Historical marker highlights the little-known story of the Rockport-Fulton Art Colony

Late last month, a historical marker was placed in front of a simple, pale green building among giant live oak trees – the former art studio of a man named Simon Michael. This happened in the coastal city of Rockport, Texas.

Michael was originally from Pennsylvania. He moved to the town of Rockport in 1948 and established what was called the Fulton School of Painting.

In 1950, he founded the Simon Michael School of Fine Art, a five-acre property reportedly purchased for $1,500 at the time and a pound of butter. He then continued to have enormous influence on that art community in South Texas, one that is very much still alive today.

Kay Betz wrote about this piece of history as coauthor of the book “The Story of the Rockport-Fulton Art Colony,” along with Vickie Moon Merchant. She joined the Standard to share the details. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Courtesy photo

Texas Standard: I did not realize that there was an art colony down in Rockport. Tell us a little bit more about how that got off the ground and was it directly tied to this Simon Michael?

Kay Betz: Yes, he had been a traveling artist throughout Texas and the rest of the United States after living in Paris in the ’20s. And he chose Rockport – Fulton first, then Rockport – to create an art colony and had students through the years, including Dalhart Windberg, who was a famous Texas artist.

He was a little different than the regular Rockport folk. Some people knew that he drank wine, and he had nude painting sessions, so the townspeople would drive very slowly around the property where the historical marker is.

So he was a cosmopolitan person. He’d seen the world.

Yes, but he taught generations of poor families, children, and they grew to love him and respect him.

And the art colony evolved into the Rockport Art Association, which today is Rockport Center for the Arts. And a lot of the traditions that he started – painting plein air outside, landscape painting, public murals and sculptures – continue today.

You know, when I think of “art colony,” I think of some of these communities where you have a gathering of artists and they have public shows, they form cooperatives, that sort of thing. I think of, for instance, in California, places like Laguna Beach. They have something of an art colony there.

How much a part of the community was this Rockport-Fulton Art colony?

It’s a big part.

The Rockport Art Festival every year on July 4 is one of the longest-standing and most popular places for artists and artisans to sell their work. The Rockport Center for the Arts has many exhibits and continues the tradition of having classes. The Rockport Cultural Arts District, which was one of 54 districts in Texas designated by the Texas Commission on the Arts, has sponsored mini public art murals, public art sculptures.

So, you’re right. We were named one of the ten top artist colonies on the coast with Laguna Beach and Mohican Island, and it’s a very vibrant community, still attracting a lot of artists as it has over the years.

A real compelling part of the narrative for me is that there were a group of artists called the sporting and wildlife artists of the ’70s and ’80s, and they helped start groups like the Coastal Conservation Association and Ducks Unlimited, helped pass legislation. Jack Cowan was the most famous of those, and his son-in-law was the legislator trying to impress his father-in-law, and they passed legislation to save the redfish.

So that tradition, I think, continues with many artists who love the wildlife and the natural environment, working to save the bay’s ecosystem and the wildlife. Rockport is on the Central Flyway, so it gets mass migrations of the whooping cranes, which everybody knows, but hummingbirds and all of wildlife.

I feel like I’ve really been left out of this because I think of Rockport, and I think of the fishing, right? That’s a big, big deal there. The boats… I think of the migration of the birds. But I guess I missed the memo on the art colony.

But it sounds like this went way beyond the canvas – that this was part of how people participated in civic life. And that was something else that sort of bound these artists together. But was there a kind of an aesthetic, you think, that sort of emerged from the Rockport-Fulton Art Colony?

Yeah, there’s something called the Texas Gulf Coast aesthetic, and it goes all along the coast. It’s not just Texas. But it focuses very often on watercolor and the light with the plein air painting, landscapes, celebrating nature, the sporting scenes like of hunting and fishing.

And there’s a large sculpture tradition. The late Jesús Moroles was an international sculptor who had a studio there, and he has sculptures throughout the cultural district and at the sculpture garden at the art center.

Kent Ullberg is another international sculptor, and they both celebrate things like lighthouses and, you know, sea life and birds and the interdependence. So, that sculpture tradition is still vibrant.

