the Governor's Arts Award Winners

Woody Gwyn

Galisteo

2010 Recipient, Individual Artist

Born in San Antonio, Texas, Woody Gwyn grew up on the stripped-down landscapes around Midland before attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and moving to the village of Galisteo, New Mexico in 1976. He has been painting for the greater part of five decades. His first exhibition was in Canyon, Texas in 1965. Gwyn’s paintings, which are all about precision, clarity, light, and space, reflect the wide horizons of West Texas and New Mexico.
His work has been exhibited and collected throughout the United States and is represented in numerous museum collections, including the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, Albuquerque Museum, Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, and Phoenix Art Museum. Fellow Galisteo resident Lucy Lippard has said, "Woody Gwyn communicates the exhilaration so many of us feel when we come around the corner, drive past a familiar view or look down Lamy Hill into the Galisteo Basin. " In her letter of support, Sharyn Udall said, "Woody’s paintings open to us, in the way the best music, literature and painting always do, a larger vision of the West and of humanity’s place in it."