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

Pan is Five Year Old

Robert Boyd

  

I just realized that Pan had an anniversary this month. The Great God Pan Is Dead is officially five years old. Now if you look over in the right hand column, you will see posts going as far back as December, 2006. But that is a little deceptive.

I started a personal blog (initially called Boyd's Blog, later renamed Wha' Happen?) back in May 2006. I occasionally wrote about art on it, increasing in frequency as I made more of an effort to see more local art events and exhibits. Finally, in August 2009, I decided to spin off an art blog separate from my personal blog. My first post official post was posted on August 21, 2009. But I imported a bunch of art posts from Wha'Happen? into this blog, which is why it seems to start much earlier.

The first five posts after that introductory post were:

• An explanation of the title of the blog from a piece by William Burroughs.
• A post on Herb and Dorothy Vogel (with notes on the Menils and Glenn Bray).
• A post relating a dream I had about James Turrell. 
• A description of some of the acts at the Frenetic Theater Fringe Festival, including Jim Pirtle's wine enema.
• A post about James Surls giving a talk at Lawndale (featuring art by Emily Sloan and Elaine Bradford).

Interestingly, some of these are subjects I would return to again and again: two more posts about the Vogels,  several posts mentioning Jim Pirtle (including this one), ditto for Surls, Elaine Bradford and Emily Sloan.

As for Wha'Happen?, it gradually diminished as The Great God Pan Is Dead expanded.

To celebrate our fifth birthday, I'm going to re-post my five favorite posts, perhaps with a little introductory commentary, over this Labor Day weekend.

I want to thank everyone who has read The Great God Pan Is Dead for the past five years, and I especially want to thank the writers who contributed over the years: Dean Liscum, Virginia Billeaud Anderson, Betsy Huete, Brian Piana, Paul Mullan, Pete Gershon and Carrie Marie Schneider. Thank you all so much!

The Pan Review of Books: Painting the Town Orange by Pete Gershon

Robert Boyd



In the 1970s, mailman Jeff McKissack took a modest property in Southeast Houston and transformed it into a monument to the orange. He finished it in 1979. I recall as an undergraduate at Rice University during the 80s going over there to see rock shows--McKissack had build a small stage and bleachers. The seats were old tractor seats.


Jeff McKissack and the Orange Show (photo by Geoff Winningham)

His working class neighborhood had no deed restrictions and Houston famously has no zoning, so there was nothing to stop McKissack from building his dream. While the Orange Show is the best-known example of "visionary architecture" in town, Houston, it turns out, is full of this kind of build environment, this sort of outsider architecture. (I realize that "outsider" is a problematic term, but I can't think of a better way to describe people like McKissack.) It's high time someone wrote a book about them, which is what Pete Gershon has done with Painting the Town Orange: The Stories behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments. The Orange Show, the Beer Can House, the Flower Man's House and even Notsuoh are described, as well as many that weren't saved and exist only in photographs and memories.

But if Painting the Town Orange were merely a guide book, it would be of only modest interest. (Likewise, if it were a book of criticism about these places, I'd be intrigued but I'd still likely find it less useful than Gershon's book.) What Gershon has done is thoroughly researched each artist's life, particularly McKissack, John Milcovisch, the creator of the Beer Can House, and Cleveland Turner, who was the Flower Man. Now why people create structures like this is to some extent unknowable, but Gershon shows how their biographies at least lead them to a certain point where doing something like this--something both very public and highly eccentric--seems like an option.

And beyond that, Gershon thoroughly reports how the structures were saved--how each one was discovered by people who considered it worth the considerable effort required to acquire the works (usually after the death of the artist), restore them if necessary, and preserve them. These stories end up being more complicated than one would expect. For the people who did this, there was no particular roadmap, no handbook on how to save outsider architecture. Personalities like sporting goods heiress Marilyn Oshman, who was instrumental in saving the Orange Show and artist/activist Rick Lowe, who did the same for Cleveland Turner's house, are a big part of the story that Gershon tells.


