Left to right: Mary Virginia Carson, Emma Gutzeit, Tom Miller in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, 1931. Though the wire story mangled the women’s names, newspapers from California to Vermont reported on the expedition to “the caves and bluffs of the rugged Pecos and Devils River country.” Courtesy of the Witte Museum
The first image one sees upon entering the current exhibition, Mary Virginia Carson – Pioneer Artist Capturing Rock Art With Watercolors, at San Antonio’s Witte Museum, is an enlarged and colorized photograph from the summer of 1931 of three people standing in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. The three were part of an “expedition” to explore and document the lifeways and artistic production of people who lived in the region thousands of years ago. In the center stands the museum’s assistant director, Emma Gutzeit, who served as the expedition’s leader, and to her right is the group’s guide, Tom Miller. Artist Mary Virginia Carson, recruited to document area pictographs and petroglyphs for the Witte, stands at left. A slender figure in straw hat and tie, she leans into the canyonland winds with a bearing that speaks of stamina and spirit.
The description of the two trips the Witte sponsored as expeditions to the area west of Del Rio (and elsewhere in West Texas) that summer is impactful. It echoes the many entradas carried out north of the Rio Grande by Spanish Colonial and, later, Mexican explorers. Carson and Gutzeit, along with a contingent of archeologists, were on an adventure that, in their own way, reflected such treks into unknown territory. The Witte Museum was only five years old in 1931, but the institution had already begun a long, and still ongoing, journey to discover the world of the Indigenous people who lived so long ago in the canyonlands on both sides of the great river. An expansive permanent exhibition, People of the Pecos, reveals much of that archeological record, just steps from the two galleries that present Carson’s work.
The first, shorter trip that the Witte sponsored that summer was intended as a scouting trek to convince the museum board to fund a more substantial effort. Carson’s watercolors from the first six-day trip occupy the first gallery of the Mary Virginia Carson exhibition. The second gallery presents a selection of her work from the second six-week expedition, which ventured as far west as Hueco Tanks. Expenses for the longer trip came to $350. Witte Museum Director Ellen Quillin not only raised the funds, she also finessed the donation of “a truckload of flour and corn meal courtesy of Liberty and Pioneer Flour Mills” to use in bartering for expedition assistance along the way.
This photograph of Mary Virginia Carson sketching at Meyers Springs appeared in the San Antonio Light on June 18, 1931. Courtesy of the Witte Museum
A certified architect and engineer, as well as an artist, the 25-year-old Carson produced 110 watercolors of murals containing anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, and figures identified as “enigmatics” at Jackrabbit Shelter, Eagle Cave, Curly Tail Panther Shelter, and 31 other sites in the Lower Pecos and Trans-Pecos areas. Along with exacting maps drawn by Carson, 52 of her watercolors appear in both the exhibition and its accompanying book by Witte CEO emeritus Marise McDermott.
On a recent tour of the exhibition, McDermott, who is currently writing a new history of the Witte in advance of the museum’s 2026 centennial, explained that museum founder Ellen Quillin was especially fascinated by the Lower Pecos people, whom she and others at the time identified as the Basketmakers, a term inspired by the material culture recovered by archeologists. (Though much about them remains unknown, it’s generally believed that the people of the Pecos were related to the Coahuiltecan, Jumano, and/or the Huichol.) From the beginning, Quillin’s mission statement maintained that the museum had “both the inclination and the obligation” to discover, interpret, and preserve the natural and cultural history of the vast and storied land mass between the Red River and the Rio Grande.
Seminole Canyon, Mary Virginia Carson, 1931. This watercolor was one of two Carson works selected for the prestigious Texas Artists exhibition at the Witte Museum in the fall of 1931. Courtesy of the Witte Museum
Mary Virginia Carson was a pioneer not only because she was the first to document the ancient artwork with watercolor paintings (or any other form of visual recording), but she also, contrary to the perspectives of some later researchers, was the first to view the murals and other works as nuanced, complex compositions that utilized motifs to relate a continuous story. The massive artwork (some of the murals are said to be as large as 20 feet high and 100 feet wide) at a site called Rattlesnake Shelter, for example, seems to have especially intrigued Carson.
She copied the entire Rattlesnake Shelter mural in seven watercolor paintings. The exhibition includes all seven, adjacent to a wall-sized photograph of the dynamic mural. Nearby, an interactive gizmo beckons a visitor to slide a knob to the right, which allows them to see an image of the shelter’s mural turn into an image of Carson’s seven watercolor sections of the mural, aligned to replicate the original work.
Mary Virginia Carson, “Seminole Canyon,” 1931. Courtesy of the Witte Museum
Some archeologists view the Rattlesnake Shelter mural, which is believed to be about 5,000 years old, as a creation story. Carson described it in her field notes as a “masterpiece” in which the “center motif and the continual tying together of beautifully proportioned groups makes a whole that, if seen in its entirety, no true artist would try to improve.” Asked to contrast Carson’s work with the watercolor project of the married artists Forrest and Lula Kirkland, who documented the ancient art later in the 1930s and whose 1967 book, The Rock Art of Texas Indians, introduced generations to the state’s oldest artworks, Marise McDermott explained, “While the Kirklands’ technique was outstanding, they viewed the Rattlesnake Shelter mural, for instance, not as a complete composition but rather as a collection of possibly unrelated figures.”
