Claire Bishop: A Few Notes on Accessories

Betsy Huete

As a part of the lecture series, Till Now: Contemporary Art in Context, the University of Houston’s School of Art recently hosted a lecture by contemporary art historian Claire Bishop. Entitled “Deja Vu: Contemporary Art and the Ghosts of Modernism,” she fundamentally laid out the groundwork for the symptomatic impulse of many contemporary artists to parcel out the tenets of modernism, piece-mealing seductive fragments into an hermetic, inscrutable construction in accordance to the artists’ tastes. Her delivery was smart, incisive, funny, humble, and open for discussion. This all, furthermore, comes on the heels of a biting critique of Dahn Vo’s installations at this past Venice Biennale.

Bishop started the lecture by categorizing contemporary artists’ modernist proclivities by organizing them globally: she pointed out how most of the artists today researching modernism—which by default for them, she suggests, means the clean lines of modernist architecture and not much else—are researching the modernist architects that are germane to their respective regions in the world. Since modernism essentially indicates notions of universal progress, Bishop immediately undercuts the research of most of these artists by implying that their regional myopia is, at best, provincial.


The Farnsworth House, architect Mies van der Rohe, from alexbowenblog.weebly.com

In contrast to a traditional powerpoint presentation where she presents an image and talks about it, moving on to the next one and so on, Bishop prepared a repetitious loop of images—some sharp, some blurry, some not even there—and she forewarned us that not only were some of the images not projecting correctly, but that they would also flow in and out of making sense, of being pertinent whatsoever to what she was lecturing. It came off as messy and disorganized, and instead of providing any real visual supplement, it functioned more as wallpaper. At first, it made me wonder why she prepared any images at all, that is until about ten minutes in when it became apparent that what she was doing was very much on purpose, and it was brilliant.

Instead of being the innocuous, fairly disorganized supplement as she dismissively stated, it was actually subversive and truly manipulative. The cutting lines and the similarities repeating again and again lulled us into a modernist trance, a thudding, relentlessly-paced reminder that hammered home her point, which is that so much of this work is so often the same. Her pinnacle example was the appropriation, regurgitation, and implementation of Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealized Monument to the Third International—a utopian modernist symbol that artists today, universally, can’t seem to help but come back to. She blew through a plethora of artists like Ai Weiwei, showing reified Tatlins repurposed into anything from chandeliers to coffee makers. This further drove home her point that references to Tatlin's Tower, while utilized heavily by Dan Flavin in the 1960s, disappeared almost entirely until about 1989: the so-called “end of history.”


Tatlin’s Tower, 1919, from arkinetblog.files.wordpress.com

The major gripes she has with these artists are the same gripes she has, I think, with Vo. Like Vo, Bishop declared that the research being done is less for critical, interpretive means than instead to evoke a kind of texture, perhaps a seance of a time when progress seemed real and things felt like they had a linear meaning. In her article “History Depletes Itself,” she likens Vo’s work “to diamonds on a necklace—or, better, crystals dangling from a chandelier.” By referencing jewelry and luxurious items, she effectively cuts all of this work off at the knees, relegating it all to the decorative.


Ai Weiwei, Fountain of Light, 2007 (from the Tate Museum)

But of course this is not the first time a critic has tried to deflate work by calling it decorative; it’s happened cyclically throughout the timeline of art history, particularly during the Feminist movement. Many critics (mostly male) at the time dismissed much of the work as decorative, failing to see that decoration was precisely the point, and that decoration has meaning and even political relevance. Obviously Bishop is using jewelry here as a metaphor, but she is nonetheless flinging mud in the very same way: artists like Vo are appropriating meaning to invoke a certain feeling, a kind of texture of rhetoric—therefore it is decorative, therefore it lacks any real meaning outside of itself.


Judy Chicago, Dinner Party, 1979, from cdn2.brooklynmuseum.org

In the same article she states: “So why does Vo’s success make me feel uneasy? In part, it has to do with the artist’s use of history and the way in which his poetics of the past is prone to devolving into information as ornament.” And this same frustration certainly came through in her lecture. But she was the first one to admit that she didn’t have a solution, and she even implored the audience for answers. So her bandaid solutions offered at the end of the lecture were a handful of works that seemed (I’m saying seemed because I haven’t seen them in person) like half-hearted attempts to engage contemporary art in a more overtly political manner, to somehow take the work out of the gallery and out into the world. I remember when Charles Esche lectured late last year at Glassell and he more or less said the same thing: I don’t have an actual solution, but here are a few half-hearted examples of artists making work that at least takes into account the real world outside of the institutions.

