This is the sixth in an occasional series exploring Texas locales near and far that offer uncommon sights and experiences.
In the days before Hurricane Harvey wreaked coastal devastation, the chief symbol of Rockport’s staying power would have been the Big Tree, a live oak anchored on sandy soil near the coast for an estimated 1,000 years or more.
Five years on from Harvey, that symbol might now be the Rockport Center for the Arts, an $8.7 million new construction state-of-the-art building rising more than two stories above South Austin Street
The old Victorian mansion housing the former arts center was one of many buildings in town destroyed by Harvey’s fierce 140-mile-per-hour winds, its spot overlooking Rockport Harbor now a plain grassy lot.
Few other signs of the Category 4 hurricane’s devastation are visible, chiefly unrepaired piers and lifeless palm trees. Thanks to significant federal disaster relief and an outpouring of donations, “Rockport bounced back very rapidly,” said Anita Diebel, one of several artists on the gallery row along Austin Street.
Diebel is one of perhaps 200 artists who make up Rockport’s still-thriving art community, a distinctive feature of the seaport town of 10,000.
A different kind of wind energy
Rockport’s history can be gleaned from various guidebooks, websites, and institutions, including the Texas Maritime Museum and the Aransas County History Center. Or a curious visitor can just talk to knowledgeable locals like Diebel, who served as director of the art center from 1998 to 2003.
She dates the arrival of artists to Rockport back to the late 1860s when cattlemen established an industry based mostly on hide and tallow shipping from the seaport.
“Yet there was nothing here for families and young people,” she said. “So they started art lessons, getting together and painting, having little shows. And then also having piano recitals and things for the kids. I think that was the spark of it.”
Others date the establishment of Rockport as an artists’ haven to the late 1940s, when painter Simon Michael began teaching classes, eventually establishing a school. A downtown mural by Rockport old-timer Steve Russell fixes the date alongside a washy coastal scene resembling a large watercolor, reading “The Rockport-Fulton Art Colony Creating Art Since 1948.”
Diebel’s own history in town dates back to 1997, when she established Wind Way Gallery, named in recognition of Rockport’s most persistent feature.
“We have to fight the wind,” she said, a problem for working plein air — the art tradition of scenic outdoor painting that draws many painters to Rockport — but other qualities make up for that.
“We have everything here for artists, and artists seem naturally to gather where there’s an energy and there’s light,” she said. “We have great sunrises and sunsets,” with Aransas Bay to the east and the coast of Copano Bay to the west.
Diebel is a strong supporter of the new Rockport Center for the Arts and credits it with jump-starting the town’s recovery after Harvey.
“They didn’t miss a beat,” she said, restarting Free Family Saturdays a mere 23 days after the storm hit.
“That was the most important thing you could do,” she said to the center’s current executive director Luis Puron during a visit to her gallery and studio. “Because kids were traumatized, things were not normal at all back then, and the arts have always been therapeutic.”
