Robert Boyd

I'm still trying to catch up blogging about comics I've read this summer. You can see more reviews here as well as my guide to Jesse Moynihan's Forming. This time around, I'm looking at some comics from Argentina, Belgium, France and Japan. Aside from their shared non-American origins, they don't have anything in common. Or one could say that the only things they have in common are things they lack--there are no superheroes in these books, no fights between good and evil, etc. This doesn't mean that they're good. Your mileage may vary. Mine did.



Macanudo #1 (Enchanted Lion Books, 2014) by Liniers. Liniers is the pen-name for Ricardo Siri, creator of the daily comic strip Macanudo. He and his wife also run a small publishing house called La Editorial Común, which publishes some very high quality Argentine, European and North American alternative comics. His drawing style is excellent, and his strips have great "timing." He often employs "silent" panels to provide a "rest" in the rhythm of the gag. Because are stand-alone strips, the gag is important. Liniers humor is more wry than laugh-out-loud funny. Many of his strips involve taking classic, cliched humor situations and tweaking them (as in the two examples below).





My problem with Linier's comics is that they really aren't all that funny. They're a little funny, sure. I don't hate them--I just don't love them. But I think that a kid, maybe 10 or 11, might find these hilarious the same way I found, say, B.C. hilarious at that age. So perhaps I'm the wrong audience for Macanudo. In any case, one can't deny that it's a very well-crafted comic strip.



White Cube (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014) by Brecht Vandenbroucke. This seemed right up my alley--comics about art and the art world. The title refers to the classic modernist white cube gallery (as well as the well-known contemporary art gallery, White Cube). White Cube stars two identical male protagonists who look at art, buy art and make art with absurd results. The style of the art and the humor recalls the classic Belgian comic CowboyHenk by Kamagurka and Herr Seele. But unfortunately, White Cube is far inferior to Cowboy Henk.


Brecht Vandenbrouke, White Cube p. 25

This witless and cruel joke typifies much of what is in the book.  It's nasty without being funny. It seems almost unfair to mention it in relation to Cowboy Henk. Here's a Cowboy Henk strip for comparison.


(from Smoke Signal, Desert Island's in-house comics tabloid.)

Only one Cowboy Henk book has been published in English,Cowboy Henk: King of Dental Floss, and that was way back in 1994. Yes to Kamagurka and Herr Seele; no to Brecht Vandenbroucke!



Weapons of Mass Diplomacy (SelfMadeHero, 2014) by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain. This is a rather bizarre book, but I found it captivating.  Lanzac is the pen-name of a French diplomat, Antonin Baudry. Baudry worked for the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin during the run-up to the Iraq War, and France was being hectored by the U.S. to join its "coalition of the willing." France wisely chose not to participate in this foolish war. Now one might expect someone like Baudry to write a memoir of the experience. What no one would expect is that he would fictionalize it in a graphic novel, Quai d'Orsay (retitled Weapon of Mass Diplomacy for English speaking readers). In the book, the low-level protagonist is a speechwriter named Arthur Vlaminck (it's confusing, but I think Vlaminck=Baudry=Lanzac) is hired to work for the foreign minister, Alexandre Taillard de Vorms. Vorms is de Villepin, and there are many additional fictional equivalences--Khemed is Iraq, Jeffrey Cole is Colin Powell, etc.


Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain, Weapons of Mass Diplomacy p. 21

Vorms at first seems to be a distracted blowhard, utterly dependent on his staff (especially his deputy, Claude). Cristophe Blain's artwork serves the story well here--Vorms is a hurricane of urgency, shoulders always backed up, gestures always emphatic. It's actually quite clever how it draws you in, thinking that the whole thing is a comedy at the expense of Vorms, as in a sequence where he compares a good political speech to Tintin.


Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain, Weapons of Mass Diplomacy p.45, top tier

But as the story progresses, you learn quite a lot about diplomacy as it is practiced at this level. And the story climaxes with a meeting of the U.N. Security Council, taking place after Cole has given his speech "proving" the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Khemed (this is based on an actual speech by Powell to the U.N. which has subsequently been proven to be false in all particulars). Vorms gives a stirring speech explaining why France cannot support a U.N. resolution against Khemed that amounts to giving the U.N. approval to war. Again, this speech was actually given by de Villepin. Obviously the opposition by France (and other countries) did not prevent the Iraq war, but it did prevent the U.N. from backing it. Somehow, this often wacky comic book manages to effectively depict the importance of that moment. I recommend Weapons of Mass Diplomacy highly.



Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan and Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan (Drawn & Quarterly, 2014) by Shigeru Mizuki. Shigeru Mizuki is in legend in Japanese comics, best known for his comics dealing with yōkai, supernatural beings from Japanese folklore. This series of books (two of which have been published in English, with more to come) tell the history of the Showa era, which lasted from 1926 until 1989, during the reign of Emperor Hirohito. Mizuki intersperses his own life story with sections of more-or-less straight history.


Shigeru Mizuki, Showa 1926-1939: A History of Japan p 273

The auto-biographical sequences, such as the above where his grandmother dies, are drawn in his typical "cartoony" style. It's a style that feels very personal, very much his own.  The historical sections, on the other hand, often rely greatly on photo-reference. 


Shigeru Mizuki, Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan p 130

The distinction between these two styles separates the two sections and gives the memoir part a more subjective feeling while giving the history part a more objective feeling. But the problem with these books is that the two parts don't really mesh. Obviously Mizuki's life is affected by what is happening in his country, as when he is drafted in 1942. Mizuki would ultimately lose an arm in combat. But most of the time, there is a feeling that life in his small town is more-or-less unaffected by the politics of Japan happening far away in Tokyo.

It would have been better, then, to split Showa into two separate books--one a memoir and one a history. As it is, the two sides of this story of modern Japan are an uncomfortable fit.

Robert Boyd



Heroes Of The Comics: Portraits Of The Pioneering Legends Of Comic Books(Fantagraphics Books, 2014) by Drew Friedman. There is a nice irony in the title of Drew Friedman's new book. For many, the "heroes of the comics" are figures like Batman and Captain America--fictional characters who have become over time little more than corporate brands, cash-flow generating properties, occasionally revitalized by the "talent" that gets parachuted in to inject new life into them and thus to perpetuate--in a legally-binding sense--the companies' valuable trademarks. Friedman, on the contrary, has always been interested in the grungy side of the entertainment business (his past books have dealt with z-grade celebrities and borscht belt Jewish comedians), and this book continues this obsession by focusing not on the superheroes and funny animals that typified comic books of the 30s through the early 60s, but on their creators, who were paid peanuts by crappy publishers to create some of the most enduring characters in American popular culture.


Drew Friedman, portrait of Wally Wood from Heroes of the Comics

And even given this premise, "heroes" is an ambiguous word. Many of these figures were not "heroes" but journeymen, just doing a job the best way they knew how, and some of those in the book fall more on the villainous end of the spectrum! But Friedman treats them all more or less equally--a full-page portrait facing a brief, one-page biography. What the reader is left with is a powerful sense of how the comics were the result of actual people whose own stories are worth knowing. Friedman honors these artists, writers, editors and publishers by giving each of them a beautifully rendered portrait in high Friedman style.


Drew Friedman, portrait of Harvey Kurtzman from Heroes of the Comics

And the book includes many portraits of artists I consider to be real heroes of comics, including the three pictured here--Jack Kirby (on the cover of the book), Wally Wood and Harvey Kurtzman. Why are they heroes while astonishingly talented artists in the book like, say,  Russ Heath and Mort Drucker are not? Because they had a vision for comics as a means of artistic expression, as something more than a mere entertainment product. Their visions were consistently thwarted throughout their creative lives by the demands of the market, by censorship, and by a public that wasn't ready to accept comics as art--they are each tragic heroes in their own way. All the more reason to honor them.

The world of contemporary art has abandoned many of the old functions of art, of which portraiture was a primary one. It's now left mostly to photographers. But there are still a few great illustrators who choose to honor their subjects with psychologically intriguing representations done in pencil, paint and occasionally pixels. In addition to Friedman, I think of Brooklyn Rail publisher Phong Bui, for example. Portraits of the quality that Friedman does here are real tributes to their subjects. They aren't commissioned portraits of some rich guy--they depict persons from a history that is meaningful to Friedman. And that's at least part of why they are so good.



Ed vs. Yummy Fur (Uncivilized Books, 2014) by Brian Evenson. Nowadays, we aren't surprised when books like Fun Home or Weapons of Mass Diplomacy just appear on the shelves, complete unto themselves. This used to be pretty much unheard of. There were comic books and comic strips and book collections or graphic novels barely existed. When Chester Brown, one of the key cartoonists in the alternative comics movement of the 1980s, started his comic book Yummy Fur, it was first as a self-published zine and later as a traditional 24-page comic book. The comic book commenced publication in 1986, reprinting the contents of the mini-comics initially. He continued the comic book for 32 issues, then started a new title, Underwater which ran for 11 issues, followed by Louis Riel, which lasted 10 issues. Material from these various comics was collected into five book collections. For his latest book, Paying for It, Brown skipped serialization and published it as a complete whole--this has become pretty typical for art comics. The age of the "comic book" is pretty much over for art comics.

When Chester Brown started Yummy Fur, he saw it as an open-ended comic about his protagonist, Ed, that he might continue indefinitely--not unlike a mainstream comic like Spider-Man. He thought he might occasionally collect issues into self-contained stories, but while doing this he would continue Ed's serialized adventures, as Hergé did with Tintin. In short, he started off with two older models of comics publishing in mind just a few years before those models started to come apart. He eventually published a definitive version of the "Ed" story from Yummy Fur called Ed the Happy Clown: a graphic-novel.

Ed vs. Yummy Fur examines this transition--how did the mini-comics differ from the comics, and how did the comics differ from graphic novel? This is an interesting case because we can see parts of the work that were redrawn, rewritten, excised, and changed. This sort of transformation is of great interest to critics, literary historians, art historians, philologists, etc. Evenson mentions Henry James'Roderick Hudson, a book James continually revised during his life, leading to four different published versions. Evenson describes the types and meanings of the changes Brown made between the comic book and the graphic novel. (However, he does not enumerate every single change--this book is critical, not encyclopedic.)

 
The plot of Ed the Happy Clown hinges on America's growing shit problem

In doing so, he discusses some of the themes of the book, particularly scatology and sacrilege. It has to be remembered that when Yummy Fur appeared, its content was shocking. There were massive amounts of shit, lots of fucking and masturbation (including masturbating saints), Ronald Reagan's head on the tip of a penis, and so on. The work was surrealist, and like the Surrealists, Brown reveled in blasphemy. Ironically, the "back-up feature" in the comic were two relatively straightforward adaptations of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Yummy Fur repeatedly faced censorship during its run.

But the basic idea of his book would apply to many other contemporary comics--Love & Rockets and Maus both underwent changes from their initial forms to their final (or at least most recent) book collections. The changes that Yummy Fur underwent to become Ed the Happy Clown are fairly drastic but not unheard of, particularly for works conceived and drawn in that transitional period in which the comic book is declining while the graphic novel is ascendent.

The publisher of Ed vs. Yummy Fur is a very small press specializing in art comics (they published the two most recent Gabrielle Bellbooks, for example). This is the first of a series of short critical books about comics being published under the title Critical Cartoons. Scholarly writing on comics has been slowly increasing--the University Press of Mississippi has been a leader in this. I'm happy to see short critical books like Ed vs. Yummy Fur being published. I look forward to more from Uncivilized Books.

Robert Boyd


Fly at the Glasstire booth

My first impression was that it felt smaller. I don't have last year's program book, but I have 2012's. This year there were 55 exhibitors (of which four were non-profit spaces), and in 2012 there were 74 (with three non-profit spaces). Last year, when you walked in the door, there were massive artworks by Ann Wood, Sharon Engelstein and the Clayton Brothers greeting you before you even saw a single booth. This time, there were some cars. And 18 of the exhibitors this year were from Houston. In other words, after what felt like three years of growth, this year's fair felt like a retrenchment.

So what is it? The economy? That can't be it--we hear in national media over and over about how well Houston is doing. This time, everything felt scaled down and constrained. Glasstire, which has in the past had elaborate booths with live animals this year had a pedicab. Fun, but not so exciting in terms of sheer spectacle.


Bill Davenport gives me a pedicab ride through the fair

The thing was, on opening night as I surveyed the well-dressed crowd of VIP party attendees, I had an epiphany: Houston shouldn't have an art fair. I'm not going to try to make an economic argument here. If galleries--particularly local galleries--make some profit while there here and in doing so put some money into artists' hands, then I'm wrong and I'll happily cop to it. It just seems like if you are a Houstonian and you want to collect art by local artists, you don't need this fair. And if you want to collect work by artists from other places around the world, get on a plane to Art Basel or Frieze. I realize that not much of the work here was blue chip art, and therefore was relatively affordable, but the same can be said of the art shown at any number of satellite art fairs around Art Basel and Frieze. And to me, that makes TCAF seem surplus to requirements.

The fair would have been a tedious experience if I hadn't had a house guest in town. It is best to have a Virgil along with you when you enter the infernal pit. Artist Matthew Couper was showing his work Zoya Tommy Gallery, so I offered to put him up for the weekend.


Matthew Couper, Kindle, 2014, oil on metal, 5 x 7 inches

His work is a pastiche of Spanish colonial retablos, symbol-laden tableaux painted on very flat pieces of metal. The images are often dark and a bit shadowy. The horizon is low and the space is usually indistinct or bounded with distant mountains. There is always a night sky. The deliberately primitive realism heightens the sense of utter strangeness, the feeling that these things are vessels of arcane knowledge. Of course, Manuel Ocampo has mined similar terrain. One might think also of Michael Tracy, but Tracy's art is much more ecstatic and performance oriented.


Matthew Couper, Horror Vacui! (Stardust), 2014, masking tape and oil on loose linen, 18 x 14 inches

Couper comes from New Zealand but has been living in Las Vegas for the past four years. As screwed up as the Houston art scene sometimes seems, Couper's description of the Las Vegas scene makes Houston sound like paradise. But despite this, Vegas fascinates him, you can see from the piece above (which was not shown at TCAF, alas). His paintings are intriguing and beautiful--if you missed them at TCAF, check them out at Zoya Tommy Gallery.

I mentioned to him how previous TCAFs had seemed larger and more spectacular. I showed him photos of last year's entryway flanked by the two looming Sharon Engelstein blow-ups.  He laid the blame on the art fair promoters. Where was the media? Where was the advertising? Where was the hype? Where was the spectacle?


Andela Andea, Lux Aeterna. cold cathode fluorescent lights, LED lights, flex neon, computer power sources, plastic

The one on-site installation that really impressed me Andela Andea's Lux Aeterna. It was a sprawling, garish piece, hanging off one of the weird radiating posts that dot the convention hall. But to be honest, I liked Alex Tremino's two glowing poles at Diana Lowenstain Gallery better. In the genre of "glowy art", Tremino does more with less.


Alex Tremino, Luminous I and Luminous II, 2013, neon lights, Plexiglass tubes, knitting, crochet, fibers, found objects

In a different hall in the same convention center that weekend was the Big Texas Train Show. How did I find out about them? Simple--they had a billboard up on I-45. Did TCAF have a billboard? Maybe, but if so I never saw it. The only mainstream media coverage of TCAF I saw was this nice article in the Houston Chronicle about Nathaniel Donnett's "Gap store" at the Darke Gallery booth. But maybe I just missed all the camera crews from the local TV stations.


Lego trains

The Big Texas Train Show had installations which easily competed with those at TCAF in size. They were pretty spectacular--there were many tables installed covered with elaborate dioramas, little landscapes and cities, in every scale from Z (1:220 scale) to HO (1:87 scale) to G (1:32 scale). I had never even heard of G-scale trains. They're freaking huge.


G-scale trains

The oval track they set up for the G-scale trains was bigger than my apartment!


Train with an elevated street car set-up

When I saw this beautiful diorama with its elevated streetcar, I thought--how cool it would be to build an HO scale model of the High Line in New York.

You can think of model railroads as a kind of industrial age folk art. So if you think of model railroads (and especially the attendant dioramas) as art--and I certainly do--who had the more successful art fair this weekend? What could TCAF have learned from the Big Texas Train Show? That buying billboards is a good idea? (It may be that TCAF had more advertising and publicity than I'm giving them credit for--but I didn't see any, and I was on the lookout for it.)