You know, I’m thinking of that worldly person that you mentioned, that Simon Michael. Why did he want to come to Rockport in the first place, way back in ’48?

You know, in the book, we kind of wrestled with that. He did an oral history with North Texas State, and he said he liked being by the ocean. He liked that, at that time when he came in the late ’40s and ’50s, there were old buildings that had been preserved – houses and structures.

He had a belief that you should uplift the poor. And so, he painted everyday scenes, I think, from his experience with the Impressionists in Paris. So, people mending nets. And, you know, he liked to take people out and see the work boats and the shrimpers and the oystermen.

And also, there was a class, a moneyed class. You can’t have artists without patrons. So, there were big ranchers and wealthy people who value the art from either their background or education who supported him.

Kay, listening to you talk about this, I have to ask – since he came in ‘48, I mean, was he still around when you began to sort of have an interest in art? Did you have him as a teacher or anything?

No, I didn’t have him as a teacher. I grew up in Corpus, but my best friends were in Rockport. Shirley Farley was one of the painters who started the Rockport Art Association, and I went to his gallery and hung around him, and it was a magical place.

He had Remington’s sculptures and lots of pictures of nude women and scenes from Mexico and Europe where he had taken his students on painting jaunts. And always interesting people hanging out, kind of a bohemian atmosphere. And he liked to talk about art and theories of art and philosophy. So, yeah, it’s a fascinating place to go.

One of his students is now an international expert in Chinese art history, really, who is at Columbia in New York. And he talks a lot in the foreword to our book about people said he drank wine. I think it brought a small little fishing village – of, at the time when he came there, less than 5,000 people – to see a world beyond, not just in art, but in other ways of living and experiencing.

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If you go to Rockport today, can you still experience the impact that he had on the community? I mean, is it palpable, visible to outsiders when you come to Rockport today?

Yeah, it is. Actually, like right now, the herons are nesting in the windswept oaks, and you’ll see plein air painters out, photographers out taking pictures of them. If you go around the Rockport Harbor, you can see that.

The cultural district has a mural that the local famous artist, Steve Russell, painted of the art colony that has the lighthouse and people out painting. And then we have many galleries in Rockport and the art center has many exhibits.

So yeah, the students of Simon Michael, a group of women paint every, I think it’s Friday, at the Fulton Firehouse. And if you talk to people and mention his name, of course they’ll mention him.

The cultural district just did the documentary based on our book. And we put that online and we’ve been showing it around town and people have been real enthused that he’s being remembered and the influence he had not only on Rockport and South Texas, but the rest of the state, is being acknowledged.

Kay, it sounds like this has been a long overdue acknowledgment, if we’re talking about a new historical marker in front of his former studio, just erected there. Why do you think that more Texans don’t know about his impact?

The art scene, like many other scenes, can be political. And I keep telling my artist friends in Rockport, if you only painted missions and cactus things, you’d make a lot more money and be a lot more famous. But a lot of it has to do with educational institutions and art historians and what they have talked about and written about.

So, that’s one reason we were glad that A&M… I’m a UT graduate. I have a doctorate from there and I retired from UT. But Texas A&M Press has done the best Texas art history books, and they just did one about Buck Schiwetz who was a famous painter who visited Rockport very often.

And so, I think it’s starting to be acknowledged. And the historical marker, we’ve been trying to get it done for a long time. The historical commission has worked with several owners, and we have an owner now who was real receptive to having it placed on the property.

Simon Michael lent his artistic talents to the war effort during World War II, earning a Legion of Merit award for his service. Courtesy photo

I have to ask, what happened to Simon Michael?

You know, he died of cancer. He was in his 90s.

His World War II experience was extraordinary. He was stationed at Fort Walters in Mineral Wells. And because he had been in Europe and had a photographic memory, he was charged with creating life-sized replicas of battlegrounds in Japan and Europe. And he was one of the people who developed camouflage for wartime use. For that work, he received the Legion of Merit from the U.S. and that was his most prized possession.

When he was dying of cancer in Corpus, he asked that that be brought to his bedside. But I think he died happy. He knew what he had done. He had encouraged and taught generations of students about a lot of things, about life as well as art.

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