Been Doing This Kind of Thing Since Before Christ: A Talk with Gus Kopriva

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

As juror of Archway Gallery’s Seventh Annual Juried Art Exhibition, Gus Kopriva discussed the process by which he selected 39 out of the 194 artworks submitted, and while he addressed the gallery crowd I wondered how long it would take him to realize he wouldn’t be able to hold his bottle of Shiner and the microphone at the same time that he handed out the awards. Not long—beer on floor. “Ah been doing this kind of thing since before Christ,” Kopriva said, “and if space had allowed, I would have chosen all of them.” But it was his job to choose, so he chose what “connected with him in that time and place.”

From years of paying attention, I can say unequivocally that Kopriva is the only Houston gallery guru who doesn’t look tense. So when I learned he would serve as Archway’s juror, I suggested we do an interview that would touch on his role as judge, and also inform readers about his other art-related “interests” - his collection, gallery, curatorial projects and lectures. “Let’s do it,” Gus said, which led to several visits during which we discussed the juries, art prizes, curating, dealing, collecting and more.


Gus Kopriva, Juror - Archway Gallery’s Seventh Annual Juried Art Exhibition (through July 29)

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: You awarded the jury prizes at Archway Gallery exactly one day after Lawndale Art Center’s guest juror broke tradition and divided their annual juried Big Show’s $3000 prize evenly among all of the participating artists, so that none of the kiddies would feel rejection and all would know how precious they are. But I’m not the only one to feel skeptical about the Lawndale juror’s decision, I saw an artist to whom you’ve given multiple exhibitions roll her eyes and say, “How democratic.”

Gus Kopriva: I agree with what that juror was doing, with his social concept. The jurying process is soooo subjective, it’s impossible for one’s choices not to be affected by what’s in one’s mind at that time and place, so if I could choose I would accept all, give everyone honorable mentions, and no prizes. But since Archway honored me with the invitation to judge, I followed the rules. There are millions of different criteria for selecting and hanging a show.

VBA: Patrick Palmer who preceded you as an Archway juror told me he selected works that appealed to him aesthetically, but also worked well collectively to make a strong show. Remember Patrick is a teacher. Should skill count for something?

GK: I believe skill is very important, but consider Outsider art where untrained artists assemble found objects into sculptural pieces that are pleasing to viewers. As you know, Lawndale’s guest curator did no different from the late Walter Hopps, who when he was invited to judge a San Francisco exhibition, insisted all the artists be included, and because Walter was a highly respected curator, the organizers reluctantly went along with his decision and were forced to show thousands of pieces of art. Of course Walter was never again asked to judge a show. In principal I agree with Walter, but there are practical considerations - space limitations, organization rules, and importantly the artists’ expectations. Artists entered the Lawndale show expecting certain protocol related to first, second and third place prizes, and I imagine some were annoyed by the outcome.

VBA: There’s irony in the fact that it was Walter Hopps’ directorial and curatorial decisiveness that was responsible for your wife Sharon’s solo exhibition at the Menil, which was a pivotal moment in her career. Did Sharon buy you that dancing Shiva t-shirt on one of her trips to India?

GK: Yea, when she had her Mumbai show. I have a large collection of t-shirts.

VBA: I’ve often wondered how actively you participate in helping Sharon manage her career.

GK: It would be a conflict of interest for me to represent Sharon, other dealers do that.

VBA: Sugar, that’s a half-baked answer, because I know you understand my question. You’re hardly ignorant of the benefits of expert strategy on commercial success, and my question takes nothing away from Sharon’s astounding skill and creativity. Do you guide Sharon in her decisions, give advice, unofficially, on such things as gallery negotiations, or pricing, or media interaction, or which essay to include in a catalog?

GP: I’m an unofficial advisor.

VBA: I saw a full page ad in Vogue that announced Sharon’s Monterrey museum exhibition. Did you do that?

GK: Uh, I did the logistics. Lynet and I went to Mexico to try to arrange a traveling show, and we visited three museums where I showed them what I had done with other shows, like Shanghai, and I also showed them some of Sharon’s work which resulted in the Museo Metropolitana de Monterrey wanting to do Sharon’s Gothic Exposure exhibition, but it was their idea. So yes I advise. But I didn’t have anything to do with the New Orleans Ogden Museum show, it was all Sharon.

VBA: Pop didn’t raise a fool, did he Gus? You have been having a blast playing the role of curator, and by now must have organized several hundred exhibitions, many of which put you in collaboration with leading curators and scholars. Your shows have been critically noted, and in fact President George Bush wrote a complimentary letter in praise of the show you brought to the Shanghai Art Museum. I’ll never forget Still Crazy after All These Years, the 2005 exhibition you did for Lawndale Art Center’s 25th anniversary. That crowd was nostalgic and drunk.

GP: Lawndale gave me full curatorial freedom.

VBA: Still Crazy at Lawndale must have been logistically simple compared to exhibits in other countries where there have been complications, such as the people in Athens disobligingly deciding to riot in the streets at the time you were trying to show them some art.

GK: That 2012 Athens show Western Sequels: Art from the Lone Star State was scheduled to open at the National Painting School, but the opening was delayed a couple of days by a transportation strike. Then riots broke out on the plaza by the capital building, near our hotel, with tear gas and flying pieces of marble, surprisingly when we finally opened there were a few hundred people who attended. You know we finance these shows ourselves with little sponsorship from the government. When we showed in Havana, we were not only unsponsored, but fairly illegal, because of the embargo. Unable to get passports stamped, we had to travel to Cuba by way of Mexico, and I shipped the art via Frankfurt, and when we arrived at the Museo de Humboldt in Havana we found the city had no nails and wires so we had to use fishing line to hang the art. Things got worse when Wayne Gilbert got himself interviewed by CNN because that made us conspicuous, so we made Wayne fly home on a separate flight. Then our non-sponsored, illegal group encountered a prestigious MFA Museum-sponsored group in the plaza, and that made things more uncomfortable. I have so many stories. Keep in mind I did the Leipzig show in the former German Democratic Republic, what used to be East Germany. For one of the shows in Peru the container arrived only one day before the show opened. Talk about stress! When we brought Western Sequels to Istanbul there were riots there too.

