#126/Southwest Modern: Texas and New Mexico

Amy Walton is from Texas, where she spent 15 years managing nonprofits like the North Texas Food Bank and the Jewish Family Service. Last year, she launched modTEXAS, an initiative to draw attention to Texas modernism and celebrate the people and institutions working to preserve it. Building a coalition of over a dozen nonprofits using social media, modTEXANS have shared thousands of images of midcentury design and architecture that can literally be mapped across the state. When you think of Albuquerque, New Mexico, you might think of southwest adobe design, or maybe that TV show In Plain Sight which filmed there for five years, but you're certainly not thinking of Modernist architecture – yet. Thea Haver is hoping to change that as co-founder and director of Modern Albuquerque. Co-host Paige Wagoner Claassen is an architectural historian with the popular Instagram feed Claasshaus, seeking out meaning, beauty, and significance in buildings and history in objects. Co-host Wayne Pond's melodious voice hosted an interview show called Soundings based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina from 1980 to 1997, interviewing journalists, poets, novelists, documentary film makers, musicians, governors, members of Congress, and tech leaders about their work in the arts, education, ethics, literature, religion, politics, music, philosophy, and even architecture. The shows live on at at the National Humanities Center iTunes site.