By the end of Saturday (I didn't attend Sunday), the thing that left the strongest negative impression were the flies. They were everywhere, especially around the bar in the VIP lounge. I can't think of a better metaphor for something being dead than a bunch of flies buzzing around. I hope they weren't an omen.

Art I Liked

But in the end, the main reason to go to an art fair is to look at a bunch of art. Sure an art fair is not the best way to see art, but it is often the only way to see a lot of contemporary art all at once. That's what I like the most about them. TCAF was conservative this year. There wasn't much video, for example, nor installation or new media. It was mostly art that could be hung on a wall. Don't get me wrong--I love me some paintings and drawings and photos. I just would have hoped a fair explicitly devoted to contemporary art would have represented a broader range of contemporary art practice. But the exhibit strategy was undoubtedly practical--show what you can sell. In any case, here's some of the art I liked best.


Al Souza at Moody Gallery


Al Souza


Allan McCullom, Visible Markers, 2012, reinforced fiberglass resin at McClain Gallery



Ana Serrano at Rice Gallery


Ana Serrano


Billy Zinser, Lil', oil on panel, 5 x 5 inches each at the Public Trust



Nathaniel Donnett, How Much for These Dreams and Memories, vitrine, gold leaf on books and plastic objects, 2011 at Darke Gallery


Nathaniel Donnett, No White Tees, cloth, duct tape, paper, belt, 2013


Nathaniel Donnett, Fill In the Blanks, conte, graphite, plastic, paper bags, 2014

Darke Gallery was shuttered a while back when Linda Darke took time off to recover from a serious illness. It was back at the art fair with a wonderful solo show by Nathaniel Donnett. And Linda Darke was looking great.


Devon Borden Gallery wall installation


Chris Cascio, Smut Peddlers (detail),  2014, Ink On Paper,  60 X 40 inches

I heard that this large Chris Cascio (on the right of Devin Borden Gallery's salon-style hanging) was sold. Also, Devin Borden Gallery has evidently signed Chris Cascio!


Matt Messinger, no title, 2014 mixed media on canvas with collage,  5 x 4


Claire Shegog at Aureus Contemporary


Claire Shegog detail

Claire Shegog apparently takes little figures used for cake decorations and heavily paints them to give them a little more solidity, then arranges them as you can see here. Now part of me laughs when I see something like that because it seems to fulfill Hennessy Youngman's definition of art as explained in this video. But there is something about it that appeals to me visually.


Cordy Ryman at Morgan Lehman

Cordy Ryman's artwork was at DCKT Contemporary at the fair in 2011, and now it's at Morgan Lehman. Lower east Side to Chelsea--I guess that's a move up. In any case, I liked this suite of tiny paintings. The sales director there suggested that Ryman's use of various materials in his work was a sign of his excellence as an artist, because only a really good artist could use so many media so well. But he is not a master of any media. His paintings always look awkward and king of unfinished. I can't tell if it's because of this or despite it that his work is appealing. Sometimes crudeness works--look at Forrest Bess.


Cordy Ryman


Cordy Ryman


Cordy Ryman


Noriko Shinohara, Cutie and Bullie Series, 2008, pencil, watercolor and sumi on paper, 24 x 18 inches


Noriko Shinohara, Cutie and Bullie Series, 2008, pencil, watercolor and sumi on paper, 24 x 18 inches


Noriko Shinohara, Cutie and Bullie Series (detail), 2008, pencil, watercolor and sumi on paper, 24 x 18 inches

This was wonderful. While Zoya Tommy Gallery had some Ushio Shinohara boxing paintings at her booth, Kirk Hopper Fine Art had his wife, Noriko Shinohara, at his. I remember seeing these pages in the documentary about the couple, Cutie and the Boxer. The funny thing was that the labels on the wall said everything about the materials used and the date, but didn't mention that these were comics pages that were meant to be read in a particular order. In other words, there is no page number. I wonder if Noriko Shinohara considers them part of a whole? Are these, in fact, two pages from a unified graphic novel? If so, I wish someone would publish it.


Dan Tague, Whistle While We Work, 2013-2014, dimensions variable at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery


Dan Tague, Whistle While We Work (detail), 2013-2014, dimensions variable at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery


Dan Tague, Lie Detector at Konathan Ferrara Gallery


And that's all for this post. I'll continue this tour of TCAF 2014 in part 2.

Robert Boyd

Continued from part 1.

Art I Liked, continued


David Ryan, Stacks, 2014, acrylic on wood, 15 x 20 inches at Galerie Richard


Don Martiny, Cayuse, 2013, polymer and pigment, 56 x 31 inches at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts


Iva Kinnaird, You Are Here

I liked Iva Kinnaird's charmingly naive floor map. Although the fair was so small this year and so rationally laid out that it hardly seemed necessary.


Iva Kinnaird, You Are Here

I think the idea was that over the course of the art fair, Kinnaird was to paint in notable artworks from various booths, but by Saturday she had only done a few.


Iva Kinnaird, You Are Here (detail)

Like this little detail of a Debra Barrera piece at the CAMH booth.


Iva Kinnaird, You Are Here (detail)

And this very accurate but tiny rendition of Ryan Humphrey's Tapes at the Public Trust.


Ryan Humphrey, Tapes, acrylic on canvas, 55 x 60 inches

At the last Diverse Works fundraiser, I got a tiny, unusual watercolor by Ryan Humphrey. The pieces he had at Dallas's The Public Trust we more typical of his work that I had seen elsewhere.


Ryan Humphrey, (left) Untitled, mixed media on hand-shaped skateboard, 24 x 8 inches and (right) Untitled, mixed media on panel, 12 x 10 inches

I spoke a bit with Public Trust gallerist Brian Gibb. He complained about his location in Dallas's Deep Ellum neighborhood. I countered that Deep Ellum seemed like a good location, what with Barry Whistler Gallery and Kirk Hopper Fine Art Right there (I didn't even mention the Deep Ellum Windows). He proceeded to dish gently on those two rivals (as gallerists are wont to do), but his main complaint was that he thought his gallery would be more visible in the Design District (where Holly Johnson, Conduit, the Goss Michael Foundation and Dallas Contemporary are). And he may be right--in my several visits to Dallas, I've never seen the Public Trust! And I regret that now, because it was one of my favorite booths at the fair.


Kim Beck at Mixed Greens


Kim Beck


Kysa Johnson at Morgan Lehman


Kysa Johnson

Kysa Johnson makes art for the physicist in your life. I loved these particle-decay paintings.


Jane Liang, Covered II, 2012, oil on canvas at Yvonamor Palix Fine Arts


Luis Jimenez at ACA Galleries


Nicholas Wood,Bubble #6, 2014, glaced ceramic, 16 x 14 x 4 1/2 inches at William Campbell Contemporary Art


Nikki Rosato at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery


Nikki Rosato (detail) at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery





Patti Oleon, Circular Corridor, 2010, oil on panel, 18 x 45 inches at Cris Worley Fine Art



Sandy Skoglund,Knees in Tub from the Reflections in a Mobile Home series, 1977, 14 x 14.5



Sandy Skoglund, Toaster from the Reflections in a Mobile Home series, 1977, 13 x 16.7


That's enough for this post, but keep on reading and looking in part 3 (the final chapter).

Robert Boyd

Continued from part 2.

Art I Liked, continued

It was interesting to see a pair of Louise Nevelsons (born 1899) and a Romare Bearden (born 1911) in among all the contemporary work.


Romare Bearden, Baptism, 1964, collage, 10 x 6 i/2 inches at ACA Galleries


Louise Nevelson, Untitled (40791), 1976, wood painted black, 57 x 44.5 x 9 inches at Timothy Yarger fine art


Skylar Fein at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery



Skylar Fein at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery


These Skylar Fein matchbook covers are freaking huge, by the way.


H.J. Bott, Oh-Gee!, 2014, glazed acrylics on canvas, 24 x 24 inches at Anya Tish Gallery

H.J. Bott is one of Houston's oldest practicing artists (born 1933). But when I see his work--always so jazzy and yet so precise--it seems like the work of ageless soul. I guess you could call Oh-Gee! a work of geometric abstraction, but that phrase somehow suggests a kind of austere coldness that is simply not a feature of Bott's work. Oh-Gee! is isn't a formal arrangement of color and line--Oh Gee! is an ecstatic dance. I was very glad to see it at TCAF.

My Favorite Art


Ibsen Espada, Yellow Zebra, ink on billboard canvas, 54 x 40 inches at Zoya Tommy Gallery

I've always liked Ibsen Espada's painting. But the veteran Houston abstractionist is an old dog who has learned a new trick. He made an agreement with a billboard company to salvage their old Tyvek billboards. He would then stretch a section of the printed Tyvek over stretcher rods as if it were canvas. But unlike canvas, this material already head colors and shapes on it. Little fragments of words and photos, once part of a larger billboard image.

What Espada has done is let these bits of found art act as the base for his painting. His painting responds to the fragments of printed billboard graphics. This dialogue between painter and urban visual blight turns out to be quite wonderful. What Espada does with these old billboard fragments feels right. Sometimes he almost obliterates the image underneath, and sometimes he barely alters it (as in the painting above). It's a very fresh visual approach from one of Houston's old masters.


Jeffrey Vallance at Edward Cella Art & Architecture

This big silkscreen caught my eye first. It's hard for artists not from Texas to play with the idea of Texas in a convincing way, but Jeffrey Vallance succeeds with this fun piece. Edward Cella Art & Architecture brought a bunch of art by the Los Angeles artist. I've always thought of Vallance as being part of the generation of L.A. artists that includes people like Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. But his humor also reminds me of the Art Guys.


Jeffrey Vallence, Rock in the Shape of Texas, 2006, rock in the shape of Texas, reliquary, 17 x 13 3/4 x 6 1/4 inches


Jeffrey Vallence, Rock in the Shape of Texas (details),  2006, rock in the shape of Texas, reliquary, 17 x 13 3/4 x 6 1/4 inches

I love the fact that the rock in Rock in the Shape of Texas isonly vaguely shaped like Texas.


Jeffrey Vallance Blinky reliquary

They also had a couple of Blinky reliquaries. Blinky was a frozen chicken that Vallance bought as an art student and had buried at a per cemetery. This triggered a lifetime of Blinky-related artworks, which he explains in the video below.




Sandow Birk, Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the Imaginary Monuments series, 2013, direct garvure etching on handmade gampi paper, backed with Sekishu kozo paper, 62 1/2 x 48 inches, edition of 25 at Catharine Clark Gallery


Sandow Birk, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (detail) from the Imaginary Monuments series , 2013, direct garvure etching on handmade gampi paper, backed with Sekishu kozo paper, 62 1/2 x 48 inches, edition of 25 at Catharine Clark Gallery


Sandow Birk, Universal Declaration of Human Rights (detail) from the Imaginary Monuments series , 2013, direct garvure etching on handmade gampi paper, backed with Sekishu kozo paper, 62 1/2 x 48 inches, edition of 25 at Catharine Clark Gallery

When I saw Sandow Birk's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it reminded me strongly of American Newspaper political cartoons from the early 20th century, particularly those of Winsor McCay. What really makes it are the obsessive, finely-etched details, like the shanty-town at tge base of the monument. On one hand, it communicates a kind of cheap irony--the utter failure of the nations of the world to live up to these lofty goals. But somehow the labor intensive artistry on display here combined with the deliberate pastiche of an older style of expression prevent me from seeing it as a piece of cheap irony. I think Birk meant it. In any case, I feel it. I was, in the end, quite moved by this piece of art.

Art I Hated


Carole Feuerman, Kendall Island, 2014, Oil on Resin, 70 x 21 x 25 inches 

People loved Kendall Island. And you could take it home for a mere $148,000. (Or you could hire a girl to come sit around in a bathing suit in your house for three or four years.) There is a pretty interesting video about the making of this sculpture. Personally, I don't get it.


Colin Christian, Batgirl, fiberglass and mixed media, 2014, 35 x 22 x 25 inches

That said, it is a model of good taste next to Colin Christian's Batgirl. Seriously, what kind of douchebag would collect this?


Mads Christensen, What Are You Blinking About?, 2013, acrylic, wood, LEDs, 40.5 x 40.5 inches at Timothy Yarger Fine Art


Mads Christensen, What Are You Blinking About?, 2013, acrylic, wood, LEDs, 40.5 x 40.5 inches at Timothy Yarger Fine Art

This supremely irritating piece of glowy art by Mads Christensen could be seen at the most recent Burning Man Festival. Nuff said!


Stanley Casselman, Luminor-1-11, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 65 x 65 inches at Timothy Yarger Fine Art

This colorful Gerhard Richter pastiche was terrible. I don't mind someone being unoriginal--after all, if an artist develops a technique, it's fair game for other artists to use it. Twas ever thus. The thing is that you have to use it well. Matthew Couper reminded me that Jerry Saltz commissioned a faux Richter squeegee painting. And what do you know--it's the same guy! Saltz seemed quite pleased with his fake Richter, and I guess working in this style has given Stanley Casselman a career (or at least a Beverly Hills gallery).

Art I Bought


Nathaniel Donnett, History Boxers, 2013 silk-screened boxer shorts at Darke Gallery

I mentioned these boxers in part 1 of this series. Nathaniel Donnett had a little clothing store within Darke Gallery that was doing a brisk trade. At $10, they were the best bargain at the fair.


Nathaniel Donnett. Orangeburg, synthetic hair and graphite on paper

This piece was in the CAMH booth. I'm not totally sure if it is in the current CAMH exhibit featuring a large installation by Donnett (I mean, would the CAMH have taken work off the wall of an exhibit to show at an art fair) or if it's merely similar to the work hanging at the CAMH.  In either case, Darke Gallery was handling the sales. I loved it, I could afford it, and so I bought it.

Matthew Couper pointed out that it was the second piece I have related to African American hair (I have a Rabéa Ballin drawing of an African American braid as well). Now I'm worried that I've accidentally become one of those white people obsessed with black hair.


Taro-Kun baseball card at The Public Trust


Taro-Kun football card

Taro-Kun is a Dallas artist. The Public Trust had a bunch of these trading cards that Taro-Kun has carefully defaced, and I found them very funny. They were cheap, too! Depicting Dave LaPoint as a big pussy was perhaps a bit unfair, but it was hilarious. Former Oiler Jerry Gray gets turned into a goat-like creature--appropriate for the Rams. But I chose this card because it reminded me of my favorite deceased Greek deity.




I got this at the Big Texas Train Show next door to the Texas Contemporary Art Fair. I will display it in my home proudly!

Betsy Huete

This past summer, I had World Cup fever. I barely watch soccer on TV normally, and I haven’t really played in nearly ten years. But I used to play a lot: I played for about sixteen years, starting from about the age of six until I graduated from college. Although I have little interest in watching sports generally, I do enjoy catching Rice soccer games as much as I can (let’s go ladies!!!). At any rate, I thought I would be mostly alone in my World Cup obsession.

My Facebook feed was, to my surprise, blown up. It was aflutter with Team USA chants, concerns about Jozy Altidore’s hamstring, or whether Michael Bradley was going to pick up the pace or not. People cheered on Memo Ochoa’s valiant goalkeeping efforts for Mexico, and floated around funny internet memes for Luis Suarez’s shoulder bite. What was even more surprising, however, was who was participating. Surely, if anyone would be chiming in, it would likely be my former teammates or the slew of people who post incessantly about sports like American football. But it wasn’t them. Instead, they were mostly art people. Fellow artists and writers, curators, dealers, art historians alike seemed completely enamored with the game. Why them?


Tim Howard, looking intense. From abc7chicago.com

Indeed, there seems to be something hovering in the art world air. LACMA this past summer presented an entire exhibition around the sport entitled Fútbol: The Beautiful Game. Glasstire’s Rainey Knudson recently forwarded a Dave Hickey Facebook post linking art to athletics. Of course there were the grumpy few who posted articles on how Jorge Luis Borges thought soccer fans were idiots—but they did it because they felt the need to respond to a growing fervor instead of ignoring it. And then there are the people residing in the art world who think athletes might as well be aliens from a distant galaxy. Stereotypes dictate that artists and athletes exist on opposite sides of the spectrum. Artists are creative, free-thinking types. Athletes are brutish robots incapable of thought. People like Duncan MacKenzie of Bad at Sports fame wear their un-athleticism as a badge of honor, but what they don’t realize is that to be an artist and an athlete are nearly exactly the same thing.

