Olin Herman Travis

Olin Travis was born and raised in Dallas, Texas and Born and in 1909 enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied five years before becoming an associate instructor at the institute in 1914. Travis worked briefly thereafter as a commercial artist and as an instructor at the Chicago Commercial Art School. In 1924 Travis moved back to Dallas with his wife, Kathryne Hail Travis. In 1926, with James Wadden, the couple founded the Dallas Art Institute and later, in Cass, Arkansas, the Ozark Summer School of Painting, which they operated for three summers. For many years Olin Travis was head of the Dallas Art Institute.

In the summer of 1933, he traveled to West Texas in Frank Reaugh’s sketching caravan. Travis taught two years as a guest instructor at the San Antonio Art Institute , and a year at Austin College, Sherman. A prolific painter, he recorded landscapes, Dallas scenes, and figures from the 1920s until his death.