Cleveland Turner and his house, circa 1990 (photo by Larry Harris)

(This kind of story--about how the work of outsider artists is recognized and, if necessary, preserved-is always fascinating to me. Henry Darger's work was saved because his landlord, Nathan Lerner, happened to be a photographer with a very open mind and an artist's eye. Vivian Maier's photos were purchased by John Maloof in a storage locker sale, and it was just luck that he was the kind of person who realized the gold he unearthed. Charles Dellschau's art was abandoned as trash, ended up in a second hand store, and purchased by the right people.)

As if to emphasize the sometimes miraculous circumstances that lead to a place like the Orange Show being preserved, Gerson includes a chapter entitled "The Lost Environments." He writes about Pigdom, the "shrine to swine", and Bob Harper's Third World. What often happens with this kind of place is when the artist dies, the heirs don't have the resources to preserve the structures and aren't connected to a local art community that could help. The places become dilapidated and dangerous, and often the city red tags them. The bare minimum of what a visionary environment requires to survive is to be widely recognized within the local art community as art. And even that may not be enough.

Gershon moves away from "outsider" environments to discuss Notsuoh,  which is a functioning bar/performance space run by Jim Pirtle, and Zocalo/TemplO, an environment that was built by Nestor Topchy. Dan Phillips and the Phoenix Commotion, a company that builds highly eccentric art houses out of materials headed for landfills, are also discussed. Pirtle and Topchy both come out of the Houston art world and Phillips was a dance instructor at Sam Houston State University--none of them are really "outsiders"--but Gershon identifies the impulse to build an expressive environment as a common feature between them and McKissack and Turner.

There are environments such as this all over the world. Houston's are neither the biggest nor, in my opinion, the most beautiful. (I'd probably vote for the Watts Towers.) But they are tightly woven into the fabric of Houston, and the stories of how they came to be made and how they ended up saved are fascinating.

The Day the Plastic Clown Died

Robert Boyd

Two guys in a bar stood up on stage and took turns telling jokes. The jokes usually started, "Two guys walk into a bar..." they did this for 8 hours. Because it was art, it didn't have to be funny. And mostly it wasn't.


The Art Guys at Notsuoh: Michael Galbreth left and Jack Massing right

The Art Guys are celebrating 30 years of collaboration with a new absurd performance each month. Many of these involve some feat of endurance--walking the length of Houston's longest street or shaking hands for eight hours straight. Or telling jokes for eight hours.



The venue was Notsuoh. The format was a stage with two chairs, where Jack Massing would stand up, tell his "joke," then sit down. Then Michael Galbreth would stand up, tell his "joke," then sit down. Sometimes the jokes were long, sometimes very brief. But always two guys walked into a bar.


Galbreth gestures hypnotically

For a while there felt like real tension. One would stand up and say something like "Two guys walk into a bar and one of them takes a shotgun and shoots the other one in the face." The the next would stand up and say something like "Two guys walk into a bar and one of them chops the other one's head off." This went on for quite a while.



But most of the jokes were fairly benign. Galbreth was more a physical performer, wringing an incredible amount of emotion out of a lengthy dissection of the phrase "Two guys walk into a bar."



Massing did a joke where he combined every element of every "_______ walks into a bar" joke he could think of. He did another where he muttered his joke inaudibly--but at great length.



People wandered into Notsuoh, checked out the act, had a beer or two, left. The jokes never stopped.



Me, I was there for about two hours. Then I had drunk just enough Lone Stars that I could still drive home, so I left.


Joke books on stage.

And when I was about to leave, Notsuoh owner Jim Pirtle came up to me and shook my hand. He was seriously upset. He had just learned that a local performance poet, Al-Gene Pennison III, also known as the Plastic Clown, had died late the previous night. He had been at Notsuoh, went to a friend's place, and then fell off a balcony. Pirtle was quite broken up about it.

As for the Art Guys, well, the death of a Plastic Clown is a hard act to follow.