Based on the recent wave of support from the art world, I suspect I’m preaching to the choir here, but I’ll say it anyway: art is not a creative endeavor. It is an athletic one. If any artist still sits in her studio waiting to be struck with genius inspiration, she is playing an artist, not being one. Artists don’t wait, they practice. And fail. And try again, and so on until they get it right, until their work is resolved. Just like their counterparts, athletes spend hours per day training, failing, trying, not quitting. To be either means one must have an enormous amount of resolve and resiliency, and the courage to constantly face the possibility of rejection. Whether it means getting benched, getting cut from the team, losing the championship game, getting a proposal rejected, losing grant money, not getting accepted into a residency: both sides are filled with victories and losses both large and small. Both must work extremely hard to achieve whatever goals they have set for themselves. It is no coincidence that some of the most successful contemporary artists of our day, like Bruce Nauman and Matthew Barney, were former athletes.


Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3 (still), from benlewis.tv

As coaches and players scout opponents and study game tape, artists (should) study art history so they are not making a piece that someone else made forty-five years ago. Like a quarterback or a center mid-fielder, a curator studies space. How does an artwork fit in a given museum or gallery? How does it relate or converse with the other work in the show?

Most of all, both of them strategize. As a soccer team, for instance, stays in formation, they must poke holes in the opponent’s formation by switching the ball across the field, catching the defense off guard. By slotting the ball in behind the defense, or having an outside midfielder take the ball down the flank and cross it in, the forwards then find a way to get it in the back of the net. In short, one team must read the other team’s problems in order to seize an advantage. Artists in turn problematize their own work. By generating and reading the problems inherent in it, they then locate solutions within their own internal logic.

I remember when I first became an artist feeling conflicted and confused. My artist and athlete selves felt at odds: such different friends, totally different conversations, and vastly different thinking. But as I’ve dealt with the reality and hard work of actually being an artist, it’s become obvious that they were always the same, just manifesting themselves in slightly different ways. Given the World Cup’s popularity this past summer, I imagine many of the arts professionals in our community feel the same.

Robert Boyd

I strolled around the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday and checked out a show called Contemporary Art: Selections from the Museum's Collection. (It's only on view through September 14, so if you want to see it--hurry!)


Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2011, mixed media

One thing that was cool about this little show was that included work by several Houstonians. And they were placed in the same galleries as artists like Nick Cave, Julie Mehretu, Ed Ruscha, and Fischli & Weiss, which is pretty flattering. Two of the Houston artists on display already have national reputations.


Mark Flood, Peacock, 2003, acrylic on canvas

Mark Flood is about to have a solo show at the Saint Louis Contemporary Art Museum, and Trenton Doyle Hancock's recently closed show at the CAMH has traveled to the Akron Art Museum. So the MFAH doesn't risk any hint of provinciality by showing those two artists. I don't know how important that is to the MFAH--it's certainly not something they'd admit in public, anyway. But let's face it--you don't become a "world class" museum by showing a bunch of local yokels.


Trenton Doyle Hancock, Beacon, 2006, acrylic and mixed media on cut canvas mounted on canvas

They were also showing a Jim Love sculpture, although curiously it was not a piece from the museum's collection. It belongs to the Alley Theatre.


Jim Love, Area Code, 1962, steel, cast iron and lead

The last two pieces were the most interesting in the sense that neither artist is particularly well known outside Houston. So the MFAH is, in a sense, taking a chance with these artists by saying they deserve to be displayed in the company of unimpeachably important contemporary artists like Cave, Mehretu and Ruscha.


Jeremy DePrez, untitled, 2013, oil on canvas


Michael Crowder, Air amusé, 2009, blown and cast glass

So why Jeremy DePrez and Michael Crowder and not, say, Emily Peacock or Robert Pruitt? I'm not making a value judgment here--just expressing curiosity about how particular works of Houston area artists end up in the MFAH.

OK, I've been a bit coy. The thing is, for each of these artworks, the wall-label explains where the work came from. Why these works ended up in the collection is up for speculation. There is a  gate-keeping process, but what appeals to a particular curator is ultimately unknown. But at least we know the "whence."

Peacock was a "museum purchase funded by various donors and friends of the artist."Beacon was a "gift of Cencily E. Horton in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Core Program." Hancock was a Core fellow from 200 to 2002. Air amusé was a "museum purchase funded by Wade Wilson, Jackie Wolens Mazow, Richard H. Moiel and Katherine S. Poeppel."Wade Wilson is a gallerist who shows Crowder's work. (We have reviewed Crowder's work here twice.) The untitled DePrez painting was a "gift of Fredericka Hunter and Ian Glennie." Hunter is the owner of Texas Gallery, where Glennie is the director. Texas Gallery exhibited work by DePrez in 2013 (a show I reviewed). DePrez is the youngest of the Houston artists here--he was born in 1983 and got his MFA from UH in 2011.

So how did this piece end up in the MFAH? I asked Alison de Lima Greene, MFAH's  Curator for Contemporary Art and Special Projects, about it. She told me that "in the case of Jeremy, his gallery invited me to look at the work and make a choice if I thought any would be good for our collection." But even at that point, there is a process for accessioning the work that she describes as "rigorous."

"After the curator and director agree that the object has relevance to the collection (which is separate from monetary value) we first present it to appropriate departmental subcommittee which is made up of a mixture of trustees, collectors, and generally knowledgeable people in that particular field. Then if the subcommittee approves, the recommendation goes to our collections committee which is made up of experienced trustees, who have final say," de Lima Greene explained.

Why would Wade Wilson and Fredericka Hunter want to give away work by an artist at their gallery? They're in the business of selling it, after all. The answer is pretty obvious--being in a museum collection confers legitimacy on an artist. In other words, it's branding. I realize this seems crass, and artists often recoil from this sort of thing--after all, the value of the work should be the work itself, not some story about its credentials--and in any case, that value shouldn't be measured in dollars. But gallerists have to live in the real world where artists and landlords and the power company all get paid lest bankruptcy and lawsuits ensue. So good branding is key to their continued existence.

Each label contained one more piece of data--a number. DePrez's was 2013.334. Beacon's was 2007.1693. This is the year the work was acquired and which work it was in order of all the works acquired that year. So in 2007, at least 1693 works were acquired by the MFAH. This tells you that at any given time, only a tiny percentage of the museum's holdings can be displayed at one time.

This perhaps more than any fear of provincialism likely explains why more Houston artists don't have work on display at any given time. (In addition to the works in this exhibit, a small James Bettison work was on display downstairs.) Not that the museum doesn't have a fraught history with local art. James Johnson Sweeney, director from 1961 to 1967, infamously ended the annual regional exhibition, which provided many Houston area artists with important exposure to viewers who might not ever otherwise see their work. Needless to say, this went over pretty poorly with local artists, as demonstrated by Frank Freed's 1966 painting Out! depicting Sweeney ejecting a local painter from the museum.


Frank Freed, Out!, oil on masonite, 12 x 12 inches

(Ironically, Out! was acquired by the MFAH in 1994. Its number is 94.250.)

Personally, I would like to see more local art exhibited at the MFAH. But its relatively small size combined with its huge collection combined with a mission to be world class institution makes this difficult. I'm hoping that when the new building is completed, which will be focused primarily on art since 1900, there will be more opportunities for the display of art by Houston's own artists.

Robert Boyd

The Museum of Fine Arts book store is having a very nice little sale right now, and I got More Than a Constructive Hobby: The Paintings of Frank Freed an exhibition catalog from 1996 for an unbeatable $2.



Frank Freed was an amateur painter in Houston who started painting at age 42 in 1948. He was heavily involved in the local Houston art scene in the 50s and 60s, particularly with the Contemporary Arts Association (later the CAMH) in its early days. Probably his best known painting is Opening Night at the Contemporary Arts Museum from 1954.


Frank Freed, Opening Night at the Contemporary Arts Museum, 1954, oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 24 1/2 inches

He had a upper-middle-class day job in the insurance industry (interesting that so many 20th century artistic figures, like Charles Ives and Wallace Stevens, had high-paying jobs in the insurance industry--not that Freed is anywhere close to Ives or Stevens in stature). He was therefore a very active "Sunday painter." The title of the exhibit comes from a letter he sent to his future wife, Eleanor, when he started taking classes at the Museum of Fine Arts school: "It's high time ... I set up a couple of constructive hobbies for old age." Curator William Camfield thinks Freed was underselling himself, but this seems right to me. He never quit his job and never seriously pursued a career as an artist. It was a highly engaging hobby. As someone who has a decent paying professional day job and an all-absorbing hobby on the side--this blog--I can relate.


Frank Freed, View from White Oak, 1971, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches

Freed's paintings are a mixed bag. Even though he had a couple of classes with serious teachers, his work is fundamentally naive. You couldn't call him an outsider artist, but you'd be forgiven if you thought of, say, the Rev. Howard Finster when you saw his work. However, his most obvious influence was Ben Shahn, whose work apparently "floored" him when he saw it in New York in 1947. His first painting class was with pioneering Houston modernist Robert Preusser.  His subject matter was his life, his city, his World War II experiences, Jewish life and his travels. Many of his subjects reflect his middle-class lifestyle.


Frank Freed, Cocktail Party, c. 1963, oil on masonite, 16 x 16 inches

Often he deals with political subjects overtly, but occasionally he sneaks it in, as in Cocktail Party which depicts what may have been a typical Houston cocktail party in 1963--all white except for one black face in the middle, the waiter.

It's reasonable to ask if Freed was deserving of a solo exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts. He was not by any stretch of the imagination a major Houston artist. But what makes him worth examining is that he was an important figure in the cultural life of Houston, and his painting was a part of that. This is made clear by the excellent critical biography written by William Camfield. He focuses tightly of Freed and his work, but by placing him and his activities in the context of his times, Camfield tells a kind of art history of Houston. Modernist and contemporary art was pushed forward here largely through the efforts of middle-class enthusiasts like Freed, especially in the days before the MFAH and the CAMH had full-time curators.

When this show was reviewed by Sheila Dewan in the Houston Press in 1996, she asked, "Freed was basically a Sunday painter, of which there have been many in Houston's history. It's likely that more than a few of comparable talent have gone semi-professional, as Freed did before his death in 1975. So the question then is, why is the MFA paying homage to this particular one?" Her answer was cynical--money. Freed, over the course of his life, became moderately wealthy and his wife left a large bequest to the museum when she died.

In a way, that can't be discounted. If Freed had been an upholsterer or a mailman, would anyone remember his work today? Well maybe--we still go to the Orange Show and the Beer Can House, after all. In fact, I think it may be harder for a wealthy art patron to be recognized as an artist than other people. Freed didn't have a solo exhibit until 1964. In the 50s, only family members and a few friends knew he painted. It was only because his wife Eleanor promoted his artwork that he started to get exhibits. And even when someone like Freed does start showing his work, it must be difficult for anyone to take it seriously. For an active art patron to proclaim himself an artist seems utterly dilettantish. In the end, we like Freed's work because it is likable, not because he was rich.

In any case, thanks to Camfield's catalog text, this exhibit wasn't just about one man's art--it was also about a period in Houston's history (including its art history).

The MFAH had a lot of these catalogs left. And it's a great bargain for just two dollars. Get it while the sale is on.

Robert Boyd

What is outsider art? What is folk art? Do these two categories overlap? What is their relationship to the "art world"? These questions are on my mind after viewing Kindred Spirit at the Art Car Museum. Co-Curator Jay Wehnert (who runs the great web site Intuitive Eye) identifies the work in this show as presenting a "folk art aesthetic"--that qualified statement is required because some of the artists in the show are academically trained. Real folk artists, he states, are either self-taught or work in a tradition that exists in their community. If there are themes to the work, Wehnert defines them as "heritage" and "spirituality." Much of the art is specifically Christian, depicting scenes from the Bible or exhorting the viewer to repent.


Rev. Brown, The Straight Gate, not dated, paint on wood

Unlike classical arts like oil paintings or marble sculpture, there is a fuzziness about whether or not a piece of folk art or outsider art is, in fact, art. This issue also exists for a lot of contemporary art, particularly installations, found objects, conceptual art, etc. To vastly simplify the issues here, a rule of thumb is that if you see it in a gallery, it's probably art. (This leads to the comic situation one sometimes finds oneself in, where you are in a gallery looking at an unfamiliar vent or electrical outlet wondering whether it's part of the exhibit.) This idea, the institutional theory of art, has very interesting philosophical ramifications, but it also happens to be very helpful in evaluating much contemporary art.

But with folk and outsider art, we need another criterion. Something similar, perhaps, but not exactly the same. The issue of whether or not a piece of work is "art" or not isn't solved by its presence in a museum--after all, such objects can exist in anthropological or historical museums without being called "art". For folk and outsider art, therefore, a work becomes art not when it enters a gallery, but when it is discovered (and usually acquired) by someone who has some level of connection to the bourgeois art world. In some cases, the "discovery story" is a major part of the elevation of a folk artist's work into the sanctified realm of art. See for example Nathan Lerner (Henry Darger's landlord), John Maloof (buying random boxes of Vivian Maier negatives at auction), Bill Arnett (driving Southern backroads to discover Thornton Dial, the Gee's Bend quilters and other African American folk artists), etc. So when in this show the labels list the names of the collector who owns a given piece, it takes on a slightly more significance than similar labels in a show of, say, 18th century English paintings at the MFAH would. In some cases, that "collector" was the first person with the authority (granted by virtue of that person's membership in the art world) to recognize that a body of work was, in fact, art.


Ike Morgan, George Washington, n.d., acrylic on paper

Such is the case with George Washington by Ike Morgan. It is identified as being in the collection of artist Jim Pirtle, and significantly, Pirtle was the one who discovered Morgan when Pirtle worked the night shift at the Rusk Hospital for the Criminally Insane and Morgan was an inmate there. (Wehnert tells this story on his website, The Intuitive Eye.) As I wandered through this show, I wondered if there were other stories like this hidden behind the artworks on display.


Ike Morgan, Mount Rushmore, ca. 1990, acrylic and ink on paper

It's hard for me to view a show like this without thinking about these things--the "discovery" of the artist and the elevation of the work from either a practical or personal function into the consecrated realm of "art." These seem like key issues in the world of outsider art. So while I look at the fascinating work of a great colorist like Ike Morgan, these thoughts nag. For instance, it is significant that this show is at the Art Car Museum as opposed to, say, Diverse Works or the CAMH. Some institutions in Houston seem sympathetic with outsider art (the Menil and the Art Car Museum primarily), while others are apparently not (pretty much every other art exhibition space in town). As far as I know, no commercial galleries in Houston deal with this work--there seems to be a worry among at least some of them that doing so would be exploitative. (This is an accusation that Bill Arnett has faced repeatedly.) But the upshot of this reticence is that we only rarely see work like this in Houston. Until this show, the most recent exhibit of this kind of art was the staggering Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawing from the Collection at the Menil in 2011. Has Ike Morgan ever had a solo exhibit in Houston? Not as far as I can determine.

It seems weird that Houston, of all places, shouldn't be more fertile ground for the public exhibition of folk/outsider/visionary art.  After all, we love our visionary architecture/environments like the Orange Show. Why does Houston value such artists more if they are architects and builders (and auto customizers) than if they are painters? I don't know. Maybe shows like this can help bring balance.


Richard Gordan Kendall, Church, ca. 1997, colored pencil on paper

Richard Gordon Kendall was a homeless man who passed his time making elaborate drawings. In 1995, curator Jay Wehnert heard about Gordon from a friend who had observed him drawing in downtown Houston. A story like this is red meat to an obsessive folk/outsider art enthusiast. He searched the area near the Star of Hope Mission in downtown Houston every day for a week until he found Kendall. According to Wehnert, Kendall had never shown anyone the drawings. For the next three years, Wehnert supplied Kendall with art supplies, food and clothes while occasionally buying a piece of art. Then in 1998, Kendall disappeared.

Kendall's obsessive drawings were entirely private until Wehnert came along. They were never finished--Kendall would continue tweaking them indefinitely as long as he was the only viewer. But once Wehnert came along and started buying them, they became finished works of art.