VBA: It seems Cuba wasn’t the only western-embargoed location you decided couldn’t do without seeing Texas art. Last year I met an Iranian-born artist who told me you asked her to help you arrange an exhibition in Tehran. I can just imagine those mullahs hissing that your art is Satanic.

GK: I wanted a show in Tehran. I like Persian, and Iranian contemporary art. The theme could be “Art by Republican Artists,” with horses, cowboys and Indians. What a show. The choice of art would not matter, what would be significant is that we would be the first to do such a thing since the time of the Shah. But the permits and government hassles would be unbearable. It needs to be done though. Maybe Israel could sponsor us. We actually had an exhibition planned for Cairo, but the new government installed by the Muslim brotherhood fired our museum director and curators, and then there were the Egyptian riots, and no one wanted to travel so we cancelled.

VBA: Gustav, you have a charming way of using the imperial “We” like the papacy and the queen of England when describing your projects.

GK: This is so fun. I still want to do the show in Egypt.

VBA: You opened Redbud Gallery in 1999, which is known for giving upstarts a chance, and taking less than the standard commission.

GK: We opened in 1999 and we’ve survived vice squad raids, censorship, and condescending critics. We show dead, live and just starting artists, all mediums, whatever I like and want to show. In the early years I only took 10% of the sale, but after about eight years I was losing too much money, so now it’s a 50-50 split. We don’t concentrate on sales, my goal is to show art, but the art sells itself. I keep the prices low, and there have been many times the shows sold out.

VBA: When you were working on the recent John Biggers exhibition you told me you thought it was one of Redbud Gallery’s most significant.

GK: Because it was a survey show with works that spanned from the beginning of his career in the 1940s to his death, and as far as I could tell, no Houston commercial gallery had done a solo Biggers show in twenty five years. I worked with curators and local collectors and researched him thoroughly, actually read six illustrated books to pull it together. I’m equally proud of some of my early shows like the inaugural exhibition that showed the 84 year old unknown sculptor Gladys Gostick. Gladys showed a collection of three dimensional birds in stone, wood and copper, and we sold out. That was one of my most satisfying shows. Know what that woman did? Sat on her welding torch and burned her ass. Another really satisfying show was the West Coast assemblage artist George Herms. He had showed at MOMA and done things in the early sixties, but had not had a show in years. We sold out, and a Philadelphia gallery picked him up. He’s big again.

VBA: Do you think your out-going personality helps with commercial gallery success? You are gracious to everyone, even non-art buying nobodies, unlike a few out there who won’t even bother to speak, not even to those of us who wrote newspaper or magazine articles about their stuff. I don’t understand how those people ever manage to sell a piece of art behaving like that.

GK: I’ve seen it. It’s possible they’re trying to act like art should be some elitist status, trying to emulate how things are in New York and Paris, playing that role. Being friendly is important. I’m nice to everyone. Look, I grew up in a trailer house. Virginia let me show you my beginning. You see these burned up buildings in this photograph. This is where I was born. It was destroyed by American bombs in the war, I played in that rubble. My grandmother was killed in this building, here near the church. She drowned trying to take sanctuary in the basement, the water pipes broke. My mother watched while they carried out the bodies, my grandmother was wearing a camel hair coat and opal jewelry. For years my mother hated camel coats and opals. My mother married my step father, Frank Kopriva, Pop, who she met after the Americans occupied Pirmasens in 1945. We left there in 1955.

VBA: There’s nothing elitist about your art collection. Nothing pretentious, you’ll purchase from artists nobody ever heard of if the art pleases you, and I’ve often admired the fact that you collect Durer, Rembrandt and other Old Master prints, even if some contemporary art-biased snobs sniff at that. Your prints are lovely and it shows you have taste.

GK: I’ve been collecting for 30 years, have over 1,850 pieces. The collection also includes German Expressionism, French Symbolism, American WPA, and of course contemporary. They are mostly works on paper. Basically I buy art that I believe is different, or extremely well crafted, and art history plays a large part in what I buy, but the collection is not heavy in abstraction, except for a few art historical abstract pieces. It includes Miro, de Kooning, and Guston. I purchase from individuals, auctions, galleries, estates, and also from the artists who show in my Redbud Gallery. Our German Expressionist works formed the exhibition Broken Brushes, and it has traveled to small museums and universities around the U.S. and to Berlin.

I want to talk about the museum in Germany. We are about to begin a ten year loan of eighty-seven of the German Expressionist pieces to a regional museum in Salzwedel. The collection will be housed in a renovated turn of the century school house, a magnificent building in a medieval town in the old East Germany, called Art House Salzwedel. I’m loaning works on paper by Otto Dix, George Grosz, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Paul Klee, Kokoschka, Kollwitz, Franz Marc, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, and many others, and the collection will form the core of the museum’s holdings. I partnered with Salzwedel’s mayor as a consultant, an idea guy, to help her promote tourism, and suggested she start the art museum. I helped her chose the building, it had been empty for 10 years, and she got it back from the city for back taxes. The site will include a restaurant, and archives and a tourist bureau. And it’s well funded. The German government gave us a million Euros and local banks contributed, so we began the nonprofit Foundation for Art House Salzwedel to handle renovation funding and operations funding. Kunsthaus Salzwedel opens this fall.

VBA: You lecture frequently about your collection.

GP: I lecture specifically on the business of collecting art, and I do it at universities. The business part is crucial, and it’s not being taught. Artists must deal in entirely different ways with collectors, curators, and galleries, and they need to know how, they need to know the business, public relations and marketing, the protocols and practices, and unwritten expectations. MFA should create courses on this.

VBA: Do you miss being an engineer?

GK: Well, not really. I’m still consulting some, very part time, for my Middle East clients.

VBA: A few years back I tried to pick your brain about energy stocks, wondered if you had held on to your Dow Chemical stock, and you told me you were only buying art.

GK: Art has a proven history. I’m buying art and real estate. It lets me control it. With real estate I’ve never gone wrong. If you can afford it, buy it.

