Texas Art Resources
Manuscript Collections about Texas Art
The MFAH Archives serves as the official repository for the Texas Art Project, a component of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. In 1977, with funding from the Brown Foundation, Inc., the MFAH launched the Texas Art Project to recover manuscript collections of artists, art galleries, and art organizations active in Texas since 1875.
The Museum maintains the microfilmed records of more than 400 artists, galleries, and organizations. The project ultimately identified, gathered, processed, and microfilmed nearly 700 reels of archival material pertaining to Texas art, thereby preserving a detailed history of the state’s art community and making the information accessible for research. Catalogue records for the manuscript collections were created by the Archives of American Art and are available online through their website.
In 2020, the MFAH Archives in partnership with University of Houston Libraries Special Collections received a grant from the Texas State Library & Archives Commission to digitize the microfilm reels with an estimated total of 700,000 images. Still being processed, those images can be found at the Texas Art Project Microfilm Collections, with a finding aid at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas Art Project Microfilm.
Hill Texas Artisans & Artists Archive
Learn more about Texas artists at the William J. Hill Texas Artisans and Artists Archive, which features archival information on artists who created ceramics, furniture, textiles, metalworks, photographs, and works on paper from the 19th century.
Portal to Texas History
The MFAH Archives has partnered with the Portal to Texas History in order to provide access to digitized content from the Archives holdings. More than 150 records from the Museum are accessible on the Portal.