Pictures of Artists

Robert Boyd

Last weekend, Jack Massing hosted a one-day only exhibit dedicated his recently deceased partner Michael Galbreth. (They were the Art Guys.) The entire Houston art community showed up. I decided at some point to take phone photos of as many of the artists, collectors, etc., who were there. I missed a lot of people I wanted to photograph, but I got a few. And here they are.



Britt Thomas. Thomas has an exhibit up at the Galveston Arts Center through April 12, 2020.

Clint Willour


David Aylsworth


Dean Ruck. I've written about Havel + Ruck projects several times over the years.


Debra Barrera. Here is a post that Dean Liscum wrote about a Debra Barrera exhibit.


Dennis Nance.


Elaine Bradford. Here's a post I wrote about Elaine Bradford.



Emily Peacock. I've written about her several times over the years.


Emily Sloan. Emily Sloan was one of the first artists in Houston I ever wrote about.


Iva Kinnaird.


Jack Massing.


James Surls. I've written about this giant of Houston art several times.


Jim Pirtle. Jim Pirtle has appeared in this blog many times.


Joachim West.


Julon Pinkston. Julon Pinkston has had several appearances on this blog.


Neil Fauerso.


Paul Kremer (l) and Phillip Kremer. I wrote about Paul Kremer's former collective (maybe it would be better to be call it a club), I Love You Baby.


Paul Middendorf. Runs Space HL (formerly Gallery Homeland).


Peter Lucas.


Scott Gilbert.


Sharon Kopriva (center) and Brad Barber (right)


Susan Budge.


Travis Hanson.


Tudor Mitroi.


William Camfield.


Xandra Eden. Director of Diverse Works.

Introducing Exu

Robert Boyd



A few months back, I wrote about my own personal writing crisis. Writing reviews of art shows just wasn't satisfying to me anymore. Obviously I haven't quit writing--I have written nine posts since then, but none have been reviews of art exhibits.

The problem is that I still see art in the galleries and artists spaces and museums that I love. I would like to share this love. I have an impulse to grab people by the lapels (even if they don't have lapels and even though I am opposed in principal to unsolicited lapel grabbing) and say, "Look at this!" People who follow me on Instagram know this. I frequently post photos of art I just seen and liked. (I'm ROBERTWBOYD2020 if you want to follow me there.)

Anyway, I think it was this impulse to share art I like that made me want to do my new project--a tabloid-sized newsprint art magazine called Exu. There are other things I could have done. I could have curated an exhibit, for example. But an exhibit lasts maybe a month, then it comes down, and not that many people see it--particularly if they live someplace else. I could have started a Tumblr. But while I look at images online constantly, there is something not quite satisfying for me about seeing them there. That was always a problem I had with this blog--I tried hard to show as many images as possible, but I wasn't particularly happy with the small, relatively lo-res images I reproduced.

My background is in print publishing. Before I started the job I have now, that was my profession. I still buy lots of physical books, especially books that have a visual component--art books and comics. I could get them on Kindle or another electronic delivery systems, but for the reasons above, I don't find that particularly satisfying. (I read plenty of all-prose books electronically, though. I'm not a luddite.)

So what I wanted to do was to publish something (IRL as they say) that would show the artwork I liked in a large format. I didn't want to do it the way art magazines like Artforum or, locally, Arts+Culture do--a small picture surrounded by type. I wanted the image to be everything. I wanted it to take up the whole page, or as much as it could. If there is a magazine that embodies this concept, I'd say it's Toilet Paper, the art magazine published by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari--page after page of images with nary a word among them.

I picked the newspaper tabloid format because it's large and because tabloids have a tradition of eye-catching graphics and, well, lapel-grabbing stories. That made me think I wanted there to be narrative content in my magazine. The pictures should tell stories, or at least imply them. So that ruled out abstract images (although in the end, I have one pure abstraction and one word-based image). Then I decided that the narrative could also be prose. I was specifically thinking about literary nonfiction and great magazine writing. So I contacted some writers I know and commissioned some prose. And since we're talking about narrative, the visual printed artistic medium that best exemplifies narrative is comics. I don't know that many Houston cartoonists--it's not a hotbed like of great cartoonists like Seattle or New York. But I contacted the ones I know for a few pages of comics.