VBA: The media reported you’re selling the 1923 Houston Heights Theater building for $1.9 million.

GK: After 30 years Sharon and I are hoping to sell the theater. If all goes well the new buyers will turn it into a top notch cultural center, with theater and music, and a bar. We’re passing the torch. When we bought it in the 80s it had been fire bombed, was a burned out hulk, sat vacant for 10 years. We renovated and saved it, and made it a historical landmark. We have a feasibility contract signed for it to be a regional art venue. Sharon and I went to school in the Heights. We started out with nothing. We had $500 between us when we got married, I thought she had money, but it turned out I was mistaken. We lived in run down areas in the Heights, and it all came back. We’ve made some wise decisions.

VBA: One of your tenants recently confirmed the rumor that he is exiting your 11th street building which holds Redbud Gallery and Sharon’s studio, which will leave you with a significant amount of additional space. When I asked you three weeks ago what you intended to do with that space you gave me a baloney answer that it would relate to art. Not talking! Are you ready to announce your plans for the space in your 11th street building?

GK: Can’t talk about, it will be related to the arts.

VBA: Last year when I wrote an article about Sharon she invited me to your home in Idaho.

GK: You should fly up with me on Thursday. Sharon told me to be there for my birthday.

Beyond Physical: Sharon Kopriva Speaks

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

She spoke of visiting the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, and it was fun to imagine Sharon Kopriva examining the artistic possibilities of centuries-old Sicilian corpses. In the same breath she said it wasn’t until she went to Palermo that she understood her grandfather’s garden. He planted orange trees, and fennel, and other plants she discovered to be in abundance there in the city of his birth.


Sharon Kopriva, Riding the Pices Moon, 2013, Mixed media on photographic print, 42 x 49 (Courtesy of Deborah Colton Gallery)

It was unnecessary for Art in America to call our attention to forest imagery in Kopriva’s art. For years it’s been evident that nature is on an equal footing with the longstanding themes of death and Catholic religious mythology. Arguably, forest landscape intermingled with gothic cathedral architecture has precisely the same connotations as sculptural mummified religious figures. They serve as referents to actuality that is inexplicable and transcendent. On a recent studio visit I learned the following:

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: After a number of years of incorporating nature into your work, the landscapes should now be thought of as established orthodoxy. Self-portraiture on the other hand, numerous examples of which appear in your solo exhibition Illuminations (at Deborah Colton Gallery through June 26), is relatively new. It’s my assessment that depictions of your flying nude body in paintings such as Time Traveling and Riding the Pisces Moon, similarly to those of dogs that fly through forests and gothic cathedrals, originate from something buried in your psyche. This will probably piss a few people off, but have you ever floated out of your body?

Sharon Kopriva: Only one other person has ever asked me that - Walter Hopps.

VBA: The late Walter Hopps organized your solo exhibition at the Menil Collection in the year 2000.

SK: I floated through the walls. My out of body experience took place almost twenty years ago when I was in the hospital. I realize now that if I had not been there in the hospital I probably would not be here today. The thing I remember most as I look back was an incredible freedom, and I recall having absolutely no fear. It is the only time I remember flying THROUGH anything, and it was different than any dream I have ever had. It was very real. I do remember hearing my name called, and called again, and I came back to a doctor who looked more anxious than I was.

VBA: My father did that when he was a kid. He slipped through an inner tube, and found himself up in the sky looking at his body on the pier, and he told me he saw the older kids who were supposed to be watching him crying and screaming. Then he was back in his body vomiting water and crying. Surely Hopps recognized this in your art.

SK: That conversation with Walter was a very brief but memorable moment when he asked me if I had ever “traveled.” Walter was special, on the edge of many things. He sometimes called in the middle of the night. For him time was eternal.

VBA: Even if you hadn’t admitted to floating around the hospital, openness to extra-dimensional reality is easily detected in the sculptural dead, decaying and mummified figures, and paintings of ghosts and phantom dogs. Have you experienced other things not of this world?

SK: Pop, the man who raised Gus, appeared to me after he died. I saw him clearly. He had something important to tell me. It was very personal, advice I followed. I think we all have these opportunities to communicate. Most of the time, we do not allow them to happen. Your questions have allowed me to think about the few times in my life when I reached beyond the physical. They are being revisited in my memory.


Sharon Kopriva, From Dust Thou Art, 1997, Papier-mâché and mixed media, 54 x 23 x 39 (Collection of Nancy Reddin Kienholz)

VBA: It’s well known that travels in Peru shaped the rotting-mummy aesthetic in your art. I traveled that entire country with my archaeology group, so I recognize how closely derived your sculptures are from their Peruvian mummy sources. It was unexpected to see the open pits at Nazca, and mummies with hair preserved and textile wrappings remarkably un-faded, the colors of which by the way account for the ocher, reds, and earth tones in your art. Archaeological interest though was not my sole reason for going to Peru. As you know, Peru is considered the most significant area on the planet for extra terrestrial sightings, and I figured if that is real and it probably is, then it’s the most important thing anyone could talk about, so I went there to talk to Peruvians about their experiences, and heard some marvelous stories. Be assured Robert Boyd will receive a few complaints about silly ass interview questions, but have you had any extra terrestrial encounters?

SK: My experiences in Peru were totally wonderful, but unfortunately remained earthbound. I have not abandoned the possibility of experiences at a later date. I did see the Nazca lines which some believe are the work of extra terrestrials.

VBA: I was certain I would die seeing those lines, kept waiting for the plane’s single propeller to malfunction.

SK: And the planes make those scary loops and turns. I would love to talk more about Peru with you, and although I have not seen extra terrestrials, I believe I experienced an earlier life, which might have been in Peru. We saw the mummies when we first went there in 1982, an elderly guide took us to the burials, and we saw bones, bleached by the sun, thrown everywhere. There were whole limbs, hair, sculls, and of course, missing was the pottery the thieves took, and the wonderful woven cloths. On our next trip almost 25 years later, that spot was "cleaned up," there were still a few bones off in the distance, but the site was suddenly organized. There is a picture of it in my New Orleans Ogden Museum exhibition catalog.

