Pan Recommends for the week of September 12 to September 18

Robert Boyd

After last week's artapalooza, this week is more sedate. The big event is the Karen Finley reading next Wednesday, plus there are some opportunities Saturday to see work that in some ways describes the art history of Houston--the painters who dominated in the 60s and 70s and the conceptualists/performance artists who followed in the 80s/90s.

THURSDAY

Marlon Puac Méndez at Koelsch Gallery, 6–9 pm. I'm sorry to say that I know nothing about this artist except that he may be an illustrator from Guatamala.


Robert Hodge, We Didn't Start the Fire, 2013 mixed media collage on found paper 58 x 82 inches

Robert Hodge: A Memory Worth Fighting For... at Peveto , 6–8 pm. Multimedia artist Robert Hodge presents a group of paintings and collages.


Francesca Fuchs, Framed Painting: Bottles, 2013, Acrylic on canvas over board, 20 x 25"

Francesca Fuchs: (Re)Collection: Paintings of Framed Paintings, Drawings, Prints and Photos at Texas Gallery, 6–8 pm. A big selection of Francesca Fuch's pale, milky paintings, some of which appear to be paintings of other framed images.

 
Kelley Devine's jackrabbit

West End Animals by Kelley Devine at the West End Pub, 6:00pm until 9:00pm. Kelley Devine continues her practice of drawing on book pages, but her subject matter this time around are animals. What I've seen look pretty interesting.


Wols, Untitled [Also known as It's All Over and The City], 1946-1947

Panel Discussion: "Wols: His Life, Work & Context" at the Menil Museum, 6 pm. The Wols exhibit officially opens tomorrow, but presumably one can get a glimpse of it tonight in this panel discussion featuring Frankfurt scholar Dr. Ewald Rathke, Menil curator Toby Kamps, Dr. Andreas Kreul, director of Bremen’s Karin and Uwe Hollweg Foundation, Patrycja de Bieberstein Ilgner, Hollweg Foundation archivist, and Dr. Katy Siegel, Hunter College, New York, professor and gallery chief curator, writer, and Wols catalogue essayist.

SATURDAY


The Art Guys, Any of These Locations Would Be An Excellent Place to Begin a Drawing, 2008, graphite on paper

The Art Guys Art Fair at The Art Guys Convention Center (aka the Art Guys Headquarters), 1–7 pm. What's this all about? Well, it looks a lot like a studio sale, with a pretty excellent selection of pieces available, including one of my faves (the drawing above).


Dick Wray, untitled, ~2000

Lives Played Out on Canvas: Paintings by Otis Huband, Richard Stout, and Dick Wray at William Reaves Fine Art, 3 to 6 pm. Three of Houston's earliest abstractionists, Otis Huband, Richard Stout, and the late Dick Wray, share a show.


Dorothy Hood, Red Hill

Dorothy Hood, The Lost Paintings at New Gallery, 3 to 5 pm. This is a show of works from Hood's estate that have not been exhibited for at least 14 years. Saturday has shaped up to be a good day for looking at the work of pioneering Houston artists like Dorothy Hood, Wray and Stout.

WEDNESDAY


Karen Finley at DiverseWorks, 6 – 8 pm. As part of the Eleventh Hour, DiverseWorks' retrospective exhibit, Karen Finley will read selections from We Keep Our Victims Ready, which she first performed at DiverseWorks in 1989 (the year before she gained unwanted membership in the group the "NEA 4," four performance artists who had their NEA grants vetoed because of their controversial content). Expect a SRO event!

Pan Recommends for the week of September 13 through September 19

The Houston Fine Art Fair is this weekend, starting with a preview party tonight then running pretty much all day Friday through Sunday. It is being held at Reliant Center, which seems to me to be a not-so-fun place to have it. (Big, though--the OTC uses it.) My impression of HFAF last year was that too many galleries were kind of kitchy in what they brought, but that this was balanced by excellent galleries and particularly by fantastic Latin American galleries. I'm looking forward to how it shapes up this year.

Benito Huerta at Avis Frank, Saturday, September 15, 7 pm. It takes a brave gallery to do an opening during HFAF. Avis Frank has a booth at the fair and is having an opening for Benito Huerta, so you can see Avis Frank gallery twice this weekend.

Richard Stout, McKie Trotter, Dick Wray, Dorothy Hood, Otis Huband, Bill Reily and Charles Schorre at William Reaves, September 14. The official reception is not until next weekend, but this new group show featuring work by some of Texas' finest painters (whose work became prominent in the 50s and 60s) will be open to the public this weekend. Well worth a stop.

