Manuel Garza

Manuel Garza was born in 1940 in the Texas Hill Country to migrant farmworker parents, and spent his childhood traveling with his family to pick cotton and dig potatoes across Texas and as far as Michigan. Working the fields, he developed the deep feeling for the land that would define his art. Encouraged by his mother, who noticed him sketching during breaks, he became the only member of his family to finish high school.

Largely self-taught, Garza pursued formal training under Charles Normann at the Texas School of Fine Arts between 1966 and 1968, spending hours in museums studying the Texas masters Porfirio Salinas and Robert Wood. Their influence shows in his luminous, realist landscapes — though Garza made the genre his own by filling it with wildlife.

His oils capture the thick heat, bold sunlight, and cool shade of Central Texas, populated with bluebonnets and wildflowers and the quail, pheasant, turkey, and deer of the Hill Country. His paintings hang in the collections of notable Texans including Governor John Connally, Lady Bird Johnson, and Governor Dolph Briscoe, and remain sought after by collectors of Texas landscape and Western art.