Richard Gordon Kendall, Self-Portrait, n.d., colored pencil on paper

The problem with Kendall's work is that it is hard to judge them without judging their story. My feeling is that they seem less visually interesting than Ike Morgan's work, but the mystery of their creation is so fascinating that I'm willing to handicap them. Yet thinking about them this way feels wrong. It makes me feel slightly guilty. But it's a helpful reminder that no aesthetic judgment is pure. There is no such thing as an ideologically neutral Olympian aesthetic judgment. The moment you know Kendall's story, his story becomes part of his art.


Rev, Brown, Jesus is the Way, n.d., paint on wood

Since the creators of these works often come from cultures in which "professional artist" doesn't exist as an occupation, they do things that in some way relate to being an artist. The Reverend Brown was a Fifth Ward sign painter and preacher. In Brown's world, Jesus is the Way was a painted sign serving a religious purpose. In a gallery, it becomes a piece of folk art with powerful design and hand-painted calligraphy.


Frank Jones, Devil House, ca. 1967, colored pencil on paper

When I saw Frank Jones' work, it immediately appealed to me even without knowing his story. But even without it, it reminded me of the work of famous outsider artists like Adolf Wölfli and Martin Ramirez. It makes one wonder if there is a style associated with incarcerated mentally ill men? In some ways, they all seem to be turning their prisons into fantasies. In Jones case, he was a visionary who was plagued by "haunts" and "devils" his entire life. His situation seems like a case of untreated mental illness, and like many facing that situation, he ended up in prison in Huntsville. There he drew pictures of his devils in "devil houses" with whatever materials he could scrounge.

Then in 1964, the prison in Huntville sponsored its first prison art contest. Some guards entered Jones's work as a joke. Ironically it won. And in a classic "discovery" narrative, Dallas gallerist Murray Smither happened to be in the audience for the show. He was taken with the work and became a liaison between Jones and the art world. It's worth noting that with Wehnert and Smither, neither just blindly stumbled onto their "discoveries." They both made an effort to get outside of their comfort zone in hope of discovering something wonderful.


Forrest Prince, People That Eat Animals Have a Love Deficiency, 2006, mirror, wood

Not every artist in the show is an outsider artist or a folk artist. Forrest Prince is an active participant in the Houston art scene, even though his biography reads like that of an outsider artist. He's an ideal example of the fluidity of these categories. Frank Jones, a lifer in prison, never had the opportunity to become part of the social world of any art scene. Forrest Prince could have been in the same boat, but his life of petty criminality ended in the late 60s and early 70s when he was born again as a Christian and an artist (a simultaneous occurrence). Of course, he still needed a discovery story, and his work was spotted by CAMH director James Harithas. But at that point, is he an outsider artist anymore? Does that phrase have a solid enough definition to include or exclude someone like Forrest Prince. Either way, his work is a powerful and a welcome inclusion in the show.


Aaron Lundy, Hood People (one of three), 2004, papier mâché

And sometimes the work here may be the work of someone resolutely outside the art world but feel like it would fit right in, like Aaron Lundy's Hood People. When I saw them, I instantly thought of John Ahearn's portraits of folks from the South Bronx.  Lundy is a hairdresser from the Third Ward. Ahearn has had museum shows and has exhibited work on three continents, with write-ups in all the big art slicks.


Aaron Lundy, Hood People & Third Ward, 2004, papier mâché

These categories--outsider art, visionary art, folk art, contemporary art--are fluid. We know what they mean, but as Kindred Spirit demonstrates (whether intentionally or not), our certainties about them can evaporate when we look closely at individual works and artists.


Vanzant Driver, untitled, ca. 1980, broken glass, glue, plywood, light

Vanzant Driver's glass chapels are the work of someone who sees himself on a mission from God. In fact, he doesn't sign the works because he sees them as being created by God. But when he walked into the CAMH and showed his work to rental gallery director Sheila Rosenstein, he found a receptive eye and a certain entrée into the art world.

When Ray Balinskas and Tito Ramos decided to build their own version of a Mexican nacimiento, they invited many of the artists of Houston to help--including Vanzant Driver.


Ray Balinskas and Tito Ramos (with Marie Adams, Wanda Alexander, Sarah Balinskas, Bobbie Bennett, James Bettison, John Bryant, Pat Burns, Bob Camblin, Sue Castleman, Dorman David, Gayle DeGuerin, Julio Del Hoyo, Mark Diamond, Vanzant Driver, Alix Dunn, Noah Edmundson, Mercedes Fernandes, Michael Galbreth, Ron Garcia, Dixie Friend Gay, Carol Gerhardt, Nancy Giordano, Lynn Goode, Stephanie Wernette Harrison, John Hilliard, Kim Hines, Perry House, Benito Huerta, Tom Hughen, Lollie Jackson, Diana Jenscke, Lucas Johnson, Patti Johnson, Sam Jones, Sharon Kopriva, Labeth Lammers, Jhonny Langer, Maite Leal, Marianne Lixie, Peter Loos, Jesse Lott, Betty Luddington, Mariquita Masterson, Jack Massing, Robert McCoy, Bonnie McMillan, Michael Moore, Paola Mrorni, Melissa Noble, Patrick Palmer, Kate Petley, Forrest prince, Don Redman, Chula Ross Sanchez, Gail Siptak, Earl Staley, William Steen, Lynn Swanner, Joe Tate, Toby Topek, Arthur Turner, Tracye Ware, Gary Wellman, Ellen White, Joanne White, Frank Williams, Clint Willour, Dee Wolff, Elena Wortham and Gloria Zamora), Texas Nacimento, 1989, mixed media

Ray Balinskas and Tito Ramos (et al.), Texas Nacimento (Vanzant Driver chapel detail), 1989, mixed media


Ray Balinskas and Tito Ramos (et al.), Texas Nacimento, 1989, mixed media


Ray Balinskas and Tito Ramos (et al.), Texas Nacimento (detail), 1989, mixed media


Ray Balinskas and Tito Ramos (et al.), Texas Nacimento (detail), 1989, mixed media


Ray Balinskas and Tito Ramos (et al.), Texas Nacimento (detail), 1989, mixed media

If any single piece in the show represents a collapsing of artistic categories, Texas Nacimiento is it.

One unspoken thing in this exhibit--the elephant in the room--is that many of these artists are African Americans who came from impoverished backgrounds, either from rural areas or urban neighborhoods like the Third Ward or the Fifth Ward. Their race and economic circumstances prevented them from studying art in school, getting MFAs, etc. (Or getting proper psychiatric treatment, as in the case of Ike Morgan and Frank Jones). While there are outsider/folk/visionary artists from every race and background, this show shows us that Texas's long shameful racial history has pushed quite a lot of African-American artists to forge their own paths far outside the mainstream.

Kindred Spirit is a good exhibit, but a bit scattered. There are too many different works in the show that are hard to relate to one another. And the inclusion of three art cars (a requirement of the museum) doesn't help this. But if you look past this minor fault, Kindred Spirit is an important show. It reminds us that there have been and are people in Houston doing often astonishing art completely outside the art world.

What I would like to see now would be nice solo exhibits by many of the artists in this show, particularly Ike Morgan, Frank Jones and Aaron Lundy.

Robert Boyd


Rick Lowe (Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.)

We aren't really supposed to use words like "genius" any more to talk about artists. "Genius" is one of those holdovers of Romanticism, a word, John Berger wrote,that was meant to "mystify rather than clarify."The MacArthur Foundation grants are often called "genius grants," but as Cecelia Conrad, vice-president of Macarthur Fellows Program, wrote, "The foundation does not use the name 'genius' grant; the news media coined that nickname in 1981, when we announced our first class of fellows."

Nonetheless, the name "genius grant" and all it implies has stuck with the MacArthur Fellows Program. The new class of MacArthur Fellows was announced this morning. I was was moved to learn that Rick Lowe, co-founder and guiding light of Project Row Houses, is part of the class of 2014.  Project Row Houses is one of the best things about Houston. A combination of community organization and revolving set of artists installations, PRH remains an unique institution on the Houston scene. (The only other thing locally that combines art and community action on anywhere near the scale of PRH is the Phoenix Commotion up in Huntsville.) And Lowe has taken this model and incubated similar initiatives in other cities.


Rick Lowe walking along Holman St. in front of Project Row Houses (Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.)

The email from Project Row Houses announcing Lowe's MacArthur grant came at two minutes after midnight. I'm guessing the news was embargoed until then. I went to the MacArthur Foundation webpage and was astonished and pleased that another artist I love had been selected--Alison Bechdel.


Alison Bechdel in her studio (Courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.)

Alison Bechdel is a cartoonist who came to prominence with her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. That comic was mainly known within the LGBTQ community--she burst out into wider awareness through her two searing comics memoirs Fun Home: A Family Tragicomicand Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama.I've loved her work since I first read her DTWOF collections. As I sit here typing this, I can look at the wall opposite me and see a piece of Alison Bechdel art--one of her DTWOF strips entitled "Boy Trouble."


Alison Bechdel artwork on my wall

The Fellowship is accompanied with a grant for each recipient of $625,000, doled out over five years. It means that for a few years, at least, Lowe and Bechdel won't have to worry too much about money. The purpose is not to reward them for past work, but to create a space for them to continue working--continuing work already started or initiating new projects. Being a MacArthur Fellow means, above all, time to work.

Rick Lowe is 53. Alison Bechdel is 54. I'm 51 and I feel like a child next to them. Maybe that's what they mean by "genius."

Robert Boyd


an art lover on Preview Night sporting an awesome shirt

Last year, I observed that the Houston Fine Art Fair had some seriously bad art, but I also happily discussed the art I found admirable. This fair, smaller than less year (like TCAF), had less to recommend it. It was an improvement in some ways over the previous HFAF--last year, I counted at least five Marilyn Monroe images. This year, there was only one that I noticed.


Craig Alan, Trance, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 at Lawrence Cantor Fine Art


Craig Alan, Trance (detail), oil on canvas, 48 x 48 at Lawrence Cantor Fine Art

Craig Alan's Trance, if you look very close at the canvas, is quite charming. The little grey and white figures, wandering hither and yon--it's like an abstraction of Washington Square Park on a fall afternoon in a world where top hats are really popular. It's only when you step away that your good feelings are rudely deflated. 

But this year there were fewer Marilyns and fewer celebrities in general. But you can't fully escape them at the HFAF.

STARS!

 

Alexi Torres, John Lennon, oil on canvas, 72 x 68 at Evan Lurie Gallery

It wouldn't be HFAF without at least one John Lennon and one painting by Alexi Torres.


Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger, 141, 1975, screenprint, 44 x 29 inches at Adamar Fine Arts

And there are always a few blue chip artists at HFAF. This Andy Warhol reminds you why his reputation deservedly nosedived in the 70s.


Jörg Döring, Champion, mixed media on canvas, 51 x 51 inches at Brisset Art Gallery

Jörg Döring, Fly first class, mixed media on canvas, 59 x 59 inches at Brisset Art Gallery


Rolland Berry, David Bowie Ziggy Stardust, 24 x 24 inches, mixed media at Lawrence Cantor Fine Art


Rolland Berry, Sex Pistols, 24 x 24 inches, mixed media at Lawrence Cantor Fine Art

Any picture of the Sex Pistols that leaves out Paul Cook and Steve Jones is an abomination in my view. (Not to mention Glenn Matlock.)

I was a teenager once--I had posters of rock stars on my walls. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. Perhaps A.O. Scott was right.

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY!

 

Then there was the art at HFAF that seemed desperately happy. I wonder about the need to surround yourself with artwork so affirming that it borders on oppressive.


Bernard St. Maxent, Love in Pink, mixed media, 100 x 100 cm. at Frederic Got

The French are so sophisticated!


Bernard St. Maxent, Trois Art, mixed media, 110 x 110 cm. at Frederic Got


Mackenzie Thorpe at Murloge Gallery/Off the Wall Gallery


Mackenzie Thorpe at Murioge Gallery/Off the Wall Gallery


Mackenzie Thorpe at Murioge Gallery/Off the Wall Gallery

It would be easy to make fun of Mackenzie Thorpe's art, but I don't necessarily see anything wrong with happy decorative objects. They look like the kind of things you would give your mom on Mother's day--and there's nothing wrong with that. What I don't get is why are these in an art fair? Can't you get stuff like this in gift shops all over the world for a fraction of the price?  Is this gallery trying to make a case that this stuff is art?

MONEY!

 

Gaston Ugalde at PSH Projects

For some strange reason, there is always a lot of art that has to do with money at art fairs. I can't figure it out! What's the connection between "art" and "money"?


Nelson de La Nuez, Take the Money and Run, Hand painted mixed media on canvas at Bruce Lurie


Paul Rousso, A Thousand Going Twice, mixed media on hand sculpted acrylic, 44 x 39 x 7 inches at George Billis Gallery

Now admittedly some people might call this art crass and idiotic. What people, you ask? Poor people.


Andy Warhol, $ (Quadrant) II.283, screenprint on Lenox Board, 40 x 32 inches at Adamar Fine Art

The most reliable way of determining whether art is great or not is how well it flatters rich people, and no one was better at that than Andy Warhol. That's why he was and remains the greatest contemporary artist.


Ken Little, Pledge, 2002, $1 bills over a steel frame, 71 x 31 x 17 inches at d.m. allison

Ken Little, bubby--you just don't get it. You can't flatter the rich with a bunch of one dollar bills. Your sculptures and collages may be witty and clever, but they're chump change.


Ken Little, Pledge, 2002, $1 bills over a steel frame, 72 x 32 x 23 inches at d.m. allison


Ken Little, Pledge, 2008, found object collage at d.m. allison

LENTICULARIFIC!

 

We live in a high-tech age, and that's reflected in art. We see robotic art, internet art, interactive art, LED art, etc.  But the most exciting high tech art of all use the technology that brought us winking postcards from Stuckey's and turns it into art. Yes, I'm talking about lenticular images.


Park Hyung-Jin, Peace of mind, 2014, mixed media on lenticular screen, 80 x 80 cm

The eyes--so haunting!


Park Hyung-Jin, Redemption_02, 2013, mixed media on lenticular screen, 105 x 105 cm

They're birds but they fishes but then they birds again oh jeez. MIND. BLOWN.


Jeff Robb, Unnatural Causes #4, lenticular photographic print, 40 x 40 inches

Jeff Robb produces the perfect art for the hip dude-bro pad--it's the art equivalent of two girls fake making out at a bar in Midtown. It's not sleazy, bro--it's art!

MORE ATROCITIES IN PART 2!

Robert Boyd

(Continued from Part 1)

STUNT ART!

Federico Uribe at Art Nouveau Gallery

To paraphrase Hennessy Youngman, that's too many pencils, therefore "art!"


Wang Ziwon, Mechanical Buddhahood, 2014, urethane, metallic material, machinery, electronic device (CPU, motor), 37 x 9 x 25 inches at Keumsan Gallery

Why not have a slowly moving slightly creepy doll man in your collection?


Wang Ziwon at Keumsan Gallery


Geraldo Feldstein, Fernandito, iron and resin

"Like."


Nathan Vincent at Emmanuel Fremin Gallery

Hey, just because it's stunt art doesn't mean I hate it. I liked Nathan Vincent's massively blown up crocheted army man sculpture. It may be nothing more than nostalgia for me, but it looks really cool. Maybe that's enough.


Nathan Vincent, Gold/Silver/Porcelain Glock, 2 x 6 x 6.5 inches each

Another set of Nathan Vincent sculptures. If they didn't sell at the art fair, maybe they could bring them back and sell them at the gun show. At $500 apiece, they are quite competitive with real Glocks.


Chris Hedrick, two thumbs up, carved linden, 24 x 15 x 4 inches at Koelsch Gallery

The biggest show of stunt art was a booth full of Chris Hedrick's wood carvings at Koelsch Gallery. But his "stunt" is his supernatural woodcarving ability and his sense of humor. In a world of deskilled conceptual art, I still doff my hat to anyone who can do what Hedrick does, and the fact he does it with such wit only makes it better.

CARTOONS!

 

Bram Reijnders, Saving All My Love For You, mixed media on canvas, 28 x 50 inches

You know me. I love comics. But is there any lazier subject matter in contemporary art than cartoon characters? It's almost always infantile instant gratification. Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami know this, and so do many less famous artists at HFAF.