What makes me feel uneasy about this, other than laying out an argument with no real solution in mind, is the implication that the kind of political, activist, social practice art that Bishop—and even Esche—champion are somehow more political than the hermetic work she is railing against. It may be more didactic, it may implicate more activism, and it may converse with everyday people outside the gallery system—this may be true—but that does not necessarily make it more effective or poignant. It certainly doesn’t make “the real world” more receptive to or interested in contemporary art simply because contemporary art is trying to engage with it.

I think of a lot of this kind of work—although to be clear, not all—and then I think of my brother. He’s a social worker, and he helps mentally ill people get back on their feet again. He does this every day. He doesn’t do it within a gallery. He doesn’t do it for accolades. He doesn’t do it for a pat on the ass from MOMA. He just does it because it’s his job. And when I think of my brother, I can’t help but cast a skeptical eye onto activist work that needs a gallery to exist. The art world lauds contemporary art that evades the gallery system and subverts the art market, but if it relies on star curators and important critics for relevance, is it not complicit in the exact capitalist system it’s meant to counteract?

At least work like Vo’s isn’t pretending to exist somewhere it really doesn’t. The hermeticism Bishop deems inscrutable and ornamental is indeed symptomatic, as she states. I agree that it’s a form of mourning, a kind of exhumation of past ideals where there was a direction and at least a belief in answers. But that impulse to exhume today matters, and it is happening because artists are clamoring for a way to put all the pieces back together after postmodernism blew it all apart—however ill-fated that might be. This Don Quixote-esque impulse, this texturing of associations and allusions and rhetoric, is indeed a political act because it stands as a litmus test as to how, exactly, we are supposed to qualify meaning in a world where, terrifyingly, there may be none. Perhaps the work Bishop referenced was decorative in a manner that lacks substance. But with the way she’s framed her argument it begs the question: is she irked by contemporary art that examines modernist tropes, or is she just irked by poorly-researched research-based art?


Dahn Vo, Mother Tongue, 2013, from kunskritkk.no

Is it not fair to conclude that if a movement like the Feminist movement was effectually political because much of it insisted on being decorative, then so is research-based work that insists on being hermetic? It’s interesting to note that within the same issue of Artforum there is an article on the Sharjah Biennial, and its author, Yasmine El Rashidi, extols curator Eugenie Joo for organizing a show in the Middle East that was not overtly political. At the end of the article, Rashidi states: “Subtle shows walk a fine line: Some works may slip into the banal…The effect of change, so subtle you can’t quite place it, is also the knowledge and understanding that only come with time. Was it too utopian an experience? Or, against the backdrop of curating today, is that attenuated gesture art’s most political act?”

Claire Bishop lectured at Dudley Recital Hall at the University of Houston on September 16, 2015.

They Must Have Anticipated This

Iva Kinnaird


Harold Mendez & Ronny Quevedo, Specter Field, 2015, mixed media, filmed on opening night on August 21 at Lawndale Art Center by Iva Kinnaird

The Front Man: Questions for Joe Havel

Virginia Billeaud Anderson

Upon receiving Hiram Butler Gallery’s announcement for How to Draw a Circle, an exhibition of drawings and sculptures by Joe Havel through September 26, I suggested to Havel we do an interview that would inform readers about his newest works, as well as discuss his art career and the MFAH Glassell School of Art where he is the Director. He would be “happy to do the interview,” Joe told me, and immediately sent a “portrait” of his bird Hanna.


Joe Havel with Hanna, Summer 2015, Image by Joe Havel

Virginia Billeaud Anderson: The art historian Irving Sandler, whom I had the opportunity to meet in New York if you can imagine that, wrote that the art system has a way of emasculating Duchamp’s urinal. Sandler was saying I believe that the post-modern appropriation of everyday objects has exited the avant-garde. A close look at your art made me realize that because I was overly focused on your use of ordinary objects, the “found” sheets, shirts and drapes that are the source of your sculptures, I under appreciated the extent to which Surrealism informs your work. There’s more to your creative process than the Pop-based incorporation of gross, mundane materials to challenge arts’ sanctity.

Joseph Havel: The touchstone is Surrealism and Dada, juxtaposition of the disparate and the irrational. For example I look to the metaphysical painter Morandi who had roots in Surrealism and found the possibility of transcendence in the mundane, or maybe through the mundane into another mental space.