The name Exu was inspired by a work of art I saw in Chasity Porter's Dormalou Project (a mobile art gallery). She had a show up of work by Anthony Suber called Archaic Habit. It was a cool show that mixed contemporary African-American pop culture and rootsy African culture seamlessly (and humorously in some cases). One of the works had the word "Eshu" in the title. Eshu is a Yoruban orisha, or deity. I was more familiar with the Portuguese spelling, Exu. In Brazil, Exu is in the pantheon of the syncretic religion of Candomble. He is the god of the crossroads--you invoke him to help you make decisions. I lived in Brazil for a while and I had a statuette of Exu. In Brazil, Exu is identified visually with the Devil. (All the other Orishas are identified with Catholic Saints.) My cheap ceramic statue was a rather old-fashioned representation of the devil--pointy beard, horns, all red.

I realized that Exu looked a lot like Pan. It's said that the modern image of the devil was a result of medieval Italian farmers plowing up old statuettes of Pan, becoming frightened, calling the parish priest who would then associate this horned, goat-footed idol with the devil. I don't know if this story is true, but the resemblance of Pan to images of the devil are undeniable. It pleased me to think that the visual image of Pan migrated to the visual image of the devil who then migrated to Exu, a god that was exported from Nigeria in the holds of Portuguese slave ships. It seemed to me that although Pan and Exu were too very different deities, they had a certain mysterious connection over space and time. (I also liked that they both have three letters in their names.)


A cover idea featuring art by Ike Morgan

So Exu it was. (Exu is pronounced "EY-shoo", by the way). My next task was to pick artists. I knew I wanted the art to be native 2-D art. No three-dimensional art (so no sculpture or installation) and no time-based art (so no film or video or performance). I wanted the transition from artwork to printed page to be as seamless and uncompromised as possible. But the world of 2-D art contains multitudes. The artists I chose had to be familiar to me. It would have been easy for me to simply pick my friends, but I wanted there to be an identifiable editorial vision here. Also, I wanted to pick artists from a variety of genres, styles, schools, media, etc. Many of these artists are unlikely to have ever met one-another, but here in Exu, they can share a space. I want Exu to be a kind of secular artistic sacra conversazione.

So we have street art next to "outsider" art next to MFA art. There's painting, drawing, printmaking and photography. I worked hard at being aware of various artistic traditions and looking at all of them. I'm haunted by the notion that there are great artists out there who I just don't know about. And there were people I wanted to include but for various reasons could not--I couldn't find a way to communicate with them, we couldn't agree on of piece to publish, or most often I just lost the thread as I got busy with other artists.

In the end, here's who is in Exu: Trenton Doyle Hancock, Kelly Alison, Seth Alverson, Debra Barrera, JooYoung Choi, Jamal Cyrus, Bill Daniel, Nicky Davis, Nathaniel Donnett, Matthew Guest, the Amazing Hancock Brothers, Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Perry House, John Hovig, Galina Kurlat, Emily Peacock, Fernando Ramirez, Sophie Roach, Christopher Sperandio, Jason Villegas and Inés Estrada. These are the writers I've included: Great God Pan Is Dead veteran Dean Liscum, Pete Gershon, John Nova Lomax, Jim Pirtle and a piece by the late, great Sig Byrd. And Exu includes the following cartoonists: Mack White, Scott Gilbert, Sarah Welch and Brett Hollis. And the cover is by Ike Morgan. Most of these artists are located in Houston and vicinity, with some from San Antonio, Austin, Waco and DFW (and two expatriate Houstonians in New York).

I'm running an Indiegogo campaign for Exu right now. The purpose is not so much to raise money (even though money is nice!) but to pre-sell copies. Please take a look. And scroll down to see some of the art that will be featured, much larger and in higher resolution, in Exu.



Seth Alverson



Nathaniel Donnett


Fernando Ramirez


Scott Gilbert


the Amazing Hancock Brothers


Hillerbrand+Magsamen


Galina Kurlat


Ike Morgan


Emily Peacock

The Lithium Art Fair, part 1

Robert Boyd

It's been a week since the Texas Contemporary Art Fair happened, and it already seems like a distant memory. If I hadn't taken so many photos, I'm not sure I'd be able to tell you what art I saw. Sometimes the most memorable things have nothing to do with the art, unless it's art's destruction. On Friday at TCAF, I was chatting when I heard a loud bang. Sports Car on Earth, In Space by Debra Barrera, one of the featured installations at the show, had fallen over. It looked pretty bad. This piece, under a different name, had appeared as one of the Blaffer Art Museum's Windows on Houston projects. It was a piece I really liked. Apparently someone taking a photo had backed into it. And it was pretty seriously damaged. TCAF wasn't all bad news for Barrera, though. She sold a great drawing, Sno-cat.