VBA: Masterful is the only word to express the manner in which you capture knotty leg joints and muscles in three-dimensional renderings of your Peruvian hounds Luna, Pluto and Thor. I once saw a superb bronze of Thor with the figure twisted as if about to chase its tail, which reached to Degas’ level of observation and nuance. But the way you distorted your dogs’ images in the Seven Deadly Sins installation at Project Row Houses in 2011 was shameful. Spread through the row house were dog sculptures meant to represent the seven human transgressions. In the rear of the house was Gluttony asleep on the floor, in the form of an obese stingray, surrounded by Frito bags, Big Mac containers and dog shit. You disgraced those animals.

SK: One day I’ll do another sculpture series of the dogs, probably in bronze. Gus and I are forever watching our dogs spin around and interact with each other. Long ago we decided they have all the same qualities as humans when dealing with each other. So when I was invited to do an installation at Row Houses, it was Gus who actually suggested I use my sculptured dogs as actors to demonstrate the sins. What fun. I managed to reserve the only house still divided into rooms, and off we went. Humor is good. I have so often seen my dogs demonstrate envy and greed, of course gluttony and lust. And I have seen anger and vanity.


Sharon Kopriva, Insomniacs Nightmare, 2010-11, Oil and mixed media on canvas, 68 x 40 (Courtesy of Deborah Colton Gallery)

VBA: The thought of you arranging doggie excrement in the row house brings to mind Kienholz with whom you studied after graduate school. As an art history student I was haunted by my first encounter with Kienholz’s The State Hospital, which must have required meticulous manipulation of materials to construct the diseased and decaying figures, as well as unpleasant installation of bloody, urine-stained mattresses. When you handle, complexly, animal bones, clay, cloth, and papier-mâché or arrange sculptural tableau such as in The Confessional are you conscious of Ed Kienholz’s influence?

SK: I am very aware of the Kienholz’s influence. I also knew Ed Kienholz through art history books long before I met him and Nancy. It was Ed who inspired me to move into the more complex installations and multi figure pieces, he continually pushed me to explore new territory. The Confessional was one of my first multi figure works, and perhaps my most important piece to date. I’m grateful to both Ed and Nancy for moving me to a new level. How lucky to not only get to meet my heroes but to become so close.

VBA: Perhaps even more influential than Kienholz was your sculpture teacher James Surls, whom I had the opportunity to meet in 2010 when I wrote a newspaper article about one of his exhibitions. Let me remind you of 2005 when Gus Kopriva organized the group exhibition Still Crazy After All These Years to celebrate Lawndale Art Center’s 25th anniversary, and to evoke the dissipated art student environment of the University of Houston Lawndale studio. As much as the event honored the U of H Lawndale and the subsequent Lawndale Art Center, it was a tribute to James Surls who set everything in motion. I came across an Art in America article from the late eighties in which Surls was quoted as saying he “exploited” his students by arranging exhibitions so they could interact with collectors and curators to experience how “real” artists conducted themselves. In my estimation Prey for Us, your sculpture of an altar boy figure over which a shadow image of a predatory cleric was projected, was a focal point of the show.

SK: Wow, Still Crazy! You aren’t leaving any stones unturned. That was a great show. I saw that exhibition as a chance to re-live history. As you know, the old Lawndale was a separate animal from Lawndale Art Center, it was part of the university and directly involved the students. James Surl's soul was all over it. I was there in 1979 when we put the first coats of white paint over the yellow walls of that old cable factory. Even after Surls moved on, his spirit stayed. The new Lawndale is a wonderful alternative exhibition space, vital to this city, and now has a history of its own. Lawndale and the MFA exhibition Fresh Paint were responsible for kicking off the careers of many young artists in Houston.

VBA: I recently saw some of your wall-mounted relief works at the Spring Street Studios exhibition and witnessed how their mysterious quality silenced a few viewers. You achieved the meditative intensity required to re-direct thoughts to life, death and the nature of reality, which for you obviously stretches beyond the physical.

SK: The four small works at Spring Street were done originally for an exhibit in India. I think we all have the capacity to think or be "beyond physical." I also feel most of us do this intuitively rather than consciously. And I think that many things come forth through art that may not have through the spoken word. Images do come that are sometimes totally conscious and sometimes not. I’m especially interested in art that is beyond real, surreal and most often spiritually motivated. I love the art historical trail through romanticism and symbolism, and believe many of the artists were reaching into metaphysical states in their visions, in search of the spiritual and the sublime.

VBA: You are speaking about the 2011 Mumbai gallery exhibition Phantoms and Milestones in which the ghost dogs appeared with depictions of historically significant events related to struggles for liberty. I’ve not yet been to India, but I’m drawn to the Hindu notion of an energy or force that connects all living and inanimate things, and one day hope to see Banaras where Hindus go to prepare for passage to the unknown reality beyond the borders of life, and pray to escape rebirth. Sharon, you already mentioned a possible past life in Peru and in a 1996 interview you stated “everything cycles.” Explain more about how reincarnation fits into your philosophy.

SK: Cycles of life interest me probably more than any other condition of our existence. I think all of my art is related to cycles in one way or another. Long before India I saw the cycles clearly in Peru. The mummy forms in my sculptures come out of the cycles there. In Australia, I also saw evidence of transformation and cycles in the aboriginal life and art, as I did in India. I do not know if all people reincarnate, but I believe some might. I do not know if I will, but I believe I could. There might be complicated reasons about why and how, but I do believe it happens. Matter is not created or destroyed, it is transformed and recycled. But that's the physical part. There are places where I have stepped where I feel I have been before, particularly in Peru. That's the spiritual part. In Australia, beings are believed to move in and out of inanimate objects. I find that fascinating. A rock may possess the spirit that will become a person and a person's spirit may yet become one with a rock or a tree or an animal. I didn’t have much time to spend in India but hope to return and experience more of that land and culture and learn more about how it fits into the "whole" picture. I do not believe the spiritual part of a person disappears. Some think we just cease to exist, some we either go to Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. I think we might not all do the same thing. I believe the souls of some float around earth, some because they cannot figure out where to go, some because they choose to or have unfinished business. I believe some might take on a new form and cycle again.