VBA: Some might have difficulty imagining that sheets, drapes and shirts cast in bronze and welded together into columnar forms can be so impactful. I once read a comparison of your sculptures to Bernini’s St. Peter’s altar columns, which gives a sense of their Baroque quality, and a critic described the towering bronze Drape in the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, as “sensuous.”

JH: Yes, but I’m interested in the point at which that form begins to break down into irony, where life’s fragmentary nature and chaos leak back in. I try to keep a tension between willing something towards pure form and the poetic decay of life. All that drapery and no one is home. We can compare this to Giacometti’s figures, the almost there but absent figure, even my piece in the sculpture garden at the MFAH is essentially a figure, the existential figure, but hopefully with Beckett’s sense of pathos through irony, humor, or at least displacement. Brancusi is an influence in idealized form and of course he is the fundamental “modern” sculptor that every “thing maker” deals with directly or indirectly. I reference directly his Endless Column, on which I based my Endless sculpture at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, and his Bird in Space. Some pieces play with the issue of the base and the object on top, questioning the sculptural function of support. This is evident in many of my resin sculptures cast from books.

VBA: Along with bronze and resin, collectors have come to associate your art with specific found objects, shirt labels for example, which you meticulously assemble into free standing and wall mounted presentations. The shirt labels unsettled me when I saw them in your 2006 MFAH exhibition Joseph Havel: A Decade of Sculpture, which means the art caused the psychological shift you intended. That exhibition I recall got you written about by those gurus at Art Forum. Your shirt labels actually make me think of the artist Tara Donovan who, like you, was selected by Valerie Cassel to exhibit in the 2000 Whitney Biennial of American Art, and who also obsessively manipulates her materials. Is it correct to say you work obsessively?

JH: That is correct.

VBA: When I wrote about Donovan I learned that she uses assistants to arrange the 500,000 toothpicks, or a room full of drinking straws or buttons, into sculptures. Do you use assistants to stuff 35,000 shirt labels into wall mounted plexi frames?

JH: I have one part time assistant who does very specific jobs but has not ever placed one single label in a plexi-glass box piece. It seems important that my hand does that.

VBA: Your hand is working damned hard to assemble 30,000 shirt labels.

JH: That repetition is an important element in my artistic practice, this type of sustained activity allows for the ego to be transcended. An important teacher was Warren Mackenzie, a potter who adhered to the Mingei philosophy and taught me the process of losing the ego through repetitive practice, this is essentially what I do. It is similar to Arte Povera which is performative in nature, with a focus on art as a way of living rather than producing master works, objects are created where art meets ordinary life, and that goes hand in hand with the modesty of materials, and also touches some aspects of Japanese Gutai, which stresses the importance of the artist’s body. Nothing is still nor is any viewer fixed, and the moment is part of a string of moments. Every experience is an interaction, all nouns are verbs. I am interested in the wonder of the mundane, the shirt labels carry a memory of their previous history, so you see my practice is aligned with Miro and other Surrealist precedents, and with my interest in Arte Povera.

VBA: Back to the topic of dramatic form, there are striking folds and wrinkles in the spherical bronze pieces in your sculptural grouping In Play at Rice University, which brings up the point that bronze casting and welding skill is an integral part of your art. Where do you cast in bronze, do you participate directly in the foundry work?

JH: The sculptures are all fabricated at my studio, the foundry is an intimate place with only a couple of people working, who I have worked with for well over a decade. It is not my foundry but we share the same building. I am always present and either directly or indirectly involved during the entire process.

VBA: The ceiling lumber in your studio looks as if it dates to the early century.

JH: My studio used to be an old church.


Joe Havel in his studio, Fall 2014, image by Will Michaels

VBA: It must be a happy thing to go back and forth to Paris for your exhibitions, and to have art in the Pompidou Center. I’ve often dreamed of having work that allowed me to live in Trastevere, my favorite part of Rome.

JH: I worked quite a bit in Paris and have a gallery there, and yes the Pompidou has 4 or 5 drawings and showed two in a group show a few years ago. I was thrilled. I love showing in France.

VBA: Your level of success is cemented by about forty years of steady exhibitions, and the large quantity of artworks that reside in private and public collections. But do you dream of having the art star exposure of artists such as Richard Serra, showy stuff like the French Legion of Honour award, conspicuous displays at the Grand Palais, commission-handling lawyers, bitchy public fights with architects, a $20 million Zwirner-brokered sale to MOMA? You get my question?

