Houston Reflections

Houston Reflections: Art in the City, 1950s, 60s and 70s by Sarah Reynolds takes on a pretty unpromising topic. Was there art in Houston then? Of course there was, and a lot of what we see today around Houston's art scene was established or massively developed during that period. Now if you go try to buy this book, it's going to run you ninety-something dollars. Astonishingly, the book is available for free online. You can read it here. I just started it today.

The book is a collection of interviews of people involved in the arts during those days. Each one is separate, which has advantages. For instance, I was able to pull read interviews with one of my old art history professors, Bill Camfield, and with the woman I took painting lessons from in high school, Stella Sullivan. That was nice. But I wish instead of this format, Reynolds had gone the Edie route and chopped up the interviews to make a historical narrative. As it is, you can piece together events based on the separate interviews. I wish the interviews had been longer and more detailed.

But these are minor cavils for an amazing resource that anyone can access for free. It's required reading if you are interested in Houston's art history.

Outloud at Philomena Gabriel

This is a little late--forgive me, it's been a busy couple of weeks. But better late than never. A new gallery opened up two weeks ago in Midtown. Philomena Gabriel Contemporary is located in a tiny storefront on Milam. The building is a lovely old brick office/retail building.



The opening show was a group showed called Outloud. It featured work by a lot of very well-known Houston artists (many of whom are shown "courtesy of" some other gallery. Philomena Gabriel's own stable has yet to be revealed, and I will be curious to see who they take.) But for now, this group show is quite good. All the work are word-based objects.

Besides that, a couple of the works are based on taking things on the floor and leaning them against the wall. Whenever I see works like this--if they work--I think of the work of John McCracken. If they don't work, they just look kind of lazy. But in this case, both of the wall-leaners are good, intriguing work.


Kelly Klaasmeyer, Ennui, acrylic on gator board, 2010

Ennui by Kelly Klaasmeyer tries to embody the meaning of the word. Casually stacked against the wall, it communicates boredom and a lack of interest in doing it "right" (for example, carefully hanging the words on the wall in a perfectly straight line and proper kerning). The ironic thing is that it looks just right as it is. It has a little bit of an Ed Ruscha vibe, but that could be said of many of the pieces here. Word-based art is his baby.


Rachel Hecker, I'm Really Tired, Me Too, acrylic on canvas, 2010

Like this piece by Rachel Hecker. It's hard not to think of Ruscha when you see it. The extreme simplicity of it is striking (two colors, reversed on each canvas). The colors are fleshy skin-like colors, like perhaps the painting on the left is the "white" one and the one on the right is the "painting of color." But despite being of different races, these two have something in common! Really, I have no idea what this diptych is all about except that it is funny.


Gabriela Trzebinski, Matatu Sticks Project, recycled wood and acrylic paint, 2002-present

If you search online for Trzebinski images, you'll find a lot of crudely-painted, expressive paintings, and nothing quite like the Matatu Sticks. The effect is like a highly irregular picket fence. The phrases on them are not meaningless, but are devoid of context. And yet, they seem appropriate for naive, hand-lettered signs. They sometimes have religious content and sometimes feel like graffiti.


Gabriela Trzebinski, Matatu Sticks Project detail, recycled wood and acrylic paint, 2002-present

The cumulative effect is strong. It's funny, then, that each separate plank is for sale--a bargain at $30! But one alone feels meaningless--a collector needs a bunch to get the ideal effect.

Philomena Gabriel is a welcome addition to the Houston art community. Galleries and art spaces in Houston come and go, and as galleries close, it's good to see new ones open, especially ones that show art as interesting as the art here.

The Fringe Festival continues

You can still the week two programming tonight. Not to mention two more weeks of theater/dance/neo-vaudeville.

I went last night and took these photos of people checking out the art show (if the Fringe festival performances are the "circus," my art show is the "side show"). I hesitated before putting them up on Pan--it's a little masturbatory, you know. Hey look! People checking out the show I curated! But I've never curated a show, and it's still kind of amazing that anyone looks. And gratifying.











I love it when people really get down to check out the Woody Golden piece, Terra Antennae Prayer Box.