Bram Reijnders, Famous Mouse Escapes, mixed media on canvas, 33 x 72 inches


Nelson De la Nuez, Be Happy, hand painted mixed media on canvas

Sure, these kinds of figures can be ironic, or can have powerful resonance by using common childhood tropes. There are ways to use them meaningfully in art. But that wasn't on the menu at HFAF.

Nick Veasey,Superman Takes a Break, c-type x-ray phootcgraphic print, 60 x 47 inches at Evan Lurie Gallery


Terry Thompson, Cap'n Crunch Pop, 2012, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches

Fifty-odd years ago, this kind of thing was transgressive and bracing. Now it is pure shit.


Gary John, Comic, acrylic on Korean Newspaper, 30 x 30 inches

Sometimes an artist brings a particular personal style to cartoons, and sometimes that works. But not Gary John's pieces, alas.

MATCHES THE SOFA!

 

Dina Gustin Baker, Crescendo, 2008, oil on canvas, 50 x 64 inches

Some pieces seem to be marketed less at collectors than at decorators. This must infuriate serious abstractionists, but let's face it--people like art that looks good in their house. In a way, the sign of a true collector is that her collection makes no sense as decoration. In other words, it doesn't look good with the couch.


Haessle (sic) at Kips Gallery


Kim Keunjoong at KP Projects

This isn't to say that these works are necessarily bad. I was really impressed by this intensely colored painting by Kim Keunjoong--the flowers were like decorative embroidery, and the line of gnomic text provides an unexpectedly straight contrast to the swirling curves of the flowers. So maybe this would have appealed to a collector. But just as likely it appealed to a decorator.

JUST PLAIN BAD.

 

I could post photos of bad art from this fair all day long, but this post is getting too damn long. But I did want to spotlight these two exceptional pieces.


Jacques Lebscond at Frederic Got Gallery


Yuroz at Murloge Gallery/Off the Wall Gallery

I love how Yuroz churns out kitsch paintings in a watered down version of a style that ran out of steam almost a hundred years ago. (There's a great picture of him meeting the Pope on his website.)

THE MOST OFFENSIVE ART AT HFAF

 

Max-Steven Grossman, (top) Art SP, 2013, photo composition on lucite, 48 x 100 and (bottom) Musica, 2014, photo composition on lucite, 48 x 100 inches at Axiom Contemporary

Max-Steven Grossman's lifesize photos  of libraries offended me more than any other piece of art at HFAF. This was a very personal offense. Lot's of things that offend other people don't offend me at all, but the fundamentally anti-intellectual conception of these photos sickened me. I love books. I love reading. These images take the place of books, almost literally. The space they occupy on your wall is the space you could have for actual books. Indeed, if you wanted to, for the price of one of these photos, you could very likely buy copies of every single book pictured--with money to spare for some Ikea bookshelves. You could carefully arrange the books you just bought to look like these photos. And as an added bonus, you could read the books if you so chose.

Grossman's photos in effect say, "Books are fine decorations, but what kind of brainiac loser actually reads them?"

OK, I will admit--these last two posts have been cruel. But HFAF deserves it. This art fair was a slap in the face, a statement that Houston deserves all the kitsch they can shovel down our throats. We've seen the two art fairs, TCAF and HFAF, dramatically shrink this year. I question in the long run if Houston can even support one art fair. But I know in my gut that we can't support two. As lame as TCAF was this year, if one of these fairs has to go under, I hope it is HFAF. Perhaps in such a circumstance, TCAF could absorb all that's good in HFAF and become a better art fair.

Because there was good stuff in HFAF. In the last two posts I've focused almost exclusively on the negative. But my next post will be a catalog of things I liked at HFAF.

Robert Boyd

Noted vandal Uriel Landeros (see this,  this, this, this and this)  returns with a new series of drawings he calls his "prison series." He posted them on his Facebook page. He describes them thus: "Its like telling a lion to stop being a lion, what dosent kill u makes u stronger. Short preview of my Prison series. The people of change, Patriots, Activist and other influential people." He includes portraits of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Carlos Slim, and Joaquin "El Chapo" Gúzman. Other drawings include a self-portrait behind bars, a masked tagger striking a heroic pose and a couple of "sheeple." Lord they're terrible. But the ballsiest picture is a portrait of Tony Shafrazi.


portrait of Tony Shafrazi by Uriel Landeros

I've lightened the image from Landeros's dark Facebook image so it's a little easier to see. Shafrazi is a very successful gallery owner, but he is best remembered as the asshole who spray painted Guernica in 1974. (Obviously a role model for young Uriel.) Of course, I prefer to think of him as the asshole who assembled a contemporary art collection for the Shah of Iran shortly before the Iranian revolution. (There are many Shafrazi-esque assholes now, selling pricey art to various Gulf State despots as we speak.)

That the little asshole should pay homage to the big asshole seems only fitting, no?

Robert Boyd

OK, I was pretty harsh on the Houston Fine Art Fairhere and here. These things are always a mixture. You have the good and the bad and a lot in between. The problem with HFAF was that the bad was so bad, and there was so much of it, one wonders if good galleries like Shoshana Wayne Gallery and Mark Borghi Fine Art will want to continue their association with the fair. Art fairs need to be curated to an extent, and there was little sense that HFAF was particularly selective.

But even if their inclusion criterion was nothing more than a gallery's willingness to pay the booth fee, some good art sneaked in. Here's some of my favorites.


James Surls at Wade Wilson Gallery


James Surls at Wade Wilson Gallery

I love James Surls and was struck by how nice these large sculptures look inside (I think they are meant to be outdoors sculptures). I was a bit surprised to see Surls associated with Wade Wilson (I though Barbara Davis was his local gallery when he bothered--but a look at the artists page on their website suggests that is no longer true.Wade Wilson Gallery closed their Houston location after opening a Santa Fe gallery. I was a little surprised to see them in Houston--at least one Houston artist had to sue Wade Wilson to get paid in recent years.


Michal Rovner, Yaar (Laila), 2014, LCD screens, paper and video, 46 1/2 x 40 1/2 x 2 3/8 inches at Shoshana Wayne Gallery

Not surprisingly, there wasn't much video art at HFAF. I think there were literally more lenticular artworks than video artworks. But one video piece I liked was this eerie one by Michal Rovner, featuring two lines of people endlessly marching on what looks like the face of a cliff. A group of cypress is in silhouette in the foreground. The latter feature seemed slightly unnecessary--the point of the work was the endless line of marchers. But as I looked closely, I realized that the center tree covered a seam between two video monitors. I guess you have to work with monitors that are actually manufactured, and if you want to have a nearly square image like this, connecting two monitors is the only way to do it. It detracts from the main idea, unfortunately. But I still found Yaar (Laila) to be a rather haunting piece.


Sabrina Gschwandtner, Hearts and Hands Brown and Blue, 2014, 16 mm polyester film, polyester thread, 23 5/8 x 23 1/2 inches at Shoshana Wayne Gallery

I saw Sabrina Gschwandtner's work earlier this year at Pulse. Aside from creating very interesting collages with old bits of 16 mm film, her surname has the highest consonant to vowel ratio of any other artist that I know of. Her pieces require a lightbox to be seen properly. Because the strips of film are sewn together, there is a rather quilt-like quality to her pieces. I find the patterning quite hypnotic.


Sabrina Gschwandtner, Hearts and Hands Brown and Blue (detail), 2014, 16 mm polyester film, polyester thread, 23 5/8 x 23 1/2 inches at Shoshana Wayne Gallery


John Chamberlain, Flywheelsonata, 2007, painted and chromed steel at Mark Borghi Fine Art

This rather antic piece by John Chamberlain exudes a happy feeling not always present in his work, which can be a little anxious in part because the association one may draw from it with car accidents. I know he always claimed to be a formalist, but still his work is from the high tide of the automobile (and thus the auto accident). It's nearly impossible not to think about that. But here, by using narrow strips of brightly painted sheet metal, I get an entirely different feeling.


John Chamberlain prints for sale to benefit the Asia Society

In addition to the John Chamberlain sculpture, HFAF was auctioning off two John Chamberlain prints (and some other artwork) to benefit the Asia Society.


Larry Poons, Untitled #13, 1973, acrylic on canvas, 55 1/2 x 29 inches at Mark Borghi Fine Art

This alarming snot avalanche by Larry Poons was perversely fascinating. 


Luis Jimenez, El Buen Pastor, colored lithograph, 1999 at Redbud Gallery

Redbud Gallery had several Luis Jimenez prints, including this powerful portrait of Esequiel Hernández, Jr., the goat herder killed by U.S. Marines in 1997.


Jim Dine, Double Iron Man, woodcut, 68 x 98 inches at Adamar Fine Arts

When I saw these antic woodcuts, I immediately thought, "Wow!" I would have never guessed that they were by Jim Dine. There is something about these two faces that really grabs me--a combination of the crude cartoonish rendering, the intense and unexpected colors and the restless texture.


Donald Sultan, Screen Aug 25, 1987, aquatint with relief print on reverse, 63 x 144 inches flat at Parkerson Gallery

I wish they had displayed this Donald Sultan on the floor so that we could see both sides of the screen. The image on this side is simple, but I love the smudginess.



Bert Long, Search, 1987, mixed media, 26 x 44 1/2 inches at Deborah Colton Gallery

Great colors on this Bert Long at Deborah Colton Gallery, which had one of the more interesting booths at HFAF.


Suzanne Anker, Carbon Collision in the Diamond Mind 33-40, 2013 metallic glazed porcelain at Deborah Colton Gallery

Suzanne Anker's little porcelain statuettes look decidedly dangerous.


Ferhat Özgür, Corps of Honour, 2011, watercolor on paper, 15.75 x 23.62 inches at Deborah Colton Gallery

Ferhat Özgür had a whole series of bizarre, slightly martial watercolors, including this tender moment between two Turkish soldiers.

The Houston Artists Hall of Fame

Jackie Harris,The Fruitmobile, 1967 Ford station wagon modified 1984

The fair devoted a considerable amount of space to the Houston Artists Hall of Fame, an exhibit of artists chosen by Patricia Covo Johnson. The idea is that there will be new artists added each year. In a way, it might have been a bad idea for HFAF to host this because it showed how weak most of the exhibitors were in comparison. It was nice that Johnson included an art car (one of the very first art cars, in fact) , recognizing the importance of this oddball vernacular art form to Houston.


Jesse Lott, Ascension of the Fire God, ca. 1974, wire and other found materials


two Jim Love sculptures


Manual (Ed Hill and Suzanne Bloom), Louis Corinth in Vermont, gelatin silver


Mel Chin, Cross for the Unforgiven, n.d., AK47s and steel


Alabama Song's booth

As they did last year, HFAF comped Alabama Song a booth. Work was hung salon-style and was for sale at all different price points (good idea!). They also had some participatory art happening. Rocky Wang played ping pong with all challengers.


Rocky Wang taking all comers with a shoe

Despite the fact that he handicapped himself by playing with his shoe instead of a paddle, Wang eviscerated every challenger.


Rocky Wang's hat with a tiny ping pong paddle


Rabéa Ballin at Alabama Song


Miguel Amat at Alabama Song

Miguel Amat will be having a show at the Blaffer Gallery later this fall--I'm looking forward to it and so should you.

Fotofest also had a booth which featured an intriguing selection of Arab photographers.


Ahmed Mater, from the series Illumination (Ottoman Waqf), 2014, gold leaf, tea, pomegranate, Dupont prints at Fotofest


Ahmed Mater, from the series Illumination (Ottoman Waqf), 2014, gold leaf, tea, pomegranate, Dupont prints at Fotofest


Hassan Hajjaj, Odd 1 Out, 2000/1421 from the series Kesh Angels, 2009-2012, c-print, walnut wood frame, tomato cans at Fotofest




Lalla Essaydi, Harem #29, 2012, chromogenic print at Fotofest

So it wasn't all bad. But HFAF still has to improve a lot, and their trajectory over the past couple of years has not been in the right direction.

Robert Boyd

I wrote about Brian Piana's podcast, Spill Some Stuff,  earlier this year, and now I have the pleasure of being a guest on it. He wanted to talk about art fairs. We started by talking about Frieze and the smaller satellite fairs in New York and compared those fairs to the two we have in Houston, the Texas Contemporary Art Fair and the Houston Fine Art Fair. We discuss a lot of specific artworks (Jonathan Monk gets a lot of ribbing), and close with a brief discussion of an art fair that I'd like to see in Houston.

When Brian Piana decides to engage in a new hobby, he goes whole hog. This was evident in the excellent home-brewed beer he served me, and in the podcast set-up he uses. It consists a large chrome-plated microphone (that looked like it could have been used in radio broadcasts from the 1940s) mounted onto a wood plank, with two microphone screens on flexible necks between us and the microphone. Visually, it was amazing! This was sitting on a small table. I sat on one side and Brian was on the other. He was monitoring the recording on a computer screen as we spoke. And all this set up paid off--the interview sounds great. You know how when you hear your own recorded voice, it usually sounds really weird? At least for me, it never sounds right. Up until now, I've always assumed that had to do with the way we hear our own voices. But now I wonder if that's true. I was amazed at hearing my own voice on Piana's podcast--it sounded natural. It didn't have that "off" sound that recordings of my own voice usually have.


Spill Some Stuff's podcast studio

Even though I managed not to sound completely dreadful, Piana as always sounds great. KUHF should give him an hour every week to chat with whoever he likes. (Of course, it's hard for me to be completely unbiased about a full hour of me spouting off on this and that. Because obviously it's great.) Anyway, Spill Some Stuff won't exclusively deal with art in the future, but so far it has really had some great local Houston art content. Give it a listen.

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

We were barely ten minutes into our drinks at Poison Girl when Christy Karll mentioned parallel universes. I knew at that moment I would investigate the art she is exhibiting in Journey Through the Trees and Beyond, which opens at the Jung Center on October 4. Over the course of several studio visits I learned the following:


Christina Karll, Symbol Transcendence, 2006, Latex and plaster on panel, 96” x 48”

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: You comfortably use words like “time travel” and “force fields.” What solar system did you come from?

Christina Karll: I know. I don’t fit in. I never did feel like I belong here.

VBA: Me too. Your Jung Center artist statement announces quite decisively that the drawings, paintings and three dimensional artworks originate primarily in your subconscious mind, so let’s discuss the hidden and unconscious sources of your art.

CK: There’s no other explanation for the narrow columnar forms that appear so frequently in my drawings and paintings. They are unfamiliar, and must come from an unknown part of my consciousness. It’s true they are partially inspired by Chinese landscape painting, in which tall rocky peaks summon nature’s energy, and which in Taoist belief express the vastness of the cosmos. And I’ve entertained the idea that the vertical marks continue to emerge because cells in my body hold memory patterns of past human existence in the Himalayas. It’s possible my imagination devised them to symbolize the big mystery at death.

VBA: According to the artist statement, recurring images of distorted stair cases also surface unconsciously.

CK: Yes, the deeper less accessible part of my mind must be their source, because I never consciously decide to walk up to a canvas and paint one more staircase. Some collectors believe the ascending “steps” express our journey to higher awareness, and surely expanded consciousness is a valid interpretation. But it’s significant that I painted Water Stairway after reading the The Tibetan Book of the Dead, from which I learned about the four colors the dead person sees in the Bardo state between death and rebirth. Those colors float through my painting. When my father was dying I urged him to focus his consciousness on the radiant white light described in the book.


Christina Karll, Water Stairway, 2011, Latex paint on panel, diptych, 96” x 96”

VBA: Christy, your familiarity with Jung’s essay on the Tibetan Book of the Dead got my attention. In the early seventies I first came to know the piece in which Jung articulated that the apparitions in the Bardo state, which are projections of our minds, are essentially part of a journey to meet the self, which corresponds precisely to the point at which we meet the divine. Jung stated, “One’s own consciousness is a radiant Godhead itself.”

CK: You can see how he familiarized himself with Hindu, Gnostic, Tao, and Christian traditions. I like that. And it interests me that although he was a scientist, he studied the occult. Did you know Jung participated in séances?

VBA: I can’t look at your images of staircases and strange waterfalls without thinking of Pat Steir. How familiar are you with her work?

CK: I’ve studied it closely. In fact I visited her studio on one of my trips to New York. It’s not that I purposefully set out to imitate her, but her art has been tremendously influential. Actually it was Gael Stack who introduced me to Steir’s work, years ago, she looked at my work, and came up and handed me a book on her, my art was similar, the images as well as the process, first the meditation, then the mark making, it was all familiar. Once I attended a lecture at the CAMH where Steir was part of a panel discussion, and I could actually see her aura, literally see it, not the other speakers’--only hers. I spoke to her afterwards and told her I saw her halo and she looked deep into my eyes, as if unsurprised by that.

