Texas Cultural Trust to award Lynn Wyatt top honor
Texas Cultural Trust insiders had hoped to keep the identity of this year’s Individual Arts Patron honoree under wraps. In this town, however, news about
Lynn Wyatt travels fast. “Of course, the cat was let out of the bag when you all received your invitation,” executive director Jennifer Ransom Rice told the intimate crowd gathered at Phoebe and Bobby Tudor’s Museum District home.
As Ransom Rice explained it, the trust is a statewide arts-advocacy nonprofit promoting the arts as economic driver.
Since 2001, the trust’s signature event, the Texas Medal of Arts Awards, has recognized 98 state leaders and luminaries — including Jamie Foxx, Tommy Lee Jones, Chandra Wilson, Debbie Allen, Willie Nelson, ZZ Top and Eva
Longoria — for their creative talents. And, as in Wyatt’s case, generosity toward artistic development.
The 2017 awards weekend honoring Wyatt and fellow tobe-announced “Texas Legends + Rising Stars” will take place in February at the Texas Performing Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Peter Holt and
Guillermo Nicolas are co-chairing the festivities featuring a VIP preview party, honoree dinner, “Stars of Texas” brunch and awards-ceremony gala dinner.
Monday night, Yvonne Cormier, Sofia Adrogue, Linda McReynolds, Jana and
Scotty Arnoldy, Andrea White, Margaret
Williams and Judy Nyquist were among friends and supporters raising champagne flutes to toast the Bayou City’s grand dame.
“I just wrote a little something in the car,” Wyatt said. “I want to think of this not as an honor for me, but as a love letter to the arts.”