 
Debra Barrera, Sno-cat, 2013, graphite and stabilo pencil on paper, adhesive, 33 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches at Moody Gallery

It isn't always art that sticks in your mind. It might be the gallerist from Charest-Weinberg with the big fro.



Or big crowd on opening night--almost all of whom were complete strangers. It's like there is another art world about which I know nothing. Houstonia and Culture Map both had photo features of the opening night and I counted the people I recognized in them. I knew who 12 of the 61 people featured were.

Or the walk from the entrance to the selling floor.


Ann Wood (left) and Sharon Engelstein (center and right)

The Ann Wood house and two giant beautiful inflatable blobs by Sharon Engelstein made a big impression, as did the Clayton Brothers' antic Wishy Washy.


Clayton Brothers, Wishy Washy, 2006


Clayton Brothers, Wishy Washy, 2006

In fact, if those four pieces had been grouped together, they would have formed a surreal diorama--two buildings in front and two "mountains" in the distance.


Clayton Brothers, Wishy Washy, 2006

The fair attendee saw some of the coolest pieces in the show before she saw a single booth.

This is not to say the art in the booths was bad. Far from it; I was very pleased by the overall level of quality. But people kept asking me if I had seen something that really impressed me, and I couldn't think of anything. This is in sharp contrast with the Houston Fine Art Fair, where there were several booths and individual artworks that really blew my mind. But the HFAF also had a lot of really terrible art. You would see some beautiful, unearthly Xul Solar paintings, then turn around to see your seventh Marylin Monroe portrait of the day--it had very high highs and very low lows. TCAF, by contrast, hewed to the middle. Sure there were a few really nice pieces and a few really horrible ones, but the level of its extremes was a lot less than HFAF. In the language of statistics, we would say that TCAF had a small standard deviation while HFAF had a large one. In terms of psychology, HFAF was bipolar, TCAF a little more stable. But leaving behind metaphor, what I think we see is that TCAF was better curated in terms of its exhibitors. And that makes a lot of difference in terms of the experience one has at an art fair.

So let's take a look at some of the art at TCAF, going more-or-less alphabetically by gallery.


left, Mike Beradino piece and right, me wearing a Jim Nolan-designed temporary tattoo.

At Art Palace, Mike Beradino had a piece that took the Cremaster films and ran facial recognition software on them. The piece was composed of two physical parts--the computer on the bottom and the monitor above. The monitor had an image of Cremaster playing inset in the upper center, and you could see red facial recognition squares pop up anytime a face appeared. Surrounding this inset image were free-floating faces (presumably captured by the facial recognition software).

I found it pretty perplexing, and gallerist Arturo Palacio's explanation comparing Beradino's solo (but high-tech) craft work with the collective high-budget Hollywood-like production of Cremaster didn't help me to understand it better. But as I thought about it, I was reminded of what Ben Davis wrote about the middle-class aspirations of art in 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (recently reviewed on this site by Paul Mullan). Comparing visual art to the art of a Pixar movie (in which the awesomely talented skilled laborers subsume their individuality to operate within a framework of total teamwork--as presumably the film personnel in the Cremaster films did), Davis writes, "the uniquely middle-class nature of creative labor in the visual arts would seem to explain its alternative emphasis on the individual, that is, on the virtues of personality and small production." Beradino is therefore quite specifically positioning himself in opposition to large-scale productions requiring talented but anonymous cultural laborers.

The other piece of art in this photo is on my neck. It's a temporary tattoo by Jim Nolan that reads "Le Va," as in Barry Le Va, the pioneering process artist. Nolan had two such tattoos--one for Le Va and one for Beuys.


Joseph Cohen at Avis Frank

It like new piece by Joseph Cohen at Avis Frank. It gets away from the shimmery perfection of his monochrome paintings. The asymmetric canvas, the hanging flaps of paint--it feels like a Rauschenberg except with Cohen's typically intense, glittery color. It combines glamor and grunge in one piece. Lovely.



Willie Cole, Downtown Goddess, 2012-13, bronze, edition of seven, 36 x 9 x 9 inches at Beta Pictoris Gallery

Even since Picasso made a bull's head out of a bicycle seat and handlebars, artists have been taking manufactured things and making more-or-less realistic sculptures out of them. Willie Cole took women's shoes and made these faux-tribal sculptures out of them. It's a witty appropriation.



Norman Bluhm, untitled, 1961, oil on paper on canvas, 50 x 36 inches

Birnam Wood Galleries has some of my least favorite art in the show (several flags by David Datuna). But they also had some handsome high-modernist pieces--one of the only galleries that had such work at TCAF. I loved this Norman Bluhm painting.