The most amazing thing happened last night. I showed up late--I don't think anyone knew I was there. Certainly no one in the audience, among whom I was just an anonymous fellow theater-goer. So at the end of the first half, Rebecca French and Robert Thoth came out to announce the intermission and point out some of the "sideshow" things happening. They invited people to look at the art exhibit "curated by Robert Boyd" and the audience burst out into spontaneous applause. So look, I've never been a performer. But after last night, I understand the appeal. That applause made me feel very emotional. I'm usually filled with doubts and regret about my own work, but that was--for a moment--washed away.

Anyway, another "sideshow" event was some crooning by Poopy Lungstuffing (aka Olivia Dvorak, who runs Super Happy Fun Land). She was great!

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 4 of 4

Great job--you made it this far! We're almost done.

(If, however, you have not read part 1, part 2, and part 3, go back and read them now!)

Why have this festival in Houston? Houston is off the beaten track for comics-as-art. None of the important publishers are here, and few comics artists of note are here. There is a small scene, but it is pretty fragmented. But these are not disadvantages. We want people to travel to Houston for the festival. High quality out-of-town guests will make Houstonians more excited about coming to check out the festival. And artists who travel to Houston to participate in the critique portion spend money in Houston's hotels and restaurants.

Also, Houstonians have a love of oddball, noncanonical art. We demonstrate this every spring at the Art Car Parade. We embrace things like The Orange Show and Cleveland Turner, The Flower Man. Comics is an artform that has stuck its big toe in the door of art, but it isn’t all the way there. The unrespectable, slightly funky odor of comics might be just the thing to appeal to a Houston audience.

And once we get the “public”, whoever they may be, into a festival, we start doing something really wonderful. We begin show them comics as art. Comics as a means of personal expression. A very different conception of how they may have thought of comics before. We expand their aesthetic horizons. We blow their freaking minds with amazing examples of comics art. This is the goal of the festival.

A truly successful comics festival will create inspire people to read more comics, and for experienced comics readers, to try something different. It may inspire a few local artists and writers to put pen to paper and create their own comics. If it could help catalyze a local comics creative scene, that would be mission accomplished. It might encourage critical and scholarly work on comics from local writers and the academic community here. And I’d like to see the art collecting community in Houston embrace this artform as something worth collecting--and in doing so, encourage local galleries to sell comics art and local museums to display it.

To sum up, what I propose a festival devoted to comics-as-art, structured around art exhibits, critiques, and slide shows, using FotoFest as a general model. This is an idea I want to launch out into the public and see what other people think of it. I welcome your feedback. Thank you.

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 3 of 4

If you haven't read part 1 and part 2, read those first.

Could a festival like this work in Houston? We obviously couldn’t count on high levels of public funding. So if we can't look to Europe for a successful model (at least as far as funding goes), where can we look? A highly successful art festival here in Houston is Fotofest. Founded in 1986, Fotofest is a biennial photography festival that features six official exhibits, over a hundred exhibits at “participating spaces”, and a large-scale critique for emerging photographers.

So if we do an exhibit-oriented comics festival, how do we fund it? Fotofest provides a model for that. Foundations are their largest funding source. Earned income comes from selling prints, but mostly from photographers paying to participate in critiques. Events include parties and galas and auctions. The government sources include the NEA and the HAA, a nonprofit organization owned by the city and funded out of the hotel tax.

An art exhibit festival needs to have a space where we can display the artwork for at least a month, which rules out a lot of otherwise great locations. Fotofest has used Williams Tower, their own offices, the Winter Street Studios, etc. The participating shows for FotoFest tend to be in art galleries, museums, or public art spaces. A comics art festival would also want to have exhibits in book stores, comic shops, and libraries.

FotoFest calls its critiques “the meeting place.” They bring over a 100 photographers, editors, curators, scholars, and critics to look at the work of photographers, some aspiring or emerging, others more seasoned. I would like to see a similar thing for the comics festival. In addition to providing feedback about their work, it would be a place where artists could network professionally with top tastemakers in the field.

One thing I would want to bring over from the academic conference format are slide shows. But I would want the slide shows to be accessible to non-specialists. Pecha Kucha and TED are both good models for this. In fact, a Pecha Kucha night as part of the festival would be an exciting event. However it is formatted, brief, well-illustrated slide presentations would be a key part of the comics-as-art festival that I envision.