VBA: Jerry Saltz described Steir’s paintings as “internally lit,” an apt summation of your paintings. You are surely aware that Steir believes an unseen force directs the pouring and removing of paint, it is done according to the universe’s rhythm.

CK: The pulsation guiding Steir is the chi, but when I studied this flow I learned that the correct word is “Qi” and it is pronounced “Ji.” Pat Steir was influenced by classical Chinese landscapes. Those landscapes represent a cosmic force, and mine do that, the animating force. My art is a meditation on energy.


Christina Karll, Untitled, 2013, Latex and plaster and conté pencil on panel, 60" x 48"

VBA: Do you practice meditation?

CK: Every day I stretch and just receive the energy. It’s a way of thanking the universe. Also for me, walking in the woods is meditation, as well as working in my studio. Once I’m in the zone, drawing or painting becomes a form of meditation. It could even be considered channeling. I often have music playing while working, and quite often I dance, I love to dance because it raises the energy. I move my body and redirect good energy and animation into the work, and also I think positive thoughts. It works, and it makes a difference. Jackson Pollock did a similar thing in the early part of his career when he borrowed ceremonial movements from Native American sand painting rituals to allow his unconscious mind to form mythic images. He was like a shaman, moving rhythmically around the painting to try to open up lines of communication between the supernatural and natural worlds. I remember reading that Giacometti also tried to inject mystical power into his work. He was interested in magic and alchemy. When I made large paintings for a restaurant commission they were on the floor of my studio, and I moved around them in a meditative way. It makes me feel as if I am part of the painting.

VBA: The image of bundled sticks is far out, admittedly the most perplexing of the repeated and unconscious motifs. By rendering it in bronze you seem to have elevated it to mythic status.

CK: Those bundled sticks have become a primary iconographical element in my art. The image first appeared in drawing in 1990, followed by a painting series, and then I created it in the three dimensional using bronze, which indicates to me it’s extremely important to my psyche, but I don’t know its meaning. On one level the biomorphic form voices my concern about humans harming the planet, while it more broadly signifies the universe’s connectedness. In the 1990 drawing Earth-patch Bundle I depicted the stick bundle floating in a mysterious landscape, it levitates in the tree tops and hovers in its own force field. By combining, layering and erasing the form it becomes ambiguous, and vanishes and reappears. Its wider significance which is not yet fully understood, not yet fully revealed to me, relates to quantum physics and the limits of time and space. I’m talking here about the nature of reality.


Christina Karll, Earth-patch Bundle, 1990, Pastel and conté pencil on paper, 58” x 64”

VBA: Mercy. We’re confronting the deep. This level of contemplation puts me in mind of Pascal’s admission that the silence of infinity frightened the pants off of him. The immensity of the unknown sent the scientist running back to church. Your stick bundle is a pictorial reference to extra dimensional reality. Do you associate it with your deceased sister’s essence?

CK: I certainly do.

VBA: Do you think she exists?

CK: Somewhere on another plane, in another dimension. Look, there are parallel universes, and they are right here! I actually began making art after my sister’s death, her death was the impetus for my art. She was the true artist, she was a great artist, it was so easy for her to create, and it is very difficult for me. I struggle constantly, like I am with this large Untitled, it’s going through so many phases. I’m sure I began making art to connect to her once I lost her, and it might sound silly, but at times I feel as if I’m channeling her. Every once in a while I say “Susan, I need some help here,” I do, I ask her for her help, to send me energy. If I could harness her creativity, her talent, I would be so good.

VBA: Leading physicists, Brian Greene, and the late Werner Heisenberg who won a Nobel Prize, would agree with your statement about parallel universes being right here. In their understanding of quantum physics, parallel universes exist alongside our own, and there are possibly eleven multiple dimensions curving through ours, which in my estimation calls for a radical revision of our beliefs about ultimate reality.

CK: This expanded view of reality is the reason I used the word “beyond” in my exhibition title. I’m trying to understand myself, as well as the mystical aspects of existence, through a wider investigation of quantum physics, philosophy, comparative religion, mythology and even ancient writing. My art is a journey to understanding my own deep inward mystery. Rothko did that. He was a visionary. When I saw the Rothko exhibition at the Tate I learned that he valued repetition, he believed that if an image was important enough to paint once, it should be done over again and again, like my bundled twigs. This was aligned with Jung who made it a rule to never let a figure or figures that he encountered leave until they had told him why they had appeared to him.


Christina Karll, Antler Mountain Chair, 2014 Mixed media, 36 x 22 x 24 inches

VBA: Even without knowledge of the biographical fact that you help Jane Goodall raise money to protect chimpanzee habitats, one “gets” your connection to animals, which is detectable in the art. Comment on the theme of animals.

CK: The bond with them is practically indescribable, it’s extremely deep. The animating force or consciousness that runs through everything is in them too, and I want to understand it. They are immensely mysterious. Animals interact without words, which seems advanced to me, there’s probably a lot there to enlighten us.

Look, I’m not a vegetarian. I eat meat. Several things are going on in works such as Antler Mountain Chair. For one, the antlers have a magical totemic quality. I’m also commenting on inhumane treatment in the way we harvest animals for food, and the trafficking of exotic animals. Clear cutting of forests destroys habitats which is devastating to animals. The lumber companies are dually complicit because poachers ride on the logging trucks to capture exotics and to kill for the illegal bush meat trade, which operates at about $19 billion annually and leads to species extinction. And did you know that the Ebola virus which is blasted all over the news because it’s killing all those people in Africa can be linked to eating infected wild game or bush meat?

There’s another connection. Dreams as you know are the mess of our unconscious mind, and they are also a source of my art. My painting of the human figure with the deer face that gazes directly at the viewer is grounded in a vivid dream in which I was a deer, I was actually in a deer’s body, and extremely frightened by a noise from a machine that was coming closer. I felt threatened by something awful and hidden, but close by. I often call that deer-face figure “Shakespeare,” I’m not sure why but I’m relating him to the greatest writer of human tragedy in the English language.

I want to tell you something because I believe it’s relevant to my art. For my entire life I’ve been inarticulate, which is probably an important reason I paint. When I was a child I was painfully shy and developed a slight stutter, and felt uncomfortable around groups of people. My mother took me to the speech therapist her friend's son was seeing, he was a handsome, shy boy and I had a crush on him. My condition gradually improved but his worsened, and years later I learned sadly that he killed himself and I know it was from crippling self-doubt, because I’ve felt it. As a child I spent quite a bit of time alone, with my dog, with animals and out in nature, and my communication skills improved. Looking back, I find links between the past and the path I’ve chosen. This is called “introversion,” one of Jung’s favorite terms by the way. This interview is another introspective process for me, a scary one.

VBA: The installation you created for the Jung Center’s main gallery is tied to the theme of animals, and has much deeper implications.

CK: My installation I Will Become a Mountain Again, (material prima) visually suggests animals and mountain landscapes, as well as my body, and is based on Jung’s correlation of the principles of alchemy as detailed in the Magnum Opus to the process of realization of the self, which he called individuation. According to Jung’s construct the “negrido” alchemical stage symbolized by the color black stands for darkness, confusion, and the shadow, and the “albedo” stage symbolized by the color white denotes purification, spirituality and understanding. The piece is made of stacked layers of sheer colored metallic fabric that symbolize the alchemical transformation of common metals into gold, and nod to the four alchemical symbolic colors. It cites our evolution through hazy incomprehension to enlightenment. You will notice bare feet beneath the fabric, they are haunting, no? Those are casts of my feet, and they complete the image of my personal transformation into a deer and a mountain, and the integration of my psyche.

It’s important you recognize that my paintings also model the stages of the Opus because they evolved in phases. Their ghost images and visible traces resulting from alterations, beneath layers of poured and dripped paint, are important components. These artworks represent an act of transmutation.

VBA: Integral to transformation is that absurd notion of time.

CK: Precisely, time is an ingredient in my art. And, it’s so weird that time might not be real, even if it feels real. Moments do seem to move forward.

VBA: Einstein spoke of relativity’s “incomparable” beauty.

CK: Beautiful yet inexplicable. When my father was dying he had some kind of revelation about time. I don’t know what happened to him, but his expression indicated it was transformative. He was unconscious, then he came back, and he said, “Christy! Time is all relative!” I think he travelled. When he was unconscious he held his body straight with his toes pointed forward, and his hands flat on each side, like he was floating. I believe he was time-travelling. What’s spooky is he saw something in my future that upset him. He said “Oh no! Christy, it’s you, no!” I wonder about that.


Christina Karll, Untitled (Connectivity) Slate Blues and Greens, 2006, Latex paint, oil stick and conté pencil on panel board, 96” x 48”

VBA: Several times we’ve discussed important Neolithic sites we have visited. Being at those sites, Catal Huyuk is an example, reinforces for me the extreme depth of time, and the fact that human consciousness extends so deeply through it, and invites me to wonder if consciousness and intelligence are eternal, in the Vedic sense. The Upanishads tell us everything existed in the beginning, and it always will.

CK: When I saw Neolithic sites in Scotland it touched something deep within me. I saw myself! It went beyond perception, I felt connected to the earth and the cosmos, and thought “I am this.” It was deeply felt, and inspired my art. Some symbols and figures were quite unfamiliar and Jung might have categorized them as primordial images and archaic remnants without known origins, but they felt familiar to me. We probably share DNA with others from distant eras, and I’m trying to capture that mystery in the art. One way is by incorporating texture made from organic materials. I create relief in my paintings with a mulch of paper and leaves and hair, usually my own hair.

VBA: How can anyone have that much hair? It’s Pythian.

CK: Oh, my mother thinks I should cut my hair.

VBA: So how come you haven’t used the word “spiritual?” I’m usually up to my ass in the word spiritual when I talk to artists. They love to use that word.

CK: My art is spiritual because it’s a tool for self knowledge.

VBA: Self knowledge is the most sensible thing one can achieve according to Socrates, and by the way, your philosophy coheres with the fundamental spiritual premise that where we attach our inner mind, is where we meet the self, and is precisely where we find heaven and hell and the gods.

It came to pass that a fellow artist decided it was important to set me on the right track regarding your art. Last year Keith Hollingsworth contacted me and encouraged me to “investigate” Christina Karll’s art. “Dig beneath the surface,” Keith insisted.

CK: And I didn’t know my friend Keith talked to you about me, until recently. Naturally when I heard, I felt I had to follow up.


Christina Karll, Journey Through the Trees, 2009, Latex paint on canvas, 96 x 60

Robert Boyd


One of a Kind at the Art League

When it rains, it pours. First there was Kindred Spirits at the Art Car Museum. Now there is One of a Kind: Artwork from the Collection of Stephanie Smither at the Art League. Both are shows of self-taught artists. This is a type of artwork that is quite dear to me, and it my review of Kindred Spirits, I proposed a theory that this kind of artwork didn't "become art" until "discovered" by someone who has enough artworld credibility to declare it to be art. This theory was received with the vast indifference that it probably deserves, but as I was researching some of the artists in Kindred Spirits, I came across mention of Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of Authenticity (2004) by Gary Alan Fine. Fine looks at the world of folk/outsider/self-taught art from the point of view of a sociologist. This is a potentially fruitful way to look at art--Pierre Bourdieu and HowardBecker both famously studied the art world (indeed, their studies helped to define the "art world"), and both men's work is referenced by Fine in Everyday Genius. And Fine does deal with what happens when a hitherto isolated self-taught artist comes into contact with a representative of an artworld.

Writing about art often comes from two poles as identified in the Raphael Rubinstein-edited book Critical Mess as bellelettrist and theory-derived. The former writers are poets and literary writers with an interest in visual art--think Baudelaire or John Ashbery--and the latter are those more heavily influenced by philosophy--think Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss. But there are other schools of art writing that in many ways I find more appealing. There are journalistic writers--Robert Hughes and Jerry Saltz for example, and writers who come from the social sciences like those mentioned earlier, as well as sociologist Sarah Thornton and economist Don Thompson. My preference is for the latter two types--journalists and social scientists--because they tend to deal with art as a class of people and objects and activities that exist in the real world. This is what Fine does in Everyday Genius. He writes about the artists, of course, but also collectors, the market for this work, the institutions that collect and/or display it, the community that has developed around world of self-taught art, the issue of boundaries (what falls into this category of art and what doesn't?--"boundary-work" being a key concept in sociology, apparently), and the idea of an art world for this kind of art.

Part of creating boundaries for the field deals with what to call the field, and this is contentious. Almost every commonly accepted name for this kind of art is problematic--folk art, art brut, outsider art, naive art, vernacular art, self-taught art, visionary art and some even more obscure terms. When I first became aware of this art in the 1980s, "outsider art" was commonly used, but it has fallen out of favor. But some of the terms, regardless of their problems, remain in use because they have been institutionalized in one way or another--the American Folk Art Museum, Collection de L'Art Brut Laussane, the American Visionary Art Museum, the Outsider Art Fair, etc. Fine chooses "self-taught art" because it seems the most neutral, and I'll follow his lead here.

As I suggested in my review of Kindred Spirits, this is art that has a relationship with the mainstream art world but is not fully congruent. Many, if not most, museums are reluctant to collect this kind of material. While there are "mainstream" galleries that carry this kind of art--the best known was Phyllis Kind Gallery, which closed in 2009 after 42 years in business--many of the galleries that feature the work of self-taught artists look and operate quite differently from the standard white cube (for instance, the Webb Gallery). There are few places where a prospective art historian can study this work, and few places where an expert art historian can teach it. Collectors tend to specialize in it, as we can see in this exhibit. And while some pieces by a small number of artists can reach six figures, the prices for self-taught art are, on average, far lower than that of mainstream contemporary art. Fine doesn't mention it, but lower prices help make it easier in one key respect to collect the work of self-taught artists. But acquiring knowledge about what to collect is harder than it is for mainstream art, so while one barrier drops, another grows higher. (This is equally true of a kind of art I personally collect, original comics art. I am a collector of modest means, but I can easily afford to buy artistically-significant works of comics art because generally this original art is not terribly expensive. On the other hand,  my ability to identify artistically-significant work is the result of a lifetime of critical study of the field.)


Howard K. Finster, A Great Wood Carving Year, 1983, wood carving, 29 x 15 x 3.5 inches

Smither's collection includes work by some of the best known self-taught artists, like Bill Traylor , Howard Finster and Thornton Dial; work by regional (Texas) self-taught artists like Ike Morgan, Rev, Johnnie Swearingen and Frank Jones; and anonymous folk artwork. Without knowing for sure, I am going to assume that this show only represents a portion of her entire collection. (I make this assumption because every collector I know, including myself, is a hoarder at heart.)

Nearly all these artists learned their art more-or-less in isolation from other artists (obviously this is not the case with many kinds of folk artists who learn their art from elder craftsmen--quilters for example). This doesn't mean they were isolated from images--they live in a world where mass culture exists, and they can hardly have avoided coming into contact with movies, magazines, TV, advertising signs, graffiti, etc. But nonetheless, they are profoundly unlike elite artists who get MFAs during which they are immersed in both art history and in current artistic practices.

It is therefore surprising to see how so many works of self-taught artists contain certain similarities.


Ben Hotchkiss, untitiled, 1980, colored pencil on paper, 14 x 17 inches

One commonality that we see frequently in Smither's collection is horror vacui--the seeming need for many artists to fill every bit of the surface on which they're drawing or painting. I first noticed this when I saw an exhibit of Adolf Wölfli in 1988, whose extemely dense artworks astonished me. We see it in the work here by Ben Hotchkiss (above), Frederick Harry Kahler, Alan Wayne Bradley (a.k.a. "Haint"), Timothy Wehrle, Winfred Rembert and others.

