Tom Lea Month 2011
Videos of Presentations

 

Tom Lea at War
presented by Dr. Bruce Cole, past Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Dr. Bruce Cole discovered Tom Lea while serving as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2001-2009. He recently visited an exhibition of World War II art at the American Constitution Center in Philadelphia and was struck by the power of Tom Lea’s eye-witness accounts.

 

 

Tom Lea’s World War II Sketchbook at the El Paso Museum of Art
presented by Dr. Michael Tomor, Director of the El Paso Museum of Art

Dr. Michael Tomor shares drawings from Tom Lea’s 1942 Sketchbook, created while Lea was on the USS Hornet and USS Grouper in the Coral Sea, on view in the Tom Lea Gallery. Dr. Tomor will compare sketches to the final oil paintings Lea completed after returning home from war.

 

 

Benito Juárez to Chiang Kai-Shek:
Tom Lea’s Historic Portraits and the Stories behind Them
presented by Adair Margo, President of the Tom Lea Institute

Benito Juárez to Chiang Kai-Shek:
Tom Lea’s Historic Portraits and the Stories behind Them

Over his lifetime, Lea painted some of the world’s most interesting personalities including General Claire Chennault, Jimmy Doolittle, and Madame and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. He also painted close friends J. Frank Dobie, Bill Burrows, Charles Leavell, Carl Hertzog and Catalan sculptor Urbici Soler. Margo, who recorded Lea’s oral history in 1993, will relay the reverence Lea felt for portraiture and the personalities behind the faces he chose to paint.

 

 

A Texas Exile in Mexico, A Mexican Exile in Texas: Tom Lea’s Advocacy of the Unbounded Identity in “The Wonderful Country”
presented by Daniel Irving

Daniel Irving illuminates the fluidity of identity in Lea’s character Martin Brady (aka Martin Bredi) in The Wonderful Country and probes the question of which side of the river is home to a person who identifies with two cultures, two languages and two ways of life.

 

 

American Aficionados, Tom Lea and Ernest Hemingway
presented by Dr. Mimi Gladstein
NOTE: Begins at the 33 minute mark of the video.

Dr. Gladstein compares Hemingway’s perspective on the bullfight in The Sun Also Rises and Death in the Afternoon with Lea’s more interior exploration of the bullfighter and his entourage in The Brave Bulls.

 

 

Whispering Like A Mountain: The Life Conversation of Tom Lea and J. Frank Dobie
presented by Brandon Shuler

Tom Lea and J. Frank Dobie were close friends and giants of Texas literature and art. They enjoyed a lifetime of correspondence, resulting in hundreds of letters. Brandon Shuler, a Ph.D. candidate in literature and history at Texas Tech University, shares insights into the relationship of these two men and illuminates the reasons behind the temporary break in their friendship.