City of Fort Worth
The city reports that the Fort Worth Art Commission this week approved interpretive plaques for the scenes depicted on the murals at the Will Rogers Memorial Center.
The need for interpretation arrived in 2019 when the city, likely merely waiting for the moment someone took a closer look at the auditorium, was made aware of a social media post raising concerns about one of scenes depicting Black Texans alongside other agricultural workers harvesting cotton.
With Native Americans and Mexican Americans playing prominent roles in Texas history, leading citizens decided there was likely a need for more than one explanation.
The mayor’s office asked the Fort Worth Art Commission to make recommendations for responding to the concerns after seeking out input from the community.
An advisory panel recommended that permanent interpretive plaques be embedded in the plazas in front of the coliseum and auditorium. This was followed by more than two years of research and meetings with focus groups representing the diverse cultures depicted in the murals.
The goal of the project is to encourage viewers to learn more about Texas’ multifaceted history and to foster cultural equity and community understanding.
The plaque for the mosaic depicting Black fieldworkers would read:
“Use of the land and its value was changing dramatically. For the first two decades of 20th century, agriculture led the state’s economic growth. Texas produced almost one third of America’s cotton. This scene depicts tenant farming and sharecropping, systems in which freedmen, poor white, and Mexican workers farmed rented land for a share of the harvested crops. Sharecropping rarely resulted in farm ownership. After World War I (1914-18), many laborers moved to cities for work, forcing landowners to modernize with machinery to harvest millions of acres of cotton, wheat, and other crops.”
The artwork was integrated into the facades of the auditorium and coliseum of the Will Rogers Memorial Center to commemorate the Texas Centennial in 1936. It consists of two 200-foot-long, hand-painted tile murals that trace the state’s settlement and industrial development.
The murals on the coliseum were scrutinized, too. One example:
“Although the Mexican Vaquero is not shown in this scene, many modern-day ranching techniques and popular cowboy practices can be traced to them. Skilled horse and cattlemen, Vaqueros participated in traditional sporting events called Charrería, the precursor of the modern-day rodeo. Working ranch hands by day, mestizo (mixed Native American and Spanish people), Black, Anglo and Indigenous horsemen often competed in roping and riding competitions in their free time. By the 1890s, organized rodeos were popular spectator events that gave cowboys a chance to demonstrate skills honed on the range.”
The City Council in an upcoming meeting will next be asked to authorize a construction contract to fabricate, deliver, and install the plaques.
For a look at the verbiage on the other plaques, go here.