Frederick Harry Kahler, untitled, ink on illustration board, 26.5 x 14 inches


Frederick Harry Kahler, untitled (detail), ink on illustration board, 26.5 x 14 inches

When I first encountered this tendency to cover the entire surface with a dense skein of marks, I thought it might have something to do with the mental state of the artists. Wölfli was a mental patient when he produced his remarkable body of work, so I thought this might be a symptom of his mental illness. But now I reject such amateur psychoanalysis. There are two other explanations that I think are just as plausible. First, these artists cover ever square centimeter because to do otherwise would be wasteful. And a corollary to that might be that the artists might feel like they aren't giving their viewers their "money's worth" if they don't cover the surface with dense detail. Second, because they haven't received an ordinary art education, they aren't beholden to conventional esthetics that would require that artists give the viewers' clear foregrounds and backgrounds, "balanced" compositions and places to "rest" the eye. When an elite artist like Jackson Pollack broke all these rules, art history saw it as admirable iconoclasm. But with self-taught artists, there are no rules to break in the first place.

Of course, these are just guesses on my part. I find this density of design appealing and something you are much more likely to see in the work of self-taught artists than in the work of a conventionally educated artist.


Alan Wayne Bradley (a.k.a. "Haint"), untitled, mixed media collage, 15 x 38 inches


Frederick Harry Kahler, untitled (detail), ink on illustration board, 26.5 x 14 inches


Timothy Wehrle, One of many wrong remedies to put out an ungrateful flame, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 23 x 42 inches


Timothy Wehrle, One of many wrong remedies to put out an ungrateful flame (detail), colored pencil and graphite on paper, 23 x 42 inches


Winfred Rembert, Chain Gang Picking Cotton, dye on carved and tooled leather, 37 x 33 inches

Another feature of self-taught art, especially that by Southern artists, is that much of the art is by African American artists, particularly rural African American artists who had little or no access to art education because of their poverty. Such is the case with Winfred Rembert (b. 1945), who was unjustly imprisoned. Chain Gang Picking Cotton, done on carved leather, reflects his personal experiences as well as many other African American men caught up in the post-Civil War version of forced servitude. (You can see a documentary, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert, on Hulu.)

The thought of bourgeois white collectors and dealers driving the backroads of the South looking for rural black self-taught artists is slightly uncomfortable. It has hints of colonialism, paternalism and slumming. This comes up in Everyday Genius.

This art world involves the intersection of groups who would not ordinarily meet. Such contact can produce condescension by the more powerful (and rage or amusement by those less powerful.) Does contact invariably involve colonization? [...] If elites treat the impoverished by elite standards, they can be criticized for cultural imperialism, but if they treat them according to their perspective of the other's culture, they can be accused of being patronizing." (p. 108)

Fine points out that African-American collectors rarely collect art by self-taught African-American artists. Some see the collecting the work as condescending. Whatever the reason, Fine writes collecting and viewing the work of  African-American self-taught artists is primarily done by white people. This is a complaint by Rembert, expressed in All Me. Rembert particularly regrets this because all his work depicts the historical reality (and biographical detail) of a youth and young adulthood in Cuthbert, Georgia, during the 50s and 60s. Rembert, who now lives in Connecticut, is pained that younger African-Americans don't know the painful histories of their parents and grand-parents. The film climaxes with an exhibit of his work at the Albany Civil Rights Institute (about 50 miles away from Cuthbert), where it finally gets wide exposure to many of the African Americans who shared aspects of Rembert's upbringing.

Of course, the most obvious "colonial" aspect is that collectors, gallerists and scouts can often get away with paying little (or even nothing!) for the work of a financially naive self-taught artist and selling it for many multiples of what the artist gets. That feels like raw exploitation, and often it is. Not every seeming case of exploitation is so straightforward.


Bill Traylor, untitled, 1943, poster paint and pencil on cardboard

For instance, One of a Kind features a painting by Bill Traylor (1854-1949). His work is the opposite of the horror vacuii school--his drawings, like this one, are minimal and witty, like a cartoon by Charles Schulz or William Steig. Traylor was born a plantation slave, and moved to Montgomery, Alabama in1936 because, "my white folks had died and my children had scattered." Homeless, he started amusing himself by drawing on discarded pieces of cardboard. He tried to sell them for five cents a piece without much luck until a white artist, Charles Shannon, discovered them (the standard discovery story). Shannon worked at the time to promote Traylor's work, putting together exhibits in Mongomery and New York City. Although the exhibits generated a lot of interest, sales were not forthcoming. Perhaps it was just too early for people to really see Traylor's astonishing work.

In the mid-70s, Shannon tried again to interest the art world in Traylor's remarkable oeuvre, which he had kept stored for nearly 30 years. This time he was very successful, and the work entered museums and became highly collectible, individual pieces achieving six figure prices. In the mid-80s, descendents of Traylor discovered that Traylor had become a well-known artist. They sued Shannon for a cut, claiming he had cheated Traylor. The case was settled out of court, with the family getting a large settlement.

So was Shannon a colonialist exploiter of Traylor? If Shannon hadn't come along and bought Traylor's work, it would never have become valuable in the first place. Nonetheless, the work did end up becoming a huge windfall Shannon--as if he had bought a seemingly useless piece of land and 30 years later discovered oil on it. My feeling is gratitude towards Shannon (and others like him)--otherwise, I would never get to see Traylor's art. And if Shannon had been more successful in promoting Traylor's art in the 1940s, Traylor probably would have shared the benefit in the years before his death. It wasn't like Shannon planned to hold onto the art until the 70s and get rich off of it then. But at the same time, such a relationship is obviously unequal.


Thornton Dial, untitled, watercolor and graphite on paper, 35.5 x 38 inches

Thornton Dial is represented in this exhibit with an atypical piece. Most of the work by Dial I've seen involve thick layers of scrap material collaged onto a surface. His works also tend to be much more abstract than this. Dial is one of the few well-known self-taught artists whose work seems not dissimilar from his contemporaries who got MFAs and came up through the contemporary art world. I find Dial's work tremendously appealing in general, but this watercolor does nothing for me.

He has a tight relationship with dealer/scholar/impresario William Arnett. I've written about this relationship before. Arnett has been raked over the coals more than any other art dealer because of the "exposé" on 60 Minutes. It's hard not to see his relationship with Dial as being paternalistic. However, when Fine visited Arnett, Arnett told Fine that he "consider[ed] this art [African-American self-taught art] to be the most important art of the century" and that Thornton Dial was the "Michelangelo of the twentieth century." Furthermore, he felt the reason that these judgments weren't universally held  was because of the racism or "Afro-phobia" of the art world. He hardly comes across as a colonialist.


Moses Ernest Tolliver, untitled, house paint on plywood, 24 x 30 inches

Moses Ernest Tolliver (1920-2006) is one of the most popular and respected of the African American self-taught artists. After an industrial accident left him crippled in the late 60s, he took up painting to pass the time. The birds in this painting remind me a bit of Bill Traylor, but the electric color on the faces made me think of Madame Matisse. This brings up the question of comparing the work of self-taught artists to art from the "mainstream" art world. Does self-taught art have a distinct aesthetic that requires a separate judgment? I don't think this is an easy question to answer. For one thing, almost all these artists started creating their work in isolation from one another. In the world of contemporary art, we can say that a young artist was influenced by an older art, or is responding to the work of older artists, or even was a student or studio assistant of an older artist. But we know for certain that Tolliver wasn't "influenced" by Traylor.


Sam Doyle, untitled, housepaint on found roof tin, 52 x 31 inches

Sam Doyle (1906-1985), another African American self-taught artist, lived on St. Helena Island in South Carolina. Like Winfred Rembert, his subject matter is highly localized.Many of his subjects have to do with illness and local traditional healers. This one seems particularly grim. What sticks in my mind, however, is the combination of blue and black and especially the corrugated tin on which it is painted. This provides a connection between self-taught art and contemporary art--bricolage. Self-taught artists by necessity and because of their lack of formal training use whatever materials are available. We can relate this to assemblagists like Robert Rauschenberg or Ed Kienholz. But for fans of self-taught art, this bricolage is a sign of authenticity, one of the most valued qualities that a self-taught artist can possess. Sam Doyle gained a certain amount of fame from his inclusion in Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980, a 1982 exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery, and the market for his work expanded accordingly. If he had started using Winsor Newton paints and doing his work on stretched and primed canvas, would it have lost "authenticity"?


Ike Morgan, untitled, pastel and pencil on paper, 26.5 x 18.5 inches

I was a little startled to see this drawing by Ike Morgan--up to now, I had only seen his portraits of presidents and historical figures. But his style is instantly recognizable. He has two big wins in the self-taught artist authenticity race--he's an African American from a rural background (born in Rockdale, TX) and he is mentally ill (schizophrenic). (He even has one further somewhat dubious mark of authenticity--he committed a horrible crime. Morgan murdered his grandmother. It was this act that landed him at the Rusk Hospital for the Criminally Insane and later the Austin State Hospital.) Synonyms for "authentic" might include "unpolluted" or "uncontaminated.""Childlike" and "naive" are two rather patronizing synonyms for authentic. It's a problematic term, in other words. Of course Fine discusses this at length, without really trying to define authenticity or judge whether or not it is a positive aesthetic quality. His interest is in the use of "authenticity" within the field--its value to collectors, dealers, curators and the artists themselves. He writes, for example, "Members of this art world have a strong preference for early 'uninfluenced' works by self-taught artists, although later works my have more artistic power, as an artist learns from experience, but such a view flies in the face of the assumptions of the field." A dealer Fine spoke to remarks that artists whose authenticity is beyond question--Bill Traylor and Martin Ramirez, for example--are the ones most likely to sell in the six figure range.

As problematic as the various categories of the authentic (self-taught, rural, impoverished, mentally ill, isolated) and the inauthentic (MFA, contact with other artists, middle-class, mainstream, subscription to Artforum) in this field, one that is perhaps most dangerous is the idea that if an artist is a good businessman, that makes him less authentic. A key example of this is the Rev. Howard Finster. When his work was discovered by collectors, he and his family started to aggressively market it (even setting up an 800 number). Somehow this overt concern for one's own career rubbed collectors wrong, and now works from the late 80s, when Finster started marketing the work heavily, is worth less than the earlier work, which is seen as more authentic. For a self-taught artist to achieve a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle (much less to become rich) is to lose authenticity. Poverty is seen as authentic and real.


Frank Jones, untitled, colored pencil on paper

Frank Jones (1900-1969) scores super-high on the authenticity scale. Convicted of murder, he served a life sentence in Huntsville, where he began to draw. He saw "haints" (ghosts) and devils, which he housed in spiked dwellings, as in the picture above. It seems symbolic of his own circumstance and dwelling--where monstrous men were locked in tight cells in a sturdy building ringed with barb wire. Jones' drawings are humorous (the devils are smiling) but also disturbing. Jones' devil houses are fearful places.


Roy Ferdinand, Jr., Portrait of Frank Jones, 1994, paint, marker and ink on paper

Roy Ferdinand, Jr. (1959-2004) was an artist who painted violent scenes from his home of New Orleans. (Despite what you might guess given his subject matter, Ferdinand's early death was due to cancer.) Smither commissioned  portraits from Ferdinand of other self-taught artists. There are four of these portraits in the show, including this one of the late Frank Jones.


François Burland, untitled, watercolor on paper

Smither's collection includes European self-taught artists, like the Swiss artist François Burland. Burland's work in this show reminds me of Stéphane Blanquet's silhouettes--they each have a deliciously creepy quality.


Alfred Marie (a.k.a. A.C.M.), untitled, mixed media, 20 x 18.5 x 9 inches

Alfred Marie (aka A.C.M.), unlike most of the other artists here, received an art education and couldn't be reasonably said to have created his art in total isolation from the art world. But he withdrew from world of mainstream art and his work gets classified as "visionary." A.C.M. is a good example of how the nomenclature doesn't totally overlap. One can be a visionary artist without being a self-taught or folk artist. I'd put Charlie Stagg in that category.


anonymous, untitled, ink on three envelopes

Fine doesn't much discuss anonymous art. One exception is the Philadelphia Wireman, whose identity is unknown but his works are distinctive. In the context of, say, a museum exhibit, he wouldn't be treated by an ordinary anonymous folk artist--his work would be credited to him particularly. But often when we think of folk art, we think of truly anonymous works. A real folk song is not one written by Woody Guthrie or Pete Segar--it's a song written by nobody, a song that has been passed around and tweaked by dozens if not hundreds of anonymous performers. But in the world of visual folk art, biography is important. For one thing, it adds authenticity.

But Smither showed some truly anonymous works. Some were classic examples of folk art, but I was intrigued by these envelopes, which are identified as "prison art." The catalog that accompanies the show has a paragraph accompanying each piece--but this one is blank. The art is skilled and reminds me of the kind of art you'd see on vans in the 70s. Symbols of freedom and imprisonment cover the envelope in a dense design. They were obviously meant to be used to send letter--the artist left spaces for the stamps and mailing address. It's easy to imagine the prisoner fighting the boredom of prison life creating these lovely envelopes, which he could then trade to fellow inmates.


Anonymous, untitled, matchstick clock sculpture, 38 x 9.5 x 8 inches

This clock feels more like traditional folk art. It may not be the work of a self-taught artist--this artist may be part of a tradition and learned this craft from an older master. Nor is it personally expressive. While the designs may be original, they are fundamentally decorative. For many collectors, this is not appealing--they want work that is highly meaningful to its creator. Visionary and religious art is highly desired. But Smither's collection displays a wide spectrum of art that falls within the folk/visionary/self-taught field.

Collectors specialize. We have some category that we end up focusing on--whether it is the work of particular artists, work in a particular genre, or work by a type of artist. Fine suggested that self-taught art is a kind of identity art, where the art is important, of course, but so is the biography of the artist. Some collectors may specialize in African American art, others in art by women, others in Japanese prints and others in Netherlandish art--Smither chose this field. The paradox is that this identity may be prevent self-taught art from ever being mainstream. It is its separation from the mainstream art world that makes it so treasured by its aficionados. So even though Thornton Dial does work that to my eyes seems strikingly contemporary, he is not considered in the same breath as other more mainstream assemblagists. Some self-taught artists choose between the self-taught art world and the mainstream art world--Bert Long and Patrick Turk (whose work is included in this exhibit) seem to have deliberately chosen to be part of the mainstream art world of grants and prizes and residencies. But many of these artists weren't given that choice due to their poverty, lack of education, mental issues, etc. Nonetheless, this exhibit amply demonstrates that their art is worth considering alongside that of the mainstream art world. It is equally capable of being exciting, beautiful, provocative, expressive, etc. It is a bizarre coincidence that two similar (indeed overlapping) exhibits of self-taught art are happening in Houston simultaneously. Do yourself a favor and see both.

Robert Boyd



I recently read a graphic novel called Angie Bongiolatti by Mike Dawson. It's his third book. It was published in April and when he got his first quarterly report from the publisher, Secret Acres, it had sold all of 106 copies. He wrote about his anguish over this in a poignant blog post entitled "Advice to the mid-career cartoonist who has failed to build an audience." In the world of comics, this got a lot of attention. Here was a well-known cartoonist who has published three books. For many cartoonists, that spells success. But reading Dawson's cri de coeur shows this not to be the case. Dawson seems committed to comics. "But, sadly, as much as I’ve contemplated it recently, I just don’t feel like I can give up. I’m stuck with cartooning. I’m a lifer." But given this commitment, he writes, "Lately, writing a book feels like I’m taking my ideas, spending years building something elaborate with them, putting them in a nice box, and then burying them in the yard. Then I’m asking everyone I know to find a shovel and hunt around and see if they can dig them up."

Now as many of you readers know, I worked in the field of comics for a long time starting in 1989, when I took a job with my favorite publisher, Fantagraphics Books. And before then, I had been a devoted reader of "alternative" comics. And when I think about the 80s and 90s, I think about many of my favorite cartoonists: Michael Dougan, Carel Moisievitch, Mark Zingarelli, Dave Cooper, J.R. Williams, Matthew Guest, Doug Allen, Scott Gilbert,  Carol Lay, Mark Marek, William Messner-Loebs, Mark Beyer, Krystine Kryttre, J. Bradley Johnson, etc. Maybe you don't know them. That could be because as far as I know, none of them still does comics. Each of them did a certain number of pages of comics. Some did maybe a few dozen in all, and some did hundreds. Dougan, Cooper, Allen, Lay, Marek, Messner-Loebs and Williams each had book collections published. But at some point, they each decided to stop being cartoonists--or at least to minimize the comics part of their practice. I'm sure they each had very specific, very personal reasons. In some cases, it might not have even been a conscious decision--cartooning had always been a sideline and they moved on. In other cases, it may have been an economic choice because comics--particularly alternative comics--is a spectacularly unremunerative occupation. In some cases, a better opportunity came along. Some may still do the occasional comic here and there, but their output has diminished to the point of near invisibility.