Sharon Kopriva, Joan of Arc, 1988, Papier-mâché, burned wood, mixed media, 72 x 36 x 28 (Menil permanent collection)

VBA: The years haven’t dimmed my memory of your Menil show. Why did the sculpture Joan of Arc unsettle me?

SK: The Joan of Arc sculpture is one of three of my works that entered the Menil Collection. I think Walter and Mrs. de Menil chose this work together to be donated by Edward and Nancy Kienholz. Mrs. de Menil was especially moved by the female martyrs. She personally chose Catherine's Wheel to have a permanent home at the museum. And I think of the series of martyrs whose legends found their way into my studio in the mid to late 80's, Joan was my favorite, and she is most people's favorite. It's her story, her role as an early, strong feminist that moves us. She was caught up in politics, first a hero, then proclaimed a heretic and burned at the stake in her teens, thanks to the Catholic Church, then 400 yeas later, proclaimed a Saint. Surely she had out of body experiences, had to be in a trance when she led the army into battle and when she was ablaze. In fact, don't you think all of our martyrs experienced religious induced trances? I think Joan's story is so compelling because she is in regular history books. That puts a mark of “TRUE Reality" on her that I do not believe others have. As part of the process of making Joan I actually set her on fire. A faint smell of that burn remains. Martyrs have always held a special place for me. As a child, I wondered and hoped if put to the test, I could risk my own life for a cause. I have seen real martyrs in my life, like those who acted to help others without thinking of their own safety, silently without needing glory, such as those in 9/11.

VBA: Not martyred, but known for bizarre self-mortifying, was Rose of Lima, on whom you based an important sculpture. It seems her head is in the Basilica in Lima, “uncorrupted” like the head of Catherine in Siena, which I saw a few years ago. Rose wanted to suffer at the saintly intensity of Catherine, so she wore a spiked crown on her head to endure a crown of thorns, and was dead not surprisingly by 31, after which the required miracles made her the first saint to be canonized in the Americas. Did you see Rose in Lima?

SK: Of course, Rose of Lima is so loved in Peru. Yes, I visited the beautiful Church which houses her relic. I have visited it twice. The people are very proud of their special saint. The Cathedral was filled with worshipers the times we went. Rose was a beautiful woman who worked hard to destroy her beauty. You mentioned Catherine, and there are many saints whose bodies are believed not to have decomposed, I have a book, I think it is The Incorruptibles. My Saint Rose of Lima sculpture is in the collection of the museum in Lima. Love that city!


Sharon Kopriva, Saint Rose of Lima, 2006, Papier-mâché, mixed media, approximately 50 x 30 (Courtesy of Deborah Colton Gallery)

VBA: Those shoes! You’re never more perverse then when devising shoes for the religious figures. When I was a kid in Catholic school, the nuns wore black leather lace-up shoes beneath their floor length habits, which to me looked ridiculous. And the priests’ heavy leather shoes seemed ill-suited to their long robes. Comment on the shoes.

SK: It is getting harder to find those nun shoes. All the kids are now in sneakers. The priests’ etc., are a bit easier to find. Once Gus left a pair of damp shoes outside the door to dry out and when he came home they were on a bishop. (I thought he was throwing them away) They looked great on my sculpture and Gus got a new pair of shoes. I have actually spent a great deal of time working on and making correct clothing, rings, shoes and even the belt buckles on my Catholic figures. I have a very good friend who is an ex-nun and enjoys helping me research these details. It is important that they be correct, and I love the research.

VBA: We know from statements you’ve made that the religious sculptures are not a condemnation of the church’s canon as dead or stuck in the past, as has been critically asserted, and that to interpret the art as a denouncement of the church and your Catholic upbringing is overly simplistic. You did say the figures are frozen in time performing rituals that you witnessed when younger, and that in each piece you are searching to try to understand yourself. Essentially, the mummy sculptures, akin to your fantasy landscapes, invite us to contemplate the ultimate enigma, where do we come from and where are we going, simply put, they encode our spiritual search. In that bodily putrefaction, recycling, consciousness, and the eternal imagination are part of the universe’s energy, the artworks facilitate deeper levels of awareness.

SK: Yes, the figures are frozen in time. I liken them to the bodies of saints that refuse to decompose. Years ago the Church sucked us in with ritual and fear, bells rang and we beat our chests and felt holy. All of that fear and ritualistic participation are in my religious figures. They are frozen in time performing their acts of religion. They similarly denote the death and ritual close to the surface in primitive societies. The art signifies my search for self knowledge, an attempt to reach a higher state. My forests as cathedrals, with tree branches superimposed over church architecture, reflect broadening of my religion, an expansion of my spirituality.


Sharon Kopriva, Cathedral Green, 2012, Oil and mixed media on photo canvas, 81 x 186 x 2.5 (Courtesy of Deborah Colton Gallery)

VBA: In 2012 the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans mounted From Terra to Verde: The Art of Sharon Kopriva, a survey of works created between 1982 and 2012. At the time curator Bradley Sumrall wrote that the exhibition reveals “the breadth and unity of her career.” Was it fine to look back on thirty years of artistic expression?

SK: It was so wonderful to look back at thirty years, all in one spot, one clean, lit spot. Bradley did such a wonderful job in preparing the exhibition, he worked on it for a full year, even traveled to my home in Idaho where we hiked my favorite trail and he really "got" the place and understood how it became such an important influence on me in the last ten years. Back to the question: I was looking at the path my life and art had traveled through thirty years and decided to arrange the show to begin in the early 80's underground in beautiful, spiritual Peru, move through my examination of my life and religion, and end with nature imagery represented by paintings such as Cathedral Green. It clarified where I am and where I had been, and the lovely closure was that it mentally created space for whatever comes next, in my own time. There were works in that exhibit that I had not seen in many years and reunited with. I guess we should call it the family reunion, when all the kids come home. Virginia, some might find it surprising that I publicly discussed those personal out of body experiences, but what the heck! Those experiences are part of my life and my art.

