This exhibition demonstrates the wide variety of outstanding drawings, watercolors, lithographs, serigraphs, etchings, and mixed media compositions from The Grace Museum’s permanent art collection.

This exhibition features the 10 important works of art purchased by members of the 2025 Collectors Circle for The Grace Museum’s permanent collection. Artists represented include Barnaby Fitzgerald, Scott Gentling, Letitia Huckaby, Florence McClung, Scooter Orsburn, Robert Peterson, Allison V. Smith, Chaco Terada, Elizabeth Walmsey, and Molly Wood.

This annual juried art competition offers every Advanced Placement (AP) Studio Art student in Abilene ISD an opportunity to have artwork selected for a museum exhibition and to compete for valuable college scholarships. The exhibition is a collaborative effort by AEF, Abilene ISD, and The Grace Museum.

In an age defined by rapid consumption, Virginia Fleck’s work investigates the relationship between materiality and perception, urging a slower, embodied engagement with objects and space. Magical thinking — rooted in cultural superstitions and beliefs in unseen forces — plays a vital role in Fleck’s practice. By infusing her work with these notions, she taps into a collective cultural memory, where objects are not only functional but also symbolic. This connection between materiality and the metaphysical draws viewers into a space where the boundaries between the rational and the irrational blur, creating a heightened sensory experience that invites deeper contemplation.

Extraños Magníficos is a contemporary Spaghetti Western, influenced by Nancy Newberry’s Texas upbringing and her mother’s Italian heritage. Staged with Mexican charros, American cowboys and military soldiers suspended in a playful sense of preparedness at the Texas-Mexico Border, this exhibition challenges modern-day perceptions of the Wild West.

Austin artist John Cobb has created renderings of Biblical imagery for more than three decades. This exhibition highlights his meticulously painted Texas landscapes, as well as a free-standing wooden chapel that houses a series of early Renaissance-style portraits in egg tempera and gold leaf, featuring contemporary individuals as subjects.

The city of Abilene grew around the Texas & Pacific Railway tracks, especially what we know as downtown, during the 1880s to the 1910s. New hotels, churches, shops, liveries, doctors’ offices and pharmacies, houses, and schools were all built within a thirty-year time span. By 1910, the town’s population reached 9,204 and its dynamic was rapidly changing. The introduction of … Early Downtown Abilene: 1880s-1910s

Exhibition Reception | Thursday, September 5, 2024 | 6-8 pmGuest Speaker: Tony Privett, Slaton Harvey House The Texas & Pacific Railway Company (T&P Railway) began plans to build a railroad line from Shreveport, Louisiana all the way to San Diego, California, creating a southern route that would help with winter climate complications. The T&P Railway began construction in 1872 and the … Full Steam Ahead: The Texas & Pacific Railway

International Holocaust Remembrance Day takes place each year on January 27th, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp. This exhibition highlights the history of the Holocaust, displacement and mass murder of Jewish people, the role Texans played as liberators, and the history of Abilene’s Jewish community.

December is Universal Human Rights Month Universal Human Rights Month celebrates the landmark document that “enshrines the inalienable rights that everyone is entitled to as a human being – regardless of race, color, religion, sex, language, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” This month strives to promote this declaration and the continuing struggles … Universal Human Rights Month – Cultural Heritage Exhibition 2023

The Grace Museum (originally The Abilene Fine Arts Museum) has a history of collecting important prints, paintings, and drawings focusing on the Texas landscape. This companion exhibition features works of art collected during the last 76 years. Paintings by Edward Eisenlohr, Loren Mozley, Bob Stuth-Wade, and many others will be presented in this group exhibition exploring Texas landscape painting treasures … Texas Landscapes from The Grace Museum Permanent Collection

When one thinks of the 1920s, images of flappers, jazz, and speakeasies immediately come to mind. While that is relatively true, for Abilene, the 1920s was an era of major change and growth, just like it was throughout the United States. The population of Abilene nearly doubled throughout the decade with the increase in businesses, buildings, railway usage, and updated … Abilene in the 1920s

June Van Cleef is a photographer from a large ranch in West Texas, about 100 miles from the United States and Mexican Border. She founded the photography department at Collin County Community College in Plano, where she taught for many years. In the 1990s, she received a sabbatical to photograph the people and landscapes of Presidio, Brewster, Jeff Davis, and Culbertson … June Van Cleef: Texas Outback

Independence Day in the United States is celebrated every July 4th to commemorate the Declaration of Independence in 1776 with fireworks, parades, and parties. Throughout Abilene’s history, Independence Day has meant a day off work and celebrating the holiday with friends, family, and the entire city. Families gathered to watch parades, and sometimes even participate, with young boys following the … Independence Day – Cultural Heritage Exhibition 2023

Paul Manes is a painter’s painter. The artwork selected for this solo exhibition is the ultimate statement of that fact. Surfaces and subjects morph into singular stunning testaments to Manes’ mastery of oil painting on canvases larger than life. Complex and solitary imagery up close and at a distance shares a haunting immediacy driven by the artist as philosopher paradigm. … Paul Manes: Odyssey

Just over thirty miles northeast of Abilene sits the Chimney Creek Ranch, established in 1876, the ranch is home to cattle and native species along with conserved grasslands and water sources. However, before the ranch was formed, the Butterfield Overland Mail Route, which ran from 1858-1861, made its way through the area. On the ranch stands the remnants of the … Smith’s Station on the Butterfield