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Texana "Painter of People of the World"
Texana was known in over 100 countries as the "People's Painter." She was always fascinated by people and their faces. In 1944, she began a series of portraits of twenty heads of state in Latin America. She then went on to paint the portraits of such dignitaries as Egypt's Anwar Sadat, India's Indira Gandhi, and Argentina's Juan and Eva Péron. She was awarded the People to People International Artist of the Year award in 1974, an organization founded by Dwight Eisenhower. Texana's efforts to foster world peace and understanding through the international language of art were recognized in 1977 with a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. She also received numerous other awards, and throughout her lifetime she was known as a goodwill ambassador with a paintbrush. Texana's paintings have been exhibited on five continents and are held in private collections throughout Europe, North and South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, as well as the tropical islands and the polar regions of the world. The United Nations has honored her work in Geneva, Switzerland, and other honors include those from the European Center for Nuclear Research and the World Intellectual Property Organization. For over four decades, Texana has traveled to the remotest
corners of the globe with her "moving studio." She
was accompanied by only canvases, paintbrushes, and an easel.
Texana went to paint the inhabitants of other countries in their
daily rural settings, painting the people "as they are,
where they are." She sought to capture the faces of the
people before they were erased into oblivion "by the onset
of encroaching 'civilization'." Thus, her wanderings began
to create a living history of world cultures. It is quite probable that she has covered the ground that no other artist and certainly no other woman has covered as she walked through humanity. From the Nomads to the Hilltribes, across nations, cultures, and religions, Texana traveled to paint the people as she found them, calling it "a crystallization of the spirit." "Art is the communication, the universal language of mankind ..." "We learn to love one another and people are no more alien strangers." - Texana
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Texana, painter of
People of the World, was born Mary Burger in Abilene, Texas in
1916 to Karl & Fremont Burger. Taking the name Texana from
her grandmother, she was one of the first persons in America
to be legally granted a one word name by a superior court judge
in Los Angeles, California in 1953.