All's Docile at Dogapalooza 2012

Dean Liscum

There are two kinds of people...Actually, with 6,973,738,433 and change (based on the World Bank's census numbers at the end of 2011) people on the planet, there are probably 362,166,576 kinds of people. Regardless, I'm insensitive, obtuse, and lazy, so I recognize only two kinds: people who love pets and the rest of us. A sub-category of that group is a cross-section of people who love dogs and people who love art. Combine the two and you get "dog art," which is art in which the focus is "the dog". This kind of art is a Rorschach test without an answer key. I have no idea what "dog art" means categorically or individually, but I'm pretty sure whoever invents an interpretive rubric for it will win a MacArthur "Genius" Grant.

So, I couldn't miss Dog Park at G Gallery not because I expected to be blown away by the art or because I love dogs, but because I was curious what had happened--What kind of dog art had local artist made? What would happen when you bring together art, alcohol, and dogs?  My negative fantasy involved animal control.

Here's what I observed while I was there.



 "dog" phrases on the window of G Gallery




Joe Furman and Laura Lark, Untitled

I bet Laura Lark drew the dog just to screw with everyone. It looks like a portrait of a dog that bit me on the butt when I was jogging through a Houston suburban. Despite its slogan, getting fanged in the ass there was not any sweeter than had it happened in Montrose.



Nestor Topchy, St. Christopher Dog Head Icon

Nestor Topchy seems to suggest that the patron saint of bachelors is dog face\headed. I believe he may have stumbled upon a truth. Here's a work by the patron saint of dog art in Houston, Sharon Kopriva.


Sharon Kopriva, title unknown

The amorphousness of Tara Conley's dog captures how I feel about dogs. I'm not sure if this dog wants to lick me to death or just burrow to my brain through my face.



Tara Conley, Dog (top view)





Tara Conley, Dog (side view)


I think a lot of abstract expressionism aims for the immediacy and satisfaction of St. Sanders' Date night, but comes short.



St. Sanders, Date night

This image by Ben Tecumseh DeSoto is a powerful and stark reminder of America's love-and-get-distracted-and-neglect-or-abandon relationship with pets. The consumerist ethos doesn't work very well with some "goods."   And, no I'm just not sure what to make of the genital warts ad under the dogs feet, but I can't let it go unmentioned.



Ben Tecumseh DeSoto, Dog Realizes Death




Debra Broz, Royal Canine


I'm not sure what Debra Broz's Royal Canine is implying. Perhaps, if you have a tongue like that you are treated as royalty.



Magsamen+Hillerbrand, Cerberus

Magsamen+Hillerbrand's dog is a mythological wanna be that is a couple of heads short but it's better than dressing it up in doggie spandex and sequins.



Otis Ike, Waiting for Wegman

Otis Ike's Waiting for Wegman is a fun send up of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Although, I couldn't find any mention of Beckett having dogs as pets, I did discover two pieces of literary criticism that had gone to the dogs. One about dog imagery in Molloy and another that insists that pets are "gushingly doted on by spinster ladies in Beckett's fiction".

When the topic of the life of dogs in America comes up (and that dog isn't about to be euthanized), Autumn Beckmann's April Mae represents my mental image except the doghouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is missing.



Autumn Beckmann, April Mae




Outside, there was a lot of butt-sniffing going on. The dogs were getting to know one another as well.

Much to my chagrin, animal control did not have to come out and Houston's S.W.A.T. did not need to separate any dog owners. But at least, none of the dogs mistook my shinbone for a chew toy.

Catharsis in Houston's South Hamptons

by Dean Liscum

On Saturday, 5/14/11, two Houston artists, Sharon Kopriva and Julia Claire Wallace, with completely different styles and subjects working in completely different mediums exhibited cathartic works. Both shows happened to be in (or very near) Houston's South Hampton neighborhood, which has a reputation for many things but generally not for being populated by people who embrace "the process of bringing to the surface repressed emotions, complexes, and feelings in an effort to identify and relieve them, or the result of this process."

Sharon Kopriva exhibited her show "Cathedrals, Phantoms and Naked Dogs" at Colton & Farb Gallery on North street. Walking into the main gallery, it doesn't require great powers of perception to realize that Kopriva's work is very Catholic. A menagerie of priests, nuns, and penitents have dominated her paintings, sculptures, and installations throughout her career. This series is only slightly different, introducing phantoms and dogs sometimes in place of her clerical subjects and sometimes in the company of them. In some of the larger works, Kopriva has also expanded the interior scale of her work moving from the intimate spaces of the dais and the confessional to the public spaces of cathedrals and dark forests.

Her subject combined with an aesthetic derived from Peruvian mummies renders her figures horrific. They are both dessicated and skeletal, drained and devoid of the life and joy that the fat and happy Buddha represents.

Cardinal Conte and his canines, 2009

In an Artlies interview with Darryl Lauster entitled Catharsis: Sharon Kopriva, Kopriva corrects Lauster by labeling her work "cleansing." Semantics aside, Kopriva confronts and conquers. She intentionally recreates the dread in Catholicism's milieus of malevolence. Her works consist of cadaverous priests in the medieval environs in which holy retribution or divine reparations are extracted from the penitent. Kopriva doesn't dispute the crime. After all, Catholicism is the religion that first asserted that even the most innocent of children is born with an original sin. Her works never depict an actual transgression inflagrante delicto. No where in her oeuvre does she happily portray adultery or take up the cause of the just murder or even a long weekend of coveting. Instead, she's battles against what she fears, the judgement. Her method of attack involves recreating to de-mystify and disarm. These pieces ominously foreshadow the consequences of a contemplated crime against the cross. By metaphorically recreating the scenes that inspire these fears, she de-mystifies them, de-spelling the images of their power over her.  

I just hope the well-healed patrons of Colton-Farb who can afford to buy one of her works don't put it in the nursery or the kids play room because they want Jaxon or Blythe to be exposed to fine art and the colors of Cardinal Conte's vestment match the crown molding.