Linda Matalon, untitled (four parts), 2013, wax and graphite on paper, 27 x 22.5 inches overall

I saw these fairly subtle pieces (and more by Linda Matalon) at Blackston. I liked them a lot, but what really made me think was how atypical they were for an art fair. They are small and feature relatively few black and grey marks. They don't jump off the wall. Considering the visual cacophony of the art fair, one wonders whether bringing art like this--even if it's beautiful like this art is--makes sense. On the other hand, maybe the way it stands apart from the typical art fair bombast is its virtue in this environment.


Peter Halley at Carl Solway

Even though I'm going in alphabetical order, this Peter Halley piece at Carl Solway Gallery illustrates my point above about art fair art. With its intense fluorescent colors and textured paint surface, it practically burns itself into your brain. You can't not see it as you stroll down the aisle.


Fernando Mastrangelo,  37 inch medallion, 2013, sugar, sprinkles. 37 inch diameter x 2 inches


Fernando Mastrangelo mediallions

Charest-Weinberg only showed work by one artist, these groovy medallions by Fernando Mastrangelo (who had a striking show in Houston last year). I'm not sure what the sales calculus is here. It makes for a fantastic-looking booth, but it also means all of your eggs are in one basket. Plus, it also means bringing no work by your other artists (Charest-Weinberg lists 10 artists in their stable), which they might resent. A tricky business, I imagine.


a bunch of paintings by Cheryl Donegan

David Shelton Gallery had a really nice "walk-through" booth (quite a few of the booths had two entrances, which allowed you to use them as short cuts to other aisles). He packed it full of some of the best work his gallery has, and it showed. I liked the flannel-shirt-style patterns of Cheryl Donegan as well as Kelly O'Connor's colorful "cover song" versions of Brancusi's Endless Column. (They remind me of when Bananarama covered "No Future.")


Kelly O'Connor sculpture


Keegan McHargue, Nymph of Lo, 2013, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

Painter Keegan McHargue won the best in show prize of $10,000, which caused some griping among the commentariat at Glasstire. I liked McHargue's paintings a lot, but I would have rather that Fredericks & Frieser had brought down some Gary Panters instead, as they had in the past.


Brad Tucker, Ham Shack, 2013, acrylic and enamel on wood, 32 1/2 x 21 x 4 inches (below) and Butter Dish, 2013, acrylic on wood, 16 x 12 x 3/4 inches (above)


Brad Tucker, Hashmack Tray, 2013, acrylic and enamel on wood, 31 x 25 x 2 1/2 inches


Brad Tucker, Generator, 2013, acrylic on wood, 4 1/2 x 4 x 7 inches and Regenerator, 2013, acrylic on wood, 4 1/2 x 4 x 7

Inman Gallery had a large booth, but still it was surprising (and pleasing) that they devoted one separate enclosed space to a single artist, Brad Tucker. His colorful sculptures depict actual things in a more-or-less abstract way. Some are familiar (TV trays) while some are less so, but they all were delightful and played around with the notion that you could be confused about what you were seeing. Were they sculpture or just colorful found objects? Until you read the label, it wasn't clear. The ordinariness of the subject matter and the colors made me think a bit of Jessica Stockholder.


Dan Douke, Gunk, acrylic on canvas, 10 3/4 x 8 x 8 3/4 inches

The Dan Douke trompe-l'oeil boxes at Jerald Melberg Gallery were amazing but struck me as "stunt art." They were designed to make you say "wow."


Dan Douke, Meguiar's, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 10 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches




Dan Douke, Meguiar's, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 10 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches

In fact, the artist seems so proud of his ability to fool the viewer that he shows us how the trick was done by making the canvas stretching apparatus visible. After all, he could have easily made that part the bottom of the sculpture. (I'm blaming the artist, but it could be the gallery. Maybe the hole is meant to be on the bottom, but the gallery wanted no one to mistake these for actual boxes.)

I visited Jayne Baum's apartment gallery (JHB Gallery) in New York last spring and was delighted to see her here. She had several Ellen Carey photos, as well as a lot of pieces by other artists. Carey is a photographer from Connecticut who specializes in photography not using a camera.