This reality breaks my heart. Obviously I'm not just talking about comics--I'm talking about art in general. So many artists start off with great promise--even great achievement--but ultimately give up in the face of economic reality, indifference from viewers, etc. It's one reason I started The Great God Pan Is Dead--to lessen the feeling of indifference that some artists feel. When I put up a post, I hope it lets an artist know that someone is paying attention. That someone who is not your mom cares about what you do. The same is true when I buy a piece of artwork or a graphic novel like Angie Bongiolatti. I mean, don't get me wrong--I'm not doing this as a charity. I get pleasure out of doing this blog (as well as collecting art and reading comics). But in addition to pleasing myself, I also hope that in some small way I contribute to some artist somewhere not giving up.

As for Angie Bongiolatti, it's not a bad book. The heroine is a young woman working in an e-learning start-up sometime after 9-11. She is involved with ultra-left wing protests and has a complicated personal history. It's not really her story--it's about people she knows, their attractions to her and their pasts with her. Dawson also rather deftly weaves in segments quoting Arthur Koestler about the psychology of revolution. It doesn't totally work, but it's the kind of sophisticated comic that I've always wanted--a multi-dimensional story with well-defined, complex characters. For what it's worth, I'm glad I was able to push its sales up--by precisely one copy.

Robert Boyd

I know some readers may get the idea that I'm leaving contemporary art behind and diving into folk and self-taught art given some of my recent posts. These are long-time interests of mine, but I don't often get the opportunity to write about them. When I learned that a new quilt show was opening in La Grange, I figured I'd check it out and continue this exploration of folk art.

Except that this exhibit, Art Quilts from the John M. Walsh III Collection (showing at the Texas Quilt Museum in La Grange through December 31), is not really a folk art exhibit. Almost all of the quilts made in this exhibit were 1) made by artists who received specialized art educations, and 2) made exclusively for display, not to put on a bed.


Catherine McConnell, Vermont Swimmers, 1991, heat transfers on acetate, cotton backing, machine quilted, 82 1/2 x 77 1/2 inches

My knowledge of quilts is quite limited. I don't know who started making quilts, or when the quilted blankets that we usually think of when we hear the word "quilts" became popular. My grandmother made beautiful quilts. I know quilting is often a collective, communal activity (quilting bees). I have a feeling that it is traditionally rural, but I don't know that for sure. I have that impression because my grandmother was a very rural person. I know that the designs on quilts are abstract and geometric, which is one aspect of them that has always appealed to me. I know that they are often made with scrap fabric--worn out clothes, for example, or left-over fabrics that are too small to be used for anything else. This recycling aspect also appeals to me. Quilting is something you learn from someone else, often an elder.

Given my limited understanding of the world of quilts, the quilts in this show were quite a departure. We can see that with Catherine McConnell's Vermost Swimmers, which is constructed like a traditional quilt--the top layer is constructed of a variety of patches sewn onto the batting and bottom layer. But instead of being "scrap", these patches are photographic heat transfers.

I think it's quite lovely, but part of me asks why it's a quilt in the first place. This could have been a photocollage on paper, for example. Of course, when you see Vermont Swimmers in person, you can see the puffiness of the batting. You see it hanging--not stretched or mounted. So it's slightly different than it would be if it were produced on some other kind of material.

Also, you are seeing it in a quilt show. I don't know anything about McConnell (she hardly exists online), but if she identified herself as a quilter, that's reason enough for this to be a quilt instead of something else. And if you are a quilter in 1991, you have the choice to avail yourself of whatever technology and subject matter you want--you don't have to imitate quilts from the 19th century. That's the attitude of the artists in this show.


Lenore Davis, Florida Surf, 1984-1985, hand paitined on velvet with Procion dye, 58 1/4 x 58 3/4

I sometimes think of quilting as sewing scraps together, but the definition of quilting has to do with binding three layers--top, batting and bottom--together with stitching. Lenore Davis (died 1996) used a single piece of velvet as the top part of this quilt. Then using Procion dye (which you may have used if you've ever made tie dye clothes), she painted the quilted design. I'm guessing that she used an airbrush because she seems to have hit the raised quilted shapes from the edge. The effect is quite striking.


Rebecca Shore, Night Light, 1991, wool, cotton and blends, cotton batting and back, machine pierced, hand quilted, 65 x 63 inches

Part of me prefers the traditional geometric quilts, and many of the artists in this exhibit hearken to that tradition. Rebecca Shore honors the tradition, but she is a highly trained artist (a graduate of and adjunct professor at SAIC) who has gallery representation and works in a variety of media, including very traditional ones like painting. So while she may have been thinking of traditional quilts, she may have also been thinking of the history of geometric abstraction in modernist painting. In any case, the precision of the image in Night Light feels a little to perfect for my tastes, though.


Anna Williams, Strings and Triangles, 1995, cotton, machine sewn, hand quilted by Mary Walker, 80 x 68 inches

Anna Williams (1927-2010) is apparently the only "unschooled" artist represented in the John M. Walsh III collection, and her biography on KnowLAdescribes her as "self-taught". But it also describes her first quilt as one made at age nine, which to me suggest that she had some instruction from an adult--a mother or grandmother or other relative. In any case, her quilt in the show is the closest to what I think of when I think of a quilt, and I like Strings and Triangles best. But this perhaps represents a sentimental, conservative impulse on my part when thinking about this art form. This exhibit was definitely an eye-opener about the possibilities of quilts.

Robert Boyd

I recently moved to a new place in Midtown. One of my reasons for moving was that I wanted to be close to the artistic center of Houston. While art is made and displayed all over the vast area of Houston and vicinity, it's hard to deny that Midtown--so close to all the museums and most of the galleries--is a great place for an art-lover like me to be. It's a neighborhood on the rise. In the late 70s and early 80s, I made a trek down to Midtown once a week with my friend John Richardson. We were taking painting lessons from Stella Sullivan in her house at the corner of San Jacinto and Southmore, built in 1935. It's just over the border of what is now "officially" Midtown. There have been many changes since then.

In the 1980s, as oil prices collapsed and city policies made it difficult to develop older neighborhoods, Midtown lost population and became seriously run-down. It was a neighborhood of boarded-up buildings. (It was also a refuge for recently arrived Vietnamese refugees who remain a strong presence.)


The official map of Midtown

But times change. I've heard that the city of Houston updated its sewage hookup rules, which made it possible to increase the number of hookups inside the 610 Loop. At the same time, starting in the late 90s, the price of oil began a long, slow rise. Hydraulic fracturing technology allowed small natural gas companies to grow into S&P 500 companies, bringing thousands of new jobs to Houston. The result was an increase in property development all over Houston, including Midtown. Midtown has been gentrifying over the past 20 years (as has the Heights and Rice Military). There are still abandoned buildings (I live right next to one) and empty lots. Plus there are are remnants of a time when Midtown was depopulated--specifically, the large number of homeless and addiction services are headquartered in Midtown. (Perhaps these charities and their clients will remind the dude-bros and basic b---hes who party down at the hip bars in Midtown that poor people exist.) Midtown is now a TIRZ, which means it can get tax money to help improve and redevelop the area. The Midtown Redevelopment Authority is the quasi-governmental organization that manages the TIRZ.

Midtown is defined by the Midtown Management District as being bordered primarily by I-45, 59, and Spur 527, with a few bits bordered by surface streets in the northeast corner and southernmost bit. That means that the intersection of Alabama and Almeda is officially part of Midtown. That's where Jamal Cyrus put up his temporary site-specific installation, The Jackson in Your House. The installation is part of a long term use of this site curated by Suplex.


Jamal Cyrus and Walter Stanciell, A Jackson in Your House, 2014, paint on sheets

The official opening for A Jackson in Your House was on a recent Friday night. It was a mild, dry evening, so I decided to walk there--I moved to Midtown precisely so I'd have these opportunities to leave the car at home. On the way, I met a couple of friends who were also headed over there, and then we ran into and chatted with CAMH director Bill Arning, who was returning from the site. I could almost pretend for a moment that I was in a pedestrian-oriented city. Midtown isn't there yet, but it's evolving in that direction.

A Jackson in Your House consists of a giant, vertically-oriented sign painted with bold display lettering. The sign is black paint on two white bedsheets sewn together. It reads, "THE SHOW IS OVER... THE SHOW IS OVER..." I'd estimate that it is about 18 feet high. It faces east into the heart of the Third Ward, and is easily visible to drivers on Almeda and west-bound drivers on Alabama.


Jamal Cyrus and Walter Stanciell, A Jackson in Your House, 2014, paint on sheets.(Jamal Cyrus is standing in the center.)

The phrase comes from a Christopher Wool painting which consists of a longer quote: "THE SHOW IS OVER THE AUDIENCE GETS UP TO LEAVE THEIR SEATS TIME TO COLLECT THEIR COATS AND GO HOME THEY TURN AROUND NO MORE COATS AND NO MORE HOME" There are actually several versions of the painting, but they are all similar--all caps, no spacing between lines, arbitrary line breaks in the middle of words based on the width of the canvas, no punctuation. The lettering seems to have been hand done with stencils. The quote comes from a book by Russian writer Vasily Rozanov from 1917 called The Apocalypse of Our Time (Cyrus identifies Rozanov as a nihilist, but most references I've seen paint him as a highly eccentric conservative intellectual). The phrase was quoted in a Situationist polemic from 1967, and repeated in Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces.


Christoper Wool's studio, 1991 (from Parkett #83)

Cyrus and Walter Stanciell retain the hand-lettered aspect of Wool's painting and the line-breaks, but otherwise their version is far easier to read. Walter Stanciell is a 3rd Ward sign painter, and these letters, white outlined with black with a black shadow giving them a somewhat 3-D appearance, are unlike the letters in most signs you see in one important aspect--they are hand-made. When you get up close, you can see imperfections. It's warm, human lettering. Because every letter is repeated at least once, you can see how they slightly differ from one another. They are unlike a display font on a computer. They are unlike billboards and advertisements created by designers and ad agencies. But at the same time, they are unlike amateur signs you might see in a neighborhood--hand painted signs that say "Garage Sale" or "Beware of Dog," for example.

Stanciell occupies the middle ground, and his signage is pleasing to the eye. It used to be that sign-painting was an ordinary, common occupation, and its practitioners were respected craftsmen. (Of course, pop artist James Rosenquist came out of that world, as did pioneering underground cartoonist Justin Green.) It makes sense that Cyrus would recruit Stanciell for a project like this. It's part of a long-term project of reinterpreting text-based painting.

What does it mean hung on a building in the Midtown? One thing that will help make sense of this is that about half of what we call Midtown is historically part of the Third Ward. The Wards started out as political divisions in Houston. They were abolished as political entities in 1915, but have remained to this day as descriptions of large neighborhoods. The Third Ward and the Fourth Ward  were separated by Main Street, which runs down the middle of Midtown. The Third Ward had been quite diverse at one time (with black areas and white areas), but in the post-war era, it became almost exclusively African-American (my old art teacher Stella Sullivan was one of the white "hold-outs" in the neighborhood). But that African-American character has begun to change, especially in the Midtown part of the neighborhood.


Map of the Houston Wards from 1920

Cyrus's statement reads in part:

Initially written on Parisian walls during the revolutionary student movement of 1968, the text here has been rendered by Cyrus and Stanciell in the style of sign-paintings that have for decades characterized the visual culture of black Houston, and re-inscribed it onto the side of a formerly abandoned building at the heart of the Third Ward (increasingly known as Midtown), one of Houston's most actively contested geographies. [...] the nihilistic text becomes ambivalent, at once evincing a pessimistic assessment of the fate of black neighborhoods undergoing gentrification, and simultaneously asserting the optimism of the black freedom struggle.

I asked Cyrus about the piece, and he spoke about the squeeze on the Third Ward from developers on the west and University of Houston expansion on the east. The building he hung the banner on, The Axelrad, appeared to be empty. Perhaps it had been a small apartment building, or maybe a suite of offices. I couldn't tell. But it seemed to be nothing now. I asked Cyrus who owned it, and he wasn't sure of the owner's name, but he had heard that this owner was planning to open a beer garden in the building.


Jamal Cyrus and Walter Stanciell, A Jackson in Your House, 2014, paint on sheets

Later, I looked up the owner on the Harris County Appraisal District website. The owner of this property is the blandly named Brookhollow Venture Ltd. As far as I can tell, this company exist for the sole purpose of owning a small number of properties within two blocks of the intersection of Alabama and Almeda.


Brookhollow Ventures' properties

One of these properties is the abandoned gas station across the street from The Station Museum. The owners have allowed that property to be used for temporary art exhibits before, so one gets the idea that Brookhollow Ventures is friendly to artists. At the same time, you don't just own abandoned properties on the edge of a gentrifying neighborhood for no reason. Such properties are investments to be developed or sold later. It struck me as ironic that Cyrus would use this as his platform for an art piece opposed to gentrification.

The crowd gathered that night was about 50% black and 50% white. They sat around chatting, congratulating Cyrus, and so forth. I don't know if Stanciell was present. I wonder if he sees himself as a collaborator or if it's just another paying gig for him. After all, he doesn't come from the art world like all the people there that night do. For those of us in the art world, a large white banner with an enigmatic phrase on it hanging from the side of a building = art. I wondered what the commuters coming up Alabama from the east would think they were seeing. Would their interpretation sync up with Cyrus's expressed vision?


Jamal Cyrus and Walter Stanciell, A Jackson in Your House, 2014, paint on sheets (as seen from a car in the intersection of Alabama and Almeda)

Later that evening, I crossed to the east side of Almeda to take some more photos. An African-American man in a white baseball cap was walking south and asked me what was going on. I explained it was an art project. He asked what "THE SHOW IS OVER" meant? I explained that it referred to the changes in the neighborhood. I was careful not to use the word "gentrification." I wanted to see what his reaction was without me coloring it from the start. He was enthusiastic--in his view, the neighborhood had changed for the better.

He moved here from Denver a few years ago, living in a duplex owned by his uncle. As he described it, drug dealers and users would congregate in his front yard--he'd have to call the police at three in the morning to break up fights on his porch. But then they "cleaned up" an apartment building across the street from him and built new apartments next to those, and the presence of more people and a better class of people (i.e., fewer sketchy tenants) on the street had the effect of driving the drug addicts and dealers away. In his view, the gentrification he saw on his own block was wholly positive.

This intrigued me, and I wanted him to tell his story to Jamal Cyrus, so I suggested he cross the street to meet the artist. He begged off--he had just been working for 12 hours in the sun stripping cars, and he was eager to go get a beer. I couldn't blame him. He crossed Alabama and I crossed with him because I wanted to take some pictures from the south-east corner. Another African-American man was walking towards us. The car-stripper greeted him, "Hello, Mr. Jordan!" They shook hands and he continued south. Mr. Jordan asked me what was going on. I explained it was an art project and started taking some photos. He asked me if I could spare some change, explaining that he was homeless. I gave him a couple of bucks. Right then a car drove by and someone shouted out, "You better not take my picture!"


Jamal Cyrus and Walter Stanciell, A Jackson in Your House, 2014, paint on sheets

Mr. Jordan took that as an opportunity to warn me that I was in a dangerous neighborhood. "You're in the Third Ward! You can't be taking pictures at night!" He suggested that for my own safety that I should go home, and suggested the same for the crowd of people across the street at the installation. Well, I had taken all the pictures I wanted to take, so I took Mr. Jordan's advice. I didn't feel like I was in danger as I walked home--at least not until I got a block from my home in Midtown. There is an abandoned building one block from home with a covering over the sidewalk. It's very dark and there are always one or two people hanging out there. If someone wanted to commit a mugging, it would be a good place for it. I always feel a little nervous walking there at night. It's not like other parts of Midtown, where the sidewalks have lots of pedestrians at night.

But nothing happened, of course. Mr. Jordan may have been just playing a game of "Freak out the white guy." On the other hand, crime happens. And crime, as the man in the white baseball cap implied, is one thing that gentrification can positively impact. Another irony.

And a final irony--who are often in the vanguard of gentrification? Artists. You want a neighborhood to attract artsy people, do installations like A Jackson in Your House. Just beware of unintended consequences.