As Kopriva's work hints at the irony in art that the more personal an artist's work is the more universal it becomes, Julia Clare Wallace's work ass-ffirms it. Wallace's medium of choice is performance art/video. A quintessential work of Wallace is a performance piece in which she discusses her favorite color while a hard-core porn-style movie of her plays on a screen behind her. Just a few miles from North street, Wallace debuted a piece called "Hidden Pussy In the Workplace" in the show "For the Man...The 9 to 5 Show" curated by Stephanie Saint Sanchez at Gallery 1724.

To say that Wallace has issues about sex is to capture the essence of this project. The objective of this work is to shock with her sex. The piece consists of a set of picture post cards of (presumably) Wallace's pussy and a video of her hiding these post cards in various work environments such as a construction site and a hair salon. Patrons are encouraged to purchase the post cards ($3 each) or print them for free from the site, http://www.hiddenpussy.blogspot.com/, and then document where they hide them.

Hidden Pussy in the Workplace, 2011

Wallace works with the borders of American sexual morays, identifying their limits and then gleefully leapfrogging over them. In contrast to Kopriva, Wallace is all about the act. She achieves catharsis by daring to do what is taboo. She transgresses. She flaunts her own genitalia to affirm sexuality.

However, the piece (and possible she as an artist on the subject) does not progress beyond catharsis over the shame of sex to celebrate it. In Hidden Pussy, the audience is asked to participate in the transgression by secreting and then documenting the workplace that they've "booty trapped." Presumably, this is so that the artist and others can imagine (even fantasize about) the shock and awe that discoveries of these post cards will produce. Unfortunately, the post card does not contain a note that invites the finder to go to the blog and describe the thrill they got from finding the pussy. Nor does it ask them to recall the first time or the most recent time they had sex at work. For me, the work doesn't push the pussy far enough in a good way. It doesn't use the conceit of the "hidden pussy" to serve as a mnemonic device to access or imagine gratifying/exhilarating sexual memories such as the first time the discoverer saw-touched-tasted-felt a/their pussy or the most luxuriant or enveloping, euphoric sexual experience they had.

And that's fine. Because sometimes, as these two artists demonstrate, you just gotta get the dread out.

Fresh Paint 25 Years Later

Robert Boyd



In January, 1985, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts opened a gigantic show of paintings by Houston area artists called Fresh Paint: The Houston School, curated by Barbara Rose and Susie Kalil. As far as I know, it was the first time the MFAH had devoted a large show to local artists. James Surls spoke about this last year at Lawndale, how in the 70s Houston art institutions were deathly afraid of failure. The implication was that if you put up a show of Houston art, you might get laughed at as provincial. But then Peter Marzio came along to run the MFAH, and he was a bit more expansive and risk-taking in his vision. Besides, by the early 80s, a lot of exciting art was being done in Houston. This exhibit was huge--44 painters in the Mies-designed front part of the museum. The paintings varied in size but tended towards being big. I was still a student at Rice and was excited about the show--although I had mixed feeling about the work.

Why this show? Why 1985? These questions are easy to answer, really. During the sixties and especially the 70s, Houston had grown substantially. That growth was fueled by the oil industry. While the rest of the country was knocked off its feet repeatedly by high oil prices, Houston prospered. A smugness, a certain unattractive swagger developed. (Totally unjustified--Houston had no control over oil prices, even thought it benefited from their rapid rise.) In 2009 dollars, the price of oil in 1970 was $9.94/bbl. In 1985, it was $54.95/bbl. (The price of oil collapsed the next year and didn't start recovering until 1999--this past-decade-long revival of the price of oil is one of the reasons Texas has suffered less than other parts of the country during the past two recessions.) 1985 was therefore a peak year. Great cities celebrate their wealth with art. Hence Fresh Paint. Hence FotoFest, which also began in 1985. And Fresh Paint wasn't just for Houston to pat itself on the back--it traveled to P.S. 1 in May of 1985. We were ready to show New York a thing or two.

But 25 years later, how does it stand up? I mostly have my memories and my copy of the catalog to go by. The first thing that rankles, and even then seemed an overreach, was the identification of a "Houston School" of painting. The rationale here was that in the Renaissance, there were distinct regional schools tied to specific Italian cities. Furthermore, one could reasonably point to places like Chicago and L.A. as having distinct regional voices and approaches--schools, if you must use the term. So why not Houston? All that was needed was to find some kind of stylistic or thematic link that tied Houston artists together.

This was folly. Here's what Thomas McEvilley wrote in Artforum at the time. He says it a lot better than I can.

The show is one in which the critic must review the curating before the work; the curating is so extravagant that the work can hardly be seen until one has blown away the cloud of claims that surround it. And when it is seen, it is found to be still without the frame or horizon which it is curating's responsibility to provide. Above all, Rose and Kalil have failed to present their Houston artists in a relation to the world. To say that these artists are gifted is not to say much. Entering the "Fresh Paint" show in the Miesian space of the museum's Cullinan Hall is both shocking and stimulating. The visual clamor is deafening. Walking through it is like riding waves of sometimes discordant music. To walk through the "Fresh Paint" show with the question of a school in mind is chaos. Everywhere are conflicting values which annihilate one another.

There just wasn't enough tying these artists together to make the case that there was a "Houston school." I can almost imagine what they were thinking, though. They saw a bunch of paintings by local artists that were, broadly speaking, neoexpressionist (which was the hip thing to be as painting and the art market revived in the 1980s--think Julian Schnabel, Georg Baselitz, David Salle, etc.), but with injections of semi-tropical color (which could reflect the greenness of Houston), neon-ish touches (reflecting both Houston's gaudiness and Mexican border towns) and a certain Mexican influence (from the great Mexican painters, from the border, from the influence of Mexican immigrants, etc.) And this stuff is present in a lot of the paintings, more or less. But seen from the vantage point of today, it seems a little kitschy. I'm looking at you Earl Staley, Malinda Beeman, Patrick Cronin and Craig Lesser.

