underwritten by BNSF Railway Co. of Fort Worth and Matthew Rose, the BNSF chairman emeritus. The handsome, 232-page volume included “Tributes” to the CAA penned by former President George W. Bush, baseball great Nolan Ryan, and Fort Worth philanthropist/art collector Anne Marion, as well as by White, Rose, and Steagall.
