LOCAL ARTISTS
Bill Hutson is a San Marcos native that went on to become a very famous artist, even having an exhibit at The Centre Pompidou in Paris. Hutson passed away in 2022, but community members are finding ways to memorialize him, while preserving local Black history.
A portion of Let’s Call It This (Study for the Black Painting), 1970. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art
Linda Kelsey-Jones, the former Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos ArtSpace coordinator, is one of the locals leading the charge to honor Hutson in San Marcos. She said Hutson was born in his family home in the Dunbar neighborhood on Centre Street in 1936. He lost his father — a local, revered musician — when he was a toddler and his mother in his teens.
Kelsey-Jones said he and his family were not well off; he and his siblings were forced to work, and he preferred working with carpenters over tending the fields, which Kelsey-Jones said “ties in to his work later because he had a very keen eye for construction and appreciation for architecture.” Hutson started art as a child, copying newspaper comics. He came across an ad, that Kelsey-Jones suggested was most likely a scam, in which one one could submit their cartoons and take a course; They sent him a paper award for his work, which emboldened him to take it to the newspaper.
“He took his most recent cartoon to the Record, which was on the square at that time; which was not within the red line of where Black people were supposed to be, but he went there, took it there, showed it to the editor,” Kelsey-Jones said. “He was 15 then, and he said that he wanted to become a cartoonist. And they accepted the cartoon and printed it.”
When Hutson’s mother passed away when he was 15 years old, he was forced to move to San Antonio. He joined the Air Force as a radar technician when he graduated high school but was unable to get a job doing that when he got out because of his skin color. He subsequently moved to California to live with his Uncle and started hanging out with a lot of “beatniks,” the artist subculture of the time.
“Getty had a bookstore in San Francisco, and a lot of poets and artists hung out there,” Kelsey-Jones said. “Bill started looking at art books, and he just was so inspired by them.”
Hutson moved to New York to experience the Harlem Renaissance, in which Black art and culture was thriving. He wasn’t a fan of New York and, later, went to Paris. All the while his artistic acumen grew, as did his fame.
Hutson lived several other places and travelled quite a bit, finally landing in Pennsylvania. He taught a guest course at Franklin & Marshall in Lancaster.
“He was so popular, and his students were just crazy about him that they eventually wanted him to stay on as faculty,” Kelsey-Jones said. “So he stayed there, and he became part of the community, bought property, a studio that he had, and he worked there and had a lot of exhibits.”
Hutson had a goal during his life that would become a reality after.
“He came to San Marcos in 1973 because he had a vision of making a park where his family homestead was,” Kelsey-Jones said. “He went to Planning and Zoning to propose a kind of joint ownership where the city would manage it, but he could create a memorial to his parents there.”
Though Hutson was never successful in that goal, Kelsey-Jones and several other members of the Calaboose African American History Museum board are ensuring that his vision comes to life. The land has already been donated to the Calaboose, and the memorial park is soon to be a reality; they plan to use the park plans that Hutson himself came up with and were found during the settling of his estate.
And that’s not all San Marcans are doing to honor one of its own. At one point, while Hutson was still alive but too ill to attend, several local organizations gathered together to curate some of his work and held a Bill Hutson exhibit in his hometown. There is also a stained glass piece being made by local artist Kathryn Welch that is inspired by Hutson’s work and will go in the San Marcos Public Library once complete.