JH: I dream that my exhibit that will open September 10th in San Francisco is something I am really happy with and think is meaningful, and that it is not the last one: that I still have something to say. After that I will worry about what the exhibit in January might mean while I work on that. I take care of my practice like a garden. I tend it and water it rather than constantly dreaming about the grand harvest. My ego is built differently than Serra’s.

VBA: Being partial to clear, ordinary language on the topic of art, it was refreshing to read Thomas Hoving’s criticism of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. After dismissing Hans Haacke's Sanitation as “sophomoric garbage”, the former New York Metropolitan Museum Director described your sculpture Curtains (1999), as “three tall and mysterious contemporary dolmens (you know, those mammoth stones cast about the French countryside) in marvelously patinated bronze actually cast from draped, common fabric the artist bought at a thrift shop ‘Value Village’ near his home. He has a special gift to transform the ordinary into sheer poetry.” I’m contrasting Hoving’s straight-forward writing style to some of the mouthy criticism that exhibiting artists typically endure, and you’ll probably say something diplomatic, but did you find valuable the 2013 critical insinuation that you are repeating what is popular, which in my opinion simply means commercially successful, which I think makes you smart, especially with the price of oil taking a dump?


Translucent resin books

JH: I care as much about that which was said, as Agnes Martin would if you complained she kept painting stripes. If anything, my work has been marked by restlessness, and when it loops back it is to reinvent and invest it in the moment; in a new context. In 2013 almost none of my work was in bronze and my shows were primarily cast translucent resin books, so go figure.

VBA: Joe, the oil stick and graphite circular drawings at Hiram Butler are lovely, particularly their arrangement and scale against the gallery wall. They made me think of Eva Hesse’s circle drawings exhibited at the Menil in 2006. And the three dimensional circular bronze wall reliefs cast from shirts have an intricate encrusted quality that pulls the eye to spaces around pleats and lace. According to the gallery press release, you titled the bronze reliefs, A Moon for Each Eye, from a line of the poem How to Draw a Circle by Texas Poet Laureate Dean Young, who composed the poem after you showed him your circle drawings. Explain how Young’s “moon” verse relates to the gallery bronzes.

JH: The moon in each eye is partially because the bronze wall reliefs look like lunar landscapes with sleeve holes for craters but are also very directly related to the body, they are little personal moons.

VBA: Let’s point out for readers the insistently circular nature of the cut-paper and collage book that is part of the exhibition. You constructed a book which features Young’s poem by dissecting and reassembling letters from John Ashbery’s book of poetry. This continues your longstanding reliance on literature for inspiration, and represents a typical reworking of past ideas and materials, which is part of your conceptual strategy for projects to loop around.

JH: Because the book I made using Dean’s poem is a direct representation of our collaborative exchange, it needed to be a thing that bound our practices together. Ashbery is a poet Dean and I were both very interested in, and I had used the Ashbery book in earlier artworks, so circling back to it fit nicely. Also Dean is stylistically connected to Ashbery’s New York School of poetry, albeit mentioned as the younger generation, so it seemed appropriate to use Ashbery's collected “late” poems. You are correct that all of the pieces in the show draw on motifs from previous forms, or are constructed from remnants of earlier sculptures. Their serial nature is an important element. Remember that each work is a rehearsal with the body constantly trying to perform the "nothing" of a circle and in so doing asking what a circle might be. Dean’s poem is poetically in sync with these ideas.

VBA: See below my literary gift to you and Dean Young, a few lines of verse from Ashbery’s poem Skaters which he published in 1966, the year his close friend Frank O’Hara died.

There is much to be said in favor of storms
But you seem to have abandoned them in favor of endless light.
I cannot say that I think the change much of an improvement.
There is something fearful in these summer nights that go on forever

JH: Virginia, thank you.

VBA: In 1991 you came to Houston to run the Core Residency Program at MFHA’s Glassell School of Art, and in 1993 became Director of the Glassell School of Art. What in your background qualified you to run Glassell, were you a professor?

JH: Yes, I was a professor before.

VBA: I’ve watched you from a distance, and it occurred to me that along with impressive art education and art professional qualifications, MFA would have found valuable how properly you conduct yourself. Joseph, you’re a gentleman. It wouldn’t do to have some jackass in the presence of Mrs. Long or the Alfred Glassell brood.