Katy Horan at Domy Books, Saturday, September 15, 7 pm. I know nothing about Katy Horan but her paintings look interesting. She seems to specialize in painting images of archtypal women in shades of grey.

Melanie Millar, Kelley Devine, Cookie Wells, M. Allison and Lindsay Peyton at Black Swan Screenprinting, Saturday, September 15, 6 pm. Organized by Black Swan Screenprinting owner Ann Brooks, this exhibit features work that (I think) uses screen-printing as part of the work.

Richard Stout's History of Art in Houston

by Robert Boyd

For the past few weeks, I've had the privilege of working on a video featuring artist Richard Stout talking about the history of Houston's art scene in the 1950s and '60s. The YouTube videos below are the fruit of that work. This talk by Stout is an expansion of a short lecture he gave at the CASETA convention a few years ago. CASETA is the Center for the Advancement of Early Texas Art, which they define as "art produced by artists who were born in and/or lived and worked in Texas through 40 years prior to the present date." Stout had 30 minutes to talk about 60 artists and decided later to expand the talk.

In addition to discussing specific artists, Stout talks about the founding, growth and evolution of key Houston institutions like the Contemporary Art Association/Contemporary Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the art departments at Rice, the University of Houston, St. Thomas, and TSU as well as the gradual proliferation of galleries during those two decades. Underlying all of this is the growth of Houston itself. In 1950, Houston had a population of 596 thousand. By 1960, that was 938 thousand, and by 1970 it was 1.2 million. Given this, it is hardly surprising that the number of artists increased and that the institutions grew and expanded their scope.

But enough of that. Watch the videos. Stout was a witness to much of this and is an erudite, scholarly man. I found this history--almost all of which was unknown to me--utterly fascinating, and I hope you will as well.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6


Part 7

January Seems So Long Ago Now

by Robert Boyd

Every month I make the rounds looking at exhibits and hoping to find something exciting. And maybe I'm easy, but my problem is that I usually find more work that I like than I can reasonably hope to write about. So with minimal content, here is some of the artI saw in the past month for which I didn't have time to write full-on reviews. But each of these exhibits was worth seeing.


Dick Wray, untitled, oil and mixed media, 48 x 35.5 inches, undated

The late Dick Wray (one of those old school Houston abstractionists) had a show at William Reaves Fine Art full of these super-colorful, expressive canvases. It was a bit overwhelming to see so many in one gallery. I wanted to write about it, and I regret that I didn't. Very vigorous, interesting work.


Jade Walker, title unknown, mixed media, 2011-2012 (?)

Sorry I don't have the title for this piece by Jade Walker. When I went to the Lawndale openings in January, Walker's installation was overwhelming. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around it. The pieces are all junk assemblages, with two main features. First, the seem to made largely out of exercise and/or athletic equipment--much of which has a soft, fleshy feeling. Second, this work has lots of nipples, penises and vaginas in it. Or at least what I interpret as nipples, penis and vaginas. But since the pieces are not figurative, they seem almost like sculptures of polymorphous perversion itself. Playful perverse sculptures! (You can still just catch Walker's exhibit, which is up through the 25th.)


David Lozano, Joy Pop (Cool), acrylic and enamel on board, 36 x 36 inches, 2011

I can't tell if David Lozano's paintings are poured paint, or if they are simply carefully painted to resemble poured paint.One is reminded of Roy Lichtenstein's hard-edge paintings of abstract expressionist brush strokes. The poured part has a bizarre sensation of floating in front of an out-of-focus space. It's a cool effect (the title Joy Pop (Cool) could have served as the title for the entire exhibit). This was up at P.G. Contemporary last month.


Zachariah Rieke, Painting 36, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 69 inches, 2011

If David Lozano was faking being a poured-paint abstract expressionist, Zachariah Rieke (whose show at Wade Wilson is up through the 25th) appears to be the real thing. He gets some of his look by spilling paint on both sides of an unprimed canvas. The bits that soak through from one side to the other become part of the composition.


Kent Dorn, The End, oil, wax, paint skins, mixed media on canvas, 24 x 18 inches, 2012

Kent Dorn (at Bryan Miller Gallery) showed a series of fairly wacky paintings depicting woodland scenes or, in the case of The End and several others, words made to look as if they are made of green, mossy sticks. His paintings work to create depth by combining super-flat painting on unprimed canvas (so the paint soaks into the canvas) and ultra-thick impasto. It didn't always work, visually, but some of the thick-paint work--such as the word paintings--are really appealing.