Go to Jail!

The drive from Cisco to Albany is pleasant enough, especially in the spring, when wildflowers relieve the somber mood of the West Texas landscape. Otherwise, there is little reason to navigate that remote portion of Highway 6—little reason, that is, unless you want to visit one of the most exceptional art museums in Texas.

The Old Jail Art Center (OJAC) opened its doors twenty years ago this month. A decade later it was accredited by the American Association of Museums, joining the ranks of leading arts institutions and historical museums across the country. The OJAC boasts more than 1,800 objects in its permanent collection, most notably an assortment of ancient Chinese tomb figures, a collection of pre-Columbian art, and works by twentieth-century European and American masters. These include an Alexander Calder mobile, a small painting by Paul Klee, Amedeo Modigliani's 1918 canvas Young Girl With Braids (a town favorite), and a tiny but representative sampling of works on paper by Americans Thomas Hart Benton, John Marin, and Grant Wood. Building on a substantial gift of Fort Worth School paintings and drawings, the museum actively collects the work of contemporary Texas artists. Today, after two successful capital campaigns, the facility has grown in size from about 1,000 to 14,000 square feet, encompassing galleries, a historical archive, a research library, administrative offices, and storage space. So what's a nice museum like this doing in a place like Albany, Texas (population: 2,056)?

Visitors will find clues just beyond the receptionist's desk, where worn limestone blocks mark the entrance to the museum's four original galleries. Here are displayed exhibition catalogs and a host of regional histories that include Per Stirpes, a family saga by the museum's co-founder Reilly Nail; tales of the prominent Matthews ranching family in Interwoven: A Pioneer Chronicle, by Sallie Reynolds Matthews; and a profile of her youngest son, Watt Matthews of Lambshead, by Dallas photographer and writer Laura C. Wilson. The OJAC, where the town's pride in its history has been fused with an appreciation for the arts, embodies the extraordinary distance these families have traveled. It gives form to their dreams. Their small town has managed not only to survive but to thrive as a cultural oasis.

The arts secured a toehold in Albany in the seventies and eighties, around the time that artists and collectors began pasting museums all over Texas as if they were temporary tattoos. Business leaders and politicians across the state, eager to attract attention (and money) to their communities, joined in this endeavor. "Culture had become the thing," admits Reilly Nail, who founded the OJAC along with his late cousin Bill Bomar. Nail, who is 73, points out that two other regional museums, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts and the Breckenridge Fine Arts Center, opened in 1985. In 1992 the old Hotel Grace in downtown Abilene was given a new lease on life as the Grace Museum. But Albany, a fraction of the size of those towns, led the way. And the OJAC's collection is more impressive by far than those of its neighbors' museums. As adventurous today as their pioneer forebears, Albany's wealthy citizens (and there are a lot of them) are not a parochial lot. The museum continues to benefit from the ideas and objects they bring back from their travels.

Located east of the Shackelford County courthouse, the former jail looks much as it did more than one hundred years ago. Each block of stone on the limestone facade bears the mark of a Scottish mason—M or E or X or a triangle—so the laborers could be paid for the work they had done. Back in 1878, when the jail was completed, local citizens were appalled at the $9,000 price tag. They made fun of the building and called it the "alphabet house." Today the old jail is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and everyone in town is quick to direct visitors to the Victorian structure on the perimeter of the vibrant, albeit only two-block-long downtown. Figurative sculptures by American and European artists cast dramatic shadows in the afternoon sun in the adjoining Marshall R. Young Courtyard, where a close inspection reveals that an old jail cell door has been inserted into the surrounding fence.

"Albany really is unique," says 25-year resident Glenn Picquet, a petroleum engineer who is the chairman of the museum's board. (Picquet's museum indoctrination came from his mother, Jimmie Picquet, who was the director of the J. E. Conner Museum in Kingsville for many years and was active with the Texas Association of Museums.) He agrees that the town's personality and that of the OJAC derive from the area's early settlers and their descendants, ranching and oil families, like the Matthewses and the Nails, who owe their good fortune to Albany. The founding families set future generations on a path to educate themselves and the community and to reach out a hand to strangers. Local historian and rancher Bob Green is quick to share stories about the generous spirit of legendary rancher Watt Matthews, who ruled the Lambshead Ranch, outside of town. Green tells an anecdote about the time Matthews answered the phone at Lambshead one morning. "Watt answered and talked at length," Green says. "When he finally hung up, his nephew asked who it was. 'Oh, I don't really know,' Watt said. 'It was the wrong number, but I invited them out for lunch.'" Visitors to the Art Center are treated to the same hospitality when they come to call.

The only time Watt Matthews left his West Texas homeland for an extended stay was when he went off to Princeton University in 1917. It was a time when being educated meant going East and "East" meant Princeton, and Albany boasted the highest number of Princeton graduates per capita of any town in the United States. Robert E. Nail, the son of another prominent Shackelford County family, graduated from Princeton in 1933. While he was a student there, he wrote and directed plays that showed great promise and afterward moved to New York City, following fellow Princeton alumni Jimmy Stewart and producer Josh Logan. But before long Nail was called back to Albany to care for his invalid mother. There's no telling what impact the talented writer might have had on the New York theater scene, but it is clear that he changed the lives of the people in his hometown forever.

Robert Nail taught high school English and encouraged his students to go to college and to travel, helping them find the money they required and often dipping into his own pockets. In 1940 he bought the old jailhouse to save it from demolition; it had sat empty since 1929, when the new jail was built. He paid $25 for the building and $375 for the land.