HJ: I behave the way I do because I am fundamentally very shy.

VBA: You were hired by Peter Marzio; are things different with Gary Tinterow? I know you won’t say anything negative about your boss, but did things change at MFAH when Gary became the new museum director, is there a difference in style?

JH: The job changes all the time. It changed with Gary coming, and continues to change, after all we just moved to a lovely temporary space for two years while the new building goes up, than will move again. Things changed all the time under Peter too. I came here to run the Core and still love the Core program which also changes all the time. Remember that all of this I do as an extension of being an artist, a cultural practitioner.

VBA: As an educator, do you acknowledge some of the idiocy in contemporary art? We’re in an era in which postmodern academics and curators have accepted into the canon Bruce Nauman’s painting his testicles and calling it sculpture, and the late Beuys filling glass vitrines with swept up street dirt and cigarette butts, “the artist’s hand arranged the chaos,” Menil curators devoutly told us at the 2004 exhibition. Do you find any of this absurd?

JH: I find it absurd and serious at precisely the same time. I find life ridiculous and profound. I want my art to be sublime and ironic in equal proportions. To be grand and mundane.

VBA: Can I have Esther’s job when she retires? How fun to get to greet everybody.

JH: Our much loved Esther just retired.

VBA: I would be good in that job. How come you seem behind the scenes at Glassell? I often imagined you spend all your time with Board members, and with those rich women who put on the fundraisers. Certainly you oversee budgets and schedules, but are you involved in daily operations, for example if an instructor is coming to class drunk, do you nail him, or does Patrick Palmer get to do that?

JH: I actually have done everything from the bottom up in every area. I am shy, as said above and my ego does not need to be in front, but I teach, raise money, plan, do budgets, and clean toilets if needed. I have a wonderful team and they are hugely committed and we run everything as a team. I respect them and don't supersede but have involvement and set the larger direction with their consultation. I also still work with Mary Leclere to run the Core Program, oh yeah, I am a full time artist too. All of this does not leave a lot of time to be in front of the scenes. That is not my personality.

VBA: Are you relieved David Brauer retired? He must have caused you a tiny bit of discomfort, when people complained, people who paid tuition. Here was a captivating lecturer who could not tolerate stupidity and imbecilic remarks. Once I witnessed a woman ask a ridiculous question, and he shook his head and said “I can’t believe you asked that,” in front of the entire class, rightly making the point that if one is that ignorant about a topic one should probably keep one’s mouth shut and listen. And during his MFA public lectures David didn’t hesitate to say how little he thought of the museum’s collection, which probably pissed off a few Board members.

JH: David was well loved, idiosyncratic and irritable at times, irascible at others. Sounds pretty good, really. I’m sure I have pissed some people off.

VBA: As you reminded us, the Glassell School just moved into its new temporary quarters, demolition of the old building is set for September, and the new building will be complete in 2017. I’m assuming some of those gifts, such as the $250 million that made the news, will help to pay for the new building. Did you participate in choosing the architects for the new building?

JH: I did not choose Steven Holl but have worked with him and his team on the design, as have others on the Glassell team.

VBA: Besides newness and considerably more space, what about the new building excites you the most?

JH: The roof top green space observatory and its integration into the campus. Imagine how cool it will be when everything is done to walk out of your class or studio next door to a building filled with modern and contemporary artworks as precedents and examples. It’s as good as adding twice as many faculty.

VBA: Is there anything else you want readers to know about you, or your art?

JH: Hanna would like to mention that she comes up with all the ideas, and just whispers them to me. I am just a front!

Betsy Huete’s Big Show Top Ten

Betsy Huete

Part of the fun of Lawndale’s Big Show is simply navigating through all the work. Like a flea market, it’s enticing to think that something with a resonating weirdness or striking complexity lingers right around the corner. But compared to previous years, this year’s group came off as much safer and sedate, like a Big Show on quaaludes. There was too little risk-taking, too much easy symbolism, too many heavy-handed one-liners. Some of that is to be expected of an open-call, juried exhibition of this magnitude, but the over all lack of personality had me pining for the Duncan MacKenzie/Avril Falgout papier mache rocker days. The slump can be attributed to any one of three things: 1) This is the best of what curator George Scheer had to choose from. 2) George Scheer has a yawn-worthy curatorial eye. Or 3) The new digital selection process is having damaging effects on the over all curation. Knowing that many of the same artists apply year after year and Scheer had nearly 1,000 works to choose from, I suspect #1 isn’t the case. Sure, it’s possible that Scheer is just a boring curator, but after all, Lawndale hand-picks each year’s judge; it’s not like they pull any unqualified person off the street—which makes me suspicious of #2. This is Lawndale’s first year to switch to digital, and I always thought having everyone haul in their work was silly and unnecessary, but there’s something to be said about having a tangible, first-hand view of how the work behaves in the space and in tandem with the other work. This year’s show heavily privileges 2D over 3D work—work that probably photographs better. And, of course with any digital selection process, there’s always the possibility of losing out on quality work from artists who are just bad documenters. It’s a little early to blame it on digital, but it will be interesting to see how the coming years will play out if they stick to it.


