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Art Scene Grows in Plainview, TX with opening of C.A.M.P.

The art scene in West Texas has expanded with the opening of the Contemporary Art Museum Plainview. The art landscapes in Lubbock and Amarillo have developed over the past couple of decades. But Plainview’s is now rising.

“It’s done better than I expected it to. The community has embraced us more than I expected to. I thought there would be a lot of people that thought “That’s not the typical West Texas art, I don’t know what it is and I don’t want anything to do with it.” But that’s not the way they’ve been at all. They’ve come in and said “I didn’t even know I’d like this kind of thing but I do”

That’s museum executive director Kelly Alison, who never had opening and managing an art museum on her life’s to-do list. But when the Houston artist’s elderly West Texas parents needed her help, she moved back home to Plainview and opened the museum in a downtown building on 6th Street owned by her family.

The museum’s six exhibitions over the past couple of years have been sponsored in part by grants from the Sybil B Harrington Endowment for the Arts through the Community Foundation of West Texas. CAMP, the acronym for the museum, opened in November 2017.

“For the first year, the first show, they supported us before we had actually completed our non-profit work and so from then on they’ve supported us every year. We were nominated last year for their Impact Award so we’ve just been really happy with the Community Foundation of West Texas and Sybil B Harrington.”

The museum, which got its non-profit status in early 2017, has five galleries and work on a private collections room is ongoing. There are sculptures also and murals painted on the building’s brick exterior.

“Since we moved in at the beginning of 2017, we’ve built some walls, we’ve taken out other walls, we’ve taken out drop ceilings and added drop lights and all sorts of stuff to it.”

Madeline Alison joined her artist mother in August 2017. The 32-year-old says she wants to work to get the Plainview community involved. They connected with the skateboard community, staging an exhibit themed on skateboards. Also, they work with youngsters who are ordered into the Hale County’s Juvenile Justice Program.

“To me the community outreach is the most important thing. I love the museum, I love the big shows, but to me it’s a platform for a bigger cause of being able to get involved with the community and somehow help.”

The museum has won $32,500 in regional grants and will soon be able to apply for federal grants.

“I am hoping that it will continue to get funding through the local community, through the programs like Sybil B Harrington and the Community Foundation of West Texas, and that we’ll also be able to get funding on the national level so that we can have operational funds to actually stay here, to stay in business, to pay a few people to do the many jobs that we do because everybody’s just a volunteer right now.”

The museum is open noon to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. A community evening event happens the second Saturday of each month.

Kelly Alison says it remains to be seen whether the museum has a long future:

“I don’t really know, because we do get support from a larger regional area, we do get support from Houston. I still get support from personal art collectors of mine, still get support from family. But whether we see a large group of people that live and work in Plainview say “we really want to get behind this 100% and we’re going to make sure it stays there.” I don’t know yet, we’ll see.”

The current exhibition, “Rural Elements,” runs through Nov. 9.