Opening October 3 at the Briscoe Western Art Museum is Going to Texas: Five Centuries of Texas Maps,featuring 64 original maps from the Yana and Marty Davis Map Collection. The new exhibition will take visitors on a journey through Texas’ evolving history and identity. The maps featured have a range of more than 500 years, from the 16th century to 2006.
Oscar E. Berninghaus (1874-1952), Cowboy Mess Camp, 1912, oil on canvas. Gift of the Jack and Valerie Guenther Foundation.
“This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a collection of this caliber,” says Liz Jackson, president and CEO of the Briscoe Western Art Museum. “Maps are more than coordinates and boundaries—they are windows into the people, politics and possibilities of a place. This exhibition shows how cartography helped shape Texas and how Texas shaped the world’s imagination in return.”
Geological Map of Texas Showing Approximate Locations and Drilling Wells, also Names of Companies Drilling, 1920, cartography: Standard Blue Print Map and Engineering Company, 28 x 28 in. From the Yana and Marty Davis Map Collection, Museum of the Big Bend, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas.
The map collection was assembled by Yana and Marty Davis over many years, and it features maps made by European, Mexican and American mapmakers. “These maps reveal how Texas was perceived, claimed and defined across centuries—serving as tools of exploration, instruments of empire and later, records of ambition and expansion,” the museum notes. “Whether charting transport routes, outlining battle lines or portraying uncharted frontiers, each map captures a vivid moment in Texas history.”
The title of the exhibition has historic significance, with “GTT” being shorthand for “Gone to Texas,” a common farewell given by settlers, pioneers and others venturing into the iconic Western territory. —
Going to Texas: Five Centuries of Texas Maps
October 3, 2025-January 19, 2026
210 W. Market Street, San Antonio, TX 78205
(210) 299-4499, www.briscoemuseum.org
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