SOUTHERN TEXAS, BEAUMONT: THE ART MUSEUM OF SOUTHERN TEXAS

 November 22, 2021

In my last post, I mentioned what a surprise it was to discover a church as beautiful as St. Anthony's Cathedral Basilica in an industrial town like Beaumont, Texas. Some of the primary businesses associated with the town are Bethlehem Steel, Gulf Oil, and Exxon Oil. Driving around, we definitely got the feel that it was a blue-collar town, stereotypically not a place known for things like art museums.

So as we pulled up to the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, I must confess that my expectations were not very high, in spite of the fact that we'd just been blown away by St. Anthony's. The exterior is nice but not exceptional. A statue of a rakish George O'Brien Millard, a prominent Beaumont citizen in the early 1900s who helped develop the city's public school system, stands on the corner.

We stopped at the front desk to pay our $8 admission fees and I was almost immediately hooked. This was going to be Beaumont Shocker #2. Right next to the desk was an elaborate Tree of Life sculpture that rivals just about any similarly-themed sculpture I've seen.

Tree of Life, Creation (1960-1980) by Alfonso Soteno

A close-up view of the top shows God the Creator overseeing his creations, including Adam and Eve in the Garden with the serpent between them.

At the bottom of the tree are Adam and Eve again as they are being expelled from the Garden.