Rose and Kalil also make a case that Houston artists are non-abstract. "The use of figuration is similarly motivated today [...] by the desire to communicate with the public rather than to remain locked in the isolated prison of art for art's sake. The general antagonism of Houston-based artists to elitist styles, intelligible only to the initiated, is as much a moral position as it is an attraction to local folk traditions as opposed to the academic elitism of the more hermetic modernist styles." (Barbara Rose, "Painting is Dead, Long Live Painting in Houston", Fresh Paint: The Houston School, 1985)  But some of the best paintings in the show--those by Dorothy Hood, Joseph Glasco and Basilios Poulos, for example--are completely abstract and most definitely come out of the modernist tradition.

And because Rose and Kalil identified this "school" as a school of painting, this meant artists working in other media were left out. If you were to make a list of the top Houston artists from the last 30 years, James Surls, Mel Chin and Jim Love would be near the top. But because of the thesis advanced by Rose and Kalil, they are necessarily left out of this show. Furthermore, from the vantage of today, you have to ask, "Painting? Why painting?" It wouldn't be fair to criticize the curators for focusing on painting--it was in the air. The art world was full of discussion and argument about the revival of painting--particularly neoexpressionism--that accompanied the explosion of the art market. Some--the October critics especially--saw this as retrograde and reactionary, driven by money. Others, famously Thomas Lawson, formulated defenses of painting. Rose and Kalil allied themselves with the conservatives and with money. Still, that meant that this show had to ignore a lot of the previous 25 years in art. To see Fresh Paint was to see what art would be like if there had been no Happenings, no neo-dada, no Minimalism, no post-minimalism, no conceptual art, no process art, no performance art, no Arte Povera, no Earth Art, no Art & Technology, no Fluxus, etc.

So there was a lot to criticize about the show, but why bother? This was an exhibit that had its run 25 years ago. At the time, it engendered a lot of the same kind of discussion. The No Zoning catalog said this: "Sparking heated debate about inclusions versus exclusions, and the true definition of the "Houston School," the exhibition was nonetheless a watershed moment in the maturation of the Houston scene." (Caroline Huber and The Art Guys, "Merging Traffic: A Chronology", No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston, 2009.) It's pointless to complain about it now.

The questions that should be asked, 25 years later, are these. What affect did the show have on Houston's art scene? Did the show represent the direction of Houston art going forward? (Or another way of asking it would be, was there a Houston School?) And what happened to the artists in the show?

The last question is the easiest to answer, thanks to a handy little research tool called Google. It let me down with 10 of the artists--I just couldn't find much on them. But I found quite a lot on most of the rest.

As you might expect, some of them have died, and some of them have moved away from Houston. At least eight of the artists are dead. A few of the older artists died of old-age related things, but at least a couple died in tragic circumstances. James Bettison got sick with bacterial meningitis in 1991 and finally died in 1997. (This obituary doesn't mention it, but later articles suggest Bettison had AIDS, and bacterial meningitus is known to attack people with weakened immune systems from HIV and AIDS.) Robin Utterback was murdered in 2007 by his partner, who then committed suicide.

At least 11 of the artists no longer live in Houston or the Houston area (although a few that moved only made it as far as Austin). One of the artists who moved and who is doing some really interesting work is Sara Stites. She is now living in Miami, and this is an example of her current work.

 

Derek Boshier is now in Los Angeles, but it always seemed a bit bogus to lump him into a "Houston School." He happened to be teaching here in he 80s, and doing some brightly colored, painterly works that could be lumped in with neoexpressionism. But he had already had a pretty distinguished career in the U.K. when he came here. The work he does now seems to take elements of his earlier Pop art and elements of his Houston-era expressionism and combines them. (Interestingly, Boshier was a well-loved teacher for two cartoonists I really respect, Scott Gilbert, who studied with him here in Houston, and Eddie Campbell, one of the most important cartoonists alive, who studied with Boshier in England.)

Among those who stayed in Houston are many of the respected elders of the Houston art scene--Sharon Kopriva, Gael Stack, Bas Poulos, etc. I've seen good shows from some of the artists--Kelly Alisons's bird paintings at G Gallery, for example, and Perry House's show at NauHaus last year. Earl Staley lives in Tomball now and has an amusing blog, Professor Art.



Kelley Alison, Oh Well, paint on book pages, 2010

In short, a lot of the artists from Fresh Paint are still around, still productive, still voices in the Houston scene. But not every story has been so great. In 2004, the Houston Press had a great article called "No Virgins, No Velvet" which was about the difficulties Latino artists had making it in Houston. As their main example, they wrote about the rise and fall of the career of Ibsen Espada. As far as I can tell, his last solo show was in 2002 at Sicardi.

A much more tragic story is that of Kermit Oliver, a painter in a classical style who specializes in religious themes. His son, Khrystian, murdered a man during a robbery in Nacogdoches, was tried, convicted, and executed in 2009. Khrystian had been Kermit's model in many paintings, including an image of Christ resurrected that hangs over the altar in the Morrow Chapel at Trinity Episcopal Church on Holman. (Oliver has had great success as a painter, however, including a solo exhibit at the MFAH in 2005.)

Did Fresh Paint point the way forward for Houston art? To an extent, yes. After all, most of the participants kept on painting, and many stayed here in Houston to practice their art. However, if one were to discuss the art produced in Houston between 1985 and now and to make a list of the most significant artists, it wouldn't be the Fresh Paint people. It wouldn't really be painters for the most part, or else it would be artists for whom painting was just a part of their overall practice. The Art Guys had their first solo show in 1983, for example. I think the most important work in Houston has been more conceptual, more performance based, and more community oriented. I think of Rick Lowe and Project Row Houses or Jim Pirtle and Notsuoh. I think sculpture in the broadest sense of the word (including social sculpture in the Joseph Beuys sense) has been pretty key. One need only think of artists like Paul Kittelson, Havel and Ruck, and Lee Littlefield. And fundamentally, the Houston art scene seems a lot more diverse and eclectic than what one would have expected from Fresh Paint. I feel pretty confident in saying that it would make no curatorial sense to try to do a big but tightly focused exhibit like Fresh Paint today. And indeed, what we now see are curators who assemble shows out of smaller, more focused groups of Houston artists.