The Art of Bill Hutson: The homecoming of a native San Marcos artist

In the dense early fog of Dec. 1, as Sights and Sounds prepared for its first night, a small truck — Atelier 4 — arrived at the San Marcos Art Space in downtown San Marcos, a stop along their coast to coast delivery route.

As the drivers unloaded their cargo from Lancaster, Penn., the fruits of more than two years of planning took a major step toward physical reality — the presentation of a citywide exhibition celebrating the artwork and legacy of visual artist/painter Bill Hutson.

As more than 60 artworks were unpacked, the excitement of the adults from five local art venues was easily comparable to that of children’s anticipation of the local holiday carnival’s opening.

Who is Bill Hutson? And why all the excitement?

Bill Hutson was born in 1936 in San Marcos at the family’s rough-hewn ‘shotgun’ house on Center Street across the street from what was then the San Marcos “colored school” and where the Dunbar Community Center stands now. The Hutson family, like many others, struggled to make ends meet in that time of Depression, segregation and WWII. In 1942, his musician father, Floyd Waymon Hutson, died of influenza. The elder Hutson had been a go-to entertainer at local meetings — white as well as Black — and a leader in the Black community, co-organizing, for example, a large celebration for the 70th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation — a forerunner of Juneteenth.

Because his father passed away when Hutson was only five, he knew almost nothing about his father or his father’s past.

Widowed, his mother, Mattie Edwards Hutson, worked to support the family as a custodian at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, in San Marcos. The children also chipped in, jumping on the day labor wagon to work on the farms, assist at construction sites and other odd jobs. The tightknit community of Black families, then unwelcome in the white downtown and stores, established a barter and trade economy of their own to get by. The children’s education, provided by the school across the street, was rudimentary for the most part, but provided a platform for future learning and slowly expanding opportunities. And he never had to worry about being late for class, he said, because he could hear the bell and just run across the street.

Art was not part of the curriculum — in fact, Hutson said he had never heard of art, nor met an artist while living in San Marcos. Helping his mother one day at her job, he remembers seeing a picture on the wall of an outdoor scene. “Why would someone put a picture of the outside on the wall when they could just look out the window?” he recalled.

“That’s a painting,” she replied.

He asked, “What’s a painting?”

In spite of not knowing what art was, he had, nonetheless, already started drawing, especially during trying times when his mother was often sick. As a teenager Bill responded to a popular “Draw Me” advertisement from a nationally-known correspondence course, Famous Artists School, to learn how to draw cartoons. When he was accepted, he paid for the mailed instructions and evaluations by mowing lawns and running errands. When he was 15, shortly before the death of his mother, he received an award from the school. This, he said, emboldened him to take one of his cartoons to the San Marcos Daily Record, which at that time was located downtown. When the newspaper accepted it for publication it was “…surprising,” he said, “considering I was just a young black boy walking in off the street.”

In 1952, after three years of illness, much of it in the Gary Air Force Base Hospital, Hutson’s mother passed away. He and his siblings were immediately taken to live with his mother’s sister in San Antonio in what he describes as a “drug- and violence-ridden” project on the historically Black east side. Again he lived across the street from school — the segregated Phillis Wheatley High School.

Distraught from family losses and having left all he had known behind, he claims to have barely passed his classes and was frequently in trouble for drawingon his papers instead of doing assignments. He graduated in the Spring — the same time and year, 1954, as the “Brown vs. Board of Education” law was passed — and immediately enlisted in the Air Force, where he became an airborne radar technician.

When he was honorably discharged from the Air Force, he applied for a job in that field, but because of his race was refused the job. While he was disappointed at the time in not being able to pursue his radar technician expertise, he realizes that his life would have taken an entirely different course than it has. Thus had begun his life of travel — and his commitment to art.

In 1960, Hutson attended classes at the San Francisco Academy of Art, then moved to New York City, which had become a vibrant nucleus of empowerment for the Black Arts Movement. Over the trajectory of his career, Hutson traveled extensively in the U.S. and to more than 22 countries. He also spent a significant amount of time living and working abroad in England, France, Italy, Holland, Senegal and Nigeria.

His travels introduced him to influential abstractionists such as Roberto Matta Echaurren, Joan Mitchell, Beauford Delaney, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Lawrence Compton-Kolawole, Edward Clark and Sam Middleton — the latter two became life-long friends and sparked an interest in African philosophy that often translates into his work. Abstract art became his most fluent and personalized visual language.

Over the years, Hutson was recognized internationally as an artist, curator, amateur archivist and educator. He has received prestigious awards and his artwork is represented in both private and public collections of major museums here and abroad.

After a lifetime of travel, Hutson currently lives in Lancaster, Penn., where he is an Assistant Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History and Jennie Brown Cook and Betsy Hess Cook Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Franklin and Marshall College. His art and archives are housed in the permanent collection at the college’s Phillips Museum of Art.

Hutson is among the most internationally-distinguished but locally unknown cultural icons with roots in San Marcos. It was by chance that he was “discovered” here long after much of the rest of the art world had recognized him.

A city-wide exhibit has been curated by a collaboration of five community art venues: the Calaboose African American History Museum, the Price Center, the San Marcos Art League, the Texas State University College of Art and Design and the Walkers’ Gallery. Each venue will display distinctly unique selections of Hutson’s work on loan from the Phillips Museum of Art.

An essential feature of this exhibit is his large painting “Homestead” and its preparatory studies with signs, symbols and numbers from 1979–1990. The piece is an abstract representation of memories of his early life growing up in what is now known as the Dunbar neighborhood, including signs and symbols referencing the region’s Indigenous heritage. It was installed in August at the Galleries at Texas State Mitte Building of Art and Design.

The rest of the artworks that arrived by truck, after framing and other preparation, will be installed at the venues with anticipated opening dates in January. A group tour and reception is being planned in February. At the exhibit’s completion, the art will return to the Phillips Museum of Art in April.

The coordinators of this citywide exhibit are grateful to the Phillips Museum of Art for their enthusiastic facilitation of this project; the support of the San Marcos Arts Commission that has made this project possible; the independent participation and in-kind support from Texas State School of Fine Arts; the City of San Marcos; and the San Marcos Public Library and promotional support from the San Marcos Convention and Visitor Bureau.

Bill Hutson still owns the property on Center Street where he was born and raised, and has family in the area — yet he has never had an exhibit in Texas. The coordinators are proud and to bring this exhibition to San Marcos and invite everyone to spread the word and join in for the upcoming celebration.

This article is part one of a series on the life and work of Bill Hutson.