Gallery signage identifies the paint used in the pictographs as ground manganese for black or dark brown, limonite for a yellowish brown, and gypsum for white. Red paint was produced from red ochre. The minerals were then mixed with an animal fat binder, most likely deer bone marrow. Signage also explains that the anthropomorphs in rock art are figures that resemble human beings and could have represented “characters from sacred stories, spirits of ancestors, or divine beings.” Zoomorphs, as the name suggests, are from the animal kingdom, while enigmatics, of course, are figures of mystery.
Mary Virginia Carson, “Fate Bell Shelter,” 1931. Courtesy of the Witte Museum
One also learns about the three styles of prehistoric West Texas rock art identified by researchers and copied by Carson in watercolor paintings: Pecos River Style, Red Linear, and Red Monochrome. A fourth type of work from the historic era includes depictions of Spanish missions, people on horseback, cattle, and figures with bows and arrows. It’s believed these later works were painted by the Lipan Apache, Comanche, and other native populations present in the area after the arrival of Europeans. Carson’s watercolors of Vaquero Shelter and Missionary Shelter, the latter portraying a religious figure with a rounded headpiece that over-imaginative viewers might liken to a space-travel helmet, are among the copies of historic era works in the exhibition. Missionary Shelter is also one of the works that has disappeared from the landscape in the nearly one hundred years since Carson painted it. Water damage, limestone spalling, and erosion are cited as the chief culprits.
Mary Virginia Carson, “Meyers Spring,” 1931. Courtesy of the Witte Museum
The saga of Mary Virginia Carson’s watercolor sketchbook is almost as captivating as the story of the ancient artwork. Though duplicates of a few watercolor paintings remained at the Witte, the 110 works, with accompanying notes by Carson and Emma Gutzeit, were lent to the University of Texas at Austin for copying in 1934. And there they remained for some 60 years. Though they had never been forgotten, when the complete body of work arrived at the Witte in 1994, as McDermott recalls, museum staff “went nuts” with excitement.
A hand-drawn map of the expedition territory by the artist-architect-engineer Mary Virginia Carson, 1931. Courtesy of the Witte Museum.
Former Chief Curator Amy Fulkerson hand-carried the sketchbook, into which the watercolor paintings had been taped in 1931, to Studio SKM Associates in Somerville, Massachusetts, for restoration. Removing the adhesive and restoring the paper and paint, conservators observed that the works were on “highly textured paper” adorned with the watermark: PM FABRIANO (ITALY) HAND MADE 1931. An appendix in McDermott’s book includes additional details on this process, along with site identifications for the 52 works in the exhibition.
Mary Virginia Carson, “Kirkland’s French Ingram Ranch,” 1931. Courtesy of the Witte Museum
While interest in the state’s ancient art continued throughout those 60 years, McDermott observes that archeologists and art historians effected a “paradigm shift” in the study of the subject in the 1990s. Much of this shift was inspired by the work of Carolyn Boyd and her founding of the Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center in Comstock in 1998. In an introduction to McDermott’s book, Boyd describes Mary Virginia Carson as “a pioneer, a trailblazer….a maverick [and] an inspiration.” Another major figure of the rock art research community, Witte Museum Curator of Archeology Harry Shafer, contributes to the Carson volume a concise and informative summary of the history of rock art research in Texas.
Mary Virginia Carson, “Rattlesnake Shelter” (one of seven), 1931. Courtesy of the Witte Museum
While the delicate watercolors in Mary Virginia Carson’s exhibition and catalog offer a walk-in-beauty portal to the seemingly abstract expressions of the first artists in the land that became Texas, witnessing the original, ancient artwork in its outdoor galleries can be an out-of-body experience. Seminole Canyon State Park & Historic Site offers rock art hiking, while the Witte Museum provides frequent hiking tours of the White Shaman Mural and several other sites. The Witte’s 29th Annual Rock Art Rendezvous on February 21 – 23 will give attendees the opportunity to “walk in Mary Virginia Carson’s footsteps.”
There, in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, you can imagine what it was like for Carson and her fellow Depression-era adventurers, camping out under the stars in Langtry, gathering at Guy Skiles’ gas station/community center, finding their way when remote roads were even fewer and farther between. Imagine their buoyant sense of discovery as expedition members first beheld the artwork described by Carolyn Boyd as the “oldest books” in North America. And you can contemplate how much has changed in the world since 1931….and how much, how very much, has not.
Mary Virginia Carson – Pioneer Artist Capturing Rock Art with Watercolors is on view at the Witte Museum through March 23.