Concluded in part 4

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 2 of 4

This is part 2 of my slide show proposing a comics festival for Houston. Part 1 is here. Read it first.

Can the dealer’s room model work for comics-as-art? Yes. In fact, it’s been a very successful model. At shows like SPX, MoCCA, TCAF, etc., the “dealers” are either small publisher or comics artists themselves, selling their comics and original art. The environment at these shows tends to be friendly and intimate, giving readers lots of opportunity to interact with artists. The dealer’s room model turns out to be extremely adaptable.

The dealers room model is popular for a variety of reasons. First of all, it’s been the default format for most festivals since the 1960s. It has a lot of tradition, a lot of institutional knowledge, a lot of inertia. Promoters know it can work because it's worked so many times before. Dealer's room models are also self-financing, which is a key virtue. A festival organizer can pay for everything by selling table space--in advance. And, from a comics-as-art point of view, it’s a good way to get often challenging work before the public. As anyone involved in underground or alternative publishing or music knows, mainstream distribution and retailers are often closed off to you. A comics-as-art dealers room is a way around this. In short, the dealers room model has a lot going for it.

But one alternative to the dealers room model that has popped up in recent years is the academic conference. As academic attention to the artform has grown, conferences devoted to them have come into being and grown alongside the scholarship. These conferences feature scholars presenting papers about comics, panel discussions, and presentations by guest artists. And, as it turns out, if you are going to explain something about comics to an audience, a slide presentation is an especially apt medium. But these conferences, by their academic nature, hold little appeal for the general public.

The art exhibit model focuses on cartoonists’ original art, displayed in vitrines and on the walls of museums, galleries, and other art spaces. This is not a model that has really taken hold in the U.S. But it's quite popular in Europe. This is the model I want to propose for a comics-as-art festival.

Perhaps the most famous of these kinds of exhibits is Fumetto in Lucerne, Switzerland, but there are comics art festivals in many countries—Portugal, France, Russia, etc.  The biggest comics festival in Europe, in  Angoulême, which combines the dealers room model with the art exhibit model--exhibits are displayed in a purpose-built comics museum. These festivals usually get a lot of state funding—either on a municipal or national level.

Continued in part 3.

Proposed: Houston Should Have a Comics Art Festival, part 1 of 4

Last night was Pecha Kucha 3, and I did my presentation. In the next few posts, I'm going to reproduce it. I hope you enjoy it. This is part 1 of 4.

This slide slow is a proposition for a festival devoted to the art of comics. This festival will be based around art exhibits, critiques for aspiring (and experienced) comics artists, and slide presentations. In the next few slides, I’m going to tell you why this festival would be a good thing for Houston, and why the format I will proposing will be the right one for the festival.

The festival will celebrate “comics as art.” These are not the comics that get made into summer blockbusters. Let’s call those “comics-as-entertainment.” Comics-as-art tend to be a lot more personal, more reflective of the creator.  There is a little bit of overlap between these categories, but mostly they are quite distinct worlds. Comics-as-art is where the art of comics truly shines, and this is what the festival should be devoted to.

Now let’s talk about comics festivals. Basically, there are three kinds; the academic conference, where scholars read papers about comics; the dealers’ room convention, where people come to buy and sell; and the art festival, where comics are displayed as artworks. (Of course, in the real world, these often overlap a little bit.) If we have a comics-as-art festival in Houston, which model would be best?

The dealer’s room model began because early fans needed to have a way to find old comics to read and collect.  This was before the age when comics were repinted in handy book formats. If you wanted to read an old issue of Two-Fisted Tales, you had to dig one up from a collector/dealer. Comics conventions allowed collectors to sell their comics to each other. This has evolved over the years to the modern comics convention, which are dominated by huge dealer’s rooms.

We have a good convention like this in Houston now called Comicpalooza. It's been going on for two years, growing every year. It’s very much devoted to comics-as-entertainment, and includes a lot of non-comics “geek culture” stuff as well. Given this, I think a comics-as-art festival should feel very distinct from Comicpalooza. We don’t want to compete with it, but to compliment it.

Comics Art Festival Proposal part 2