Around that time Nail penned a musical history of Shackelford County for his students to perform, and it proved so popular that he was asked to expand it and direct a production on the football field so that the whole town could attend. The Fort Griffin Fandangle (pronounced "Fan-dangle") eventually outgrew its sports arena and to this day is staged every summer in an outdoor amphitheater that was built especially for the production. The performers, all amateurs from the Albany area, include a passel of children dressed as the animals and flowers of the West Texas prairie and real cowboys driving a herd of Longhorns. Bob Green was the pageant's narrator for thirty of its sixty years, and nearly everyone in town has taken a turn at singing or dancing at one time or another.

Robert Nail's nephew Reilly also graduated from Princeton, in 1950, and like his uncle before him, moved to New York City. There he worked as a TV producer and indulged his passion for collecting, which he had inherited from his mother, Wyldon Burgess Nail, who had a fondness for decorative Asian artifacts. He had no plans to return to Texas, but as it had done with his Uncle Bobby, Albany reached out and yanked him home. When Robert Nail died, in 1968, he left the old jail building to his nephew.

Reilly began a regular commute between New York, Albany, and New Mexico, where he conferred with his cousin Bill Bomar about what to do with the building. Bomar, a Fort Worth native then residing in Taos, was both a serious collector and an accomplished artist associated with the Fort Worth School. The two men ultimately agreed to put their collections of twentieth century art and their mothers' collections of Oriental art on display in the old jail and invite the public to see them. (Their decision prefigured those of other private collectors across the country—including Raymond Nasher of Dallas—who have chosen to exhibit their collections in museums of their own creation rather than place them in existing institutions.) Until 1990, Nail served as the museum's director.

The Old Jail Art Center was chartered in 1978, and by December 1980 it was up and running. The building has been expanded twice—in 1984 and again in 1996—thanks in large part to the efforts of Jon Rex Jones, the chairman of Jones Energy. Approached by the museum board in the early eighties and asked to raise $50,000 for programming, Jones suggested raising three times that amount to expand the building and begin a museum endowment, a goal he accomplished in short order. During the nineties he and his committee were able to raise $2.1 million to further expand the museum and its endowment. Approximately 75 percent of the money came from within the community, clear evidence of its affection for the OJAC. (Jones's children, following his lead, contributed substantial amounts of money to the Texas Fine Arts Association in honor of their parents, prompting the TFAA to name its new Austin headquarters the Jones Center for Contemporary Art.)

The museum's ambitious schedule of changing exhibitions is equal in quality and scope to that of any other small or mid-sized institution in the state. This year alone it has exhibited works by Leandro Erlich and Joseph Havel, two of the Texans selected for the 2000 Whitney Biennial in New York City, and selections from its collections of Asian, Native American, European, and American ceramics. A summer exhibition of paintings from the Ben E. Keith Collection of Western Art, depicting life on the Texas frontier, coincided with Fandangle.

Some 20,000 visitors pass through the OJAC's doors every year, including a remarkable percentage of the town's population, who turn out to learn about each show. They are enlightened by nearly seventy docents, who are trained by museum staff and taken on field trips throughout the state and beyond to look at art. "[The museum has] changed a lot of people's lives," says Nail, who moved back to Albany in 1991. "It's been good."

Besides enjoying the art, visitors may request access to the museum's Robert E. Nail Archives, or they can peruse the periodicals and books on art and regional history in the two-thousand-volume Green Art Research Library. They can also ask to see the videos on the histories of Shackelford County and Fandangle produced for the museum by Bob Green and his wife, Nancy. Some folks linger in the Sallie Reynolds Matthews Room, which houses the Watt Matthews ranching collection with its boots, saddles, branding irons, and more. The collection also includes a selection of Laura Wilson's striking black and white photographs taken at Lambshead Ranch in the eighties. Community groups meet in the Stasney Center for Education, a high-ceilinged multipurpose space that is also used to display art and educate museumgoers of all ages. The OJAC reaches many of Albany's children through its Art-to-Go program, which sends instructors to the town's combined elementary and middle school.

While few of the townsfolk consider themselves serious art collectors, many of them say that their involvement with the museum has influenced the way they look at art wherever they happen to be. Instead of returning from trips to New York or Europe with, say, reports of the latest fashions, they talk about the museums they've visited. Conversely, art lovers around the state are taking an interest in Albany, including Ted Pillsbury, the former director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, who bought a house in town last year. On December 2 the OJAC will celebrate the opening of "small," its annual emerging artists exhibition, featuring, according to chairman Picquet's written description, "three contemporary artists whose works are . . . small." Helping to validate the museum's accomplishments as it marks its twentieth year is a recent $65,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services—a nice birthday present indeed. There is also talk of a black-tie celebration sometime within the next twelve months. "Actually," says education director Kate Ferguson, "we celebrate every day around here."

"The existence of this little collecting museum in the middle of nowhere is nothing short of remarkable," says Glenn Picquet. "It's no secret that we are proud of it." That pride is contagious. Whether you're from Albany or Austin or El Paso or New York City, the Old Jail Art Center welcomes you inside, offers you a chair to sit on, and eagerly shares stories about the history and culture of the region and the world at large. Admittance is free, and there is always someone around who is willing to answer your questions, even if they're about finding a good restaurant for lunch.

Rebecca S. Cohen is writing a guidebook to Texas art museums that will be published by the University of Texas Press in 2002.