Ellen Carey, Pull with Flares and Rollback #7, 2006, polaroid color positive print, 72 x 22 inches


Guy Laramee at JHB Gallery

This canyon carved out of books by Guy Laramee at JHB also verged on being stunt art, but I was really drawn to it. It's clever and beautiful. But when I see work like this (or work by Cara Barer or Brian Dettmer, who also had work at TCAF at Toomey Tourell Fine Art--sorry I didn't get a photo of it), I feel a pang for the books that were destroyed. These pieces, though beautiful, represent a culture that doesn't value books at physical objects. For Laramee, books are just another piece of modern detritus from which he can fashion a work of art.


Guy Laramee at JHB Gallery

Why do collectors collect art? Thorstein Veblen had some pretty convincing ideas about it, and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "cultural capital" is probably right, too. But for some collectors, particularly those who establish "egoseums" with their names on them to house their collections--Frick, Barnes, Menil, Broad, etc.--there is a quest for immortality.


Tim Etchells, Live Forever, 2010, neon sign, 6 x 78 inches

Tim Etchells' You Will Live Forever at Jenkins Johnson Gallery cuts to the chase and panders directly to collectors' desire for immortality. This is less a work of art than an ironic fetish with fake magical powers. I can't tell whether to be appalled or amused.


Kris Kurski at Joshua Liner

Kris Kurski's detailed and beautiful pieces at Joshua Liner Gallery just look wrong on a white wall. They need a more "goth" setting. If Miss Havisham had art on her walls, you might expect it to look a little like this. Although obviously it is carefully designed and constructed, it has the feeling of being the result of some quasi-natural entropic process. Creepily beautiful.


Allison Schulnik, Lace Curtains, 2012, oil on linen, 72 x 60 inches

Even though I'm going in alphabetical order by gallery (this is from Mark Moore Gallery), Allison Schulnik's Lace Curtains work well with the Kris Kurski above. They both have a feeling of neglect. Schulnik's bilious colors and thick impasto give this piece an unnerving feeling.


Yoram Wolberger, Blue Cowboy #3 (Double Gun Slinger), 2008-2013, reinforced cast fiberglass composite with pigment, 75 x 75 x 22 inches

Changing the vibe completely (but still in the Mark Moore Gallery) is Yoram Wolberger's Blue Cowboy. The scale of this sculpture is what makes it--it's your basic "take something really small and trivial and make a huge sculpture out of it" move that has been a part of contemporary art since Claes Oldenburg. And it sure does look cool. Apparently it was purchased at the show for $100,000! I'd love to know who bought it. I wonder if a sale that size signals to blue chip galleries that TCAF might be worth a try.


John Chamberlain at McClain Gallery

The thing about Houston galleries like McClain Gallery being at the fair is that I've often seen the work they're showing before. But I had never seen this festive John Chamberlain, looking like a tumbleweed at a birthday party. I love it.


Marc Burkhardt, Bridle, 2011, acrylic on wood, 30 x 21 7/8 inches

I included this painting by Marc Burckhardt (from Mindy Solomon Gallery) not just because I like it (which I do) but also because it's in a genre that is kind of a small minority here--realistic painting. Burkhardt engages in some deliberately antique classicizing, and the rope adds a surreal (which is to say modern) touch to it. Still, it's fundamentally a nice painting of a horse.

Mixed Greens had several pieces by Joan Linder, including a bunch of drawings of her sink. It seems like a rather banal subject to draw over and over, but then some of the greatest art of all time involved artists returning to the same banal subject over and over (Cezanne and Morandi, for example).


Joan Linder, Sink (Kiss My Face), 2012, ink on paper, 32 x 58 1/2 inches


Joan Linder, (clockwise from upper left) Green Sink, Yellow Sink, Pink Sink, Purple Sink, 2011 and 2012, colored maker on paper


Joan Linder, Counter, Sink, 2013, accordion book, ink on paper, 31 x 26 3/4 inches closed, 31 x 156 1/2 inches open


Joan Linder, Counter, Sink (detail), 2013, accordion book, ink on paper, 31 x 26 3/4 inches closed, 31 x 156 1/2 inches open

Her drawing has a children's book illustration vibe, which I quite like. These are fun, homey pieces.


Joan Linder, FedEx Box, 2010, watercolor on paper, 16 1/2 x 12 x 3 inches

Interestingly, Linder also did a trompe-l'oeil box. After seeing similar pieces at Frieze by Jürgen Drescher and Andreas Lolis, I am willing to declare "realistically rendered life-size three-dimension depictions of boxes" to be an official trend.


Joan Linder, FedEx Box (detail), 2010, watercolor on paper, 16 1/2 x 12 x 3 inches

OK, this post has gotten a little long. I'm going to stop here and publish a second part--there's still a lot more art from TCAF to plow through.