Installation view, Grace R. Canvar Gallery, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Regardless, there are always standouts, and here are my top ten:

10. Washington’$ Paradi$e (from the ORM-D “Con$umer Commodity” series), Cynical Con$umeri$m by JP Hartman


JP Hartman, Cynical Con$umeri$m, Washington’$ Paradi$e (from the ORM-D “Consumer Commodity” series), 2015, Mixed media assemblage, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Money, Coca-cola, and McDonald’s seem to be the go-to icons for anyone critiquing corporate commodity culture, and here Hartman employs just about every predictable motif imaginable. But as hand-cuffed, naked Ken and Barbie blissfully stare off into the distance, bearing the weight of an errant yet well-structured cornucopia of crap, Hartman’s modestly scaled trophy monument conveys as much of a sense of fun and care as it does cynicism. It’s the light-hearted ambivalence Hartman conveys that makes the work compelling, that saves it from becoming the same capitalist agitprop we’ve seen a thousand times before.

9. Silent Like Nature, Mary Carol Kenney


Mary Carol Kenney, Silent Like Nature, 2014, Oil on canvas, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

In Mary Carol Kenney’s Silent Like Nature, an elderly woman, perhaps a Mother Teresa figure, stands center, leaning with head cocked to the side, hands outstretched, releasing a kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies. However, the sharp lines and vivid colors of the butterflies stand in sharp contrast to the soft, graying woman, especially in relation to the muted, Impressionistic background. It’s as though Kenney shone a spotlight directly on the butterflies; they seem Photoshopped into the picture. It is unclear if this discontinuity was intentional, but it’s precisely this disjuncture that makes the painting so interesting. The butterflies are as much intruders as they are the focal point: with the woman’s upward-glancing gaze away from the butterflies, it seems equally likely they are suffocating her as she is releasing them.

8. After Dinner, Allyson Huntsman 


Allyson Huntsman, After Dinner, 2014, Digital inkjet print, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Huntsman directs our eye to a corner, a corner adored with wood paneling, a quaint bookcase filled with trophies and family pictures, a glowing lamp, and an outmoded stereo. What at first appears as a documentary photograph of an elderly man—perhaps her father or grandfather—quickly reads as a self-portrait. Panning as much of the room as she can from one corner to the other, we get the sense that Huntsman is grasping at the memories and familial comforts she sees across the room bathed in warm, yellow light. Yet she stands removed, facing the back of a man solitarily engaged in the rituals and comforts of old age.

7. Untitled, Family Photos, Justin Zachary


Justin Zachary, Untitled, Family Photos, 2015, Archival pigment print, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

It is clear that not only in these pictures but also in the accompanying video in the O’Quinn Gallery that Justin Zachary is trying to meld the glitches and mishaps of digital processing with the failings of memory, notions of loss, and mortality. He achieves this juxtaposition with varying degrees of success, as the central photograph of his Untitled, Family Photos triptych is far more effective than the two on each side. While the central photograph is oriented horizontally, the flanking pictures Zachary chose look as though they were originally oriented vertically, making the lengthening he’s applied far less dramatic than the one in the middle. The middle photograph eerily conveys the wonder one feels when he is small, when everything in the world feels so much larger than it actually is. Majestic skyscraper windows, glowing in mid-day light, loom large over an oblivious young boy (presumably Zachary) watching TV.

6. Green Thumb, Elise Weber


Elise Weber, Green Thumb, 2015, Archival pigment print, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

There isn’t a whole lot of new conceptual territory being covered here as Weber seems to be channeling Cindy Sherman in Green Thumb. A beautiful Jessica Lange-esque 1950s starlet gazes longingly afar as she performs her afternoon gardening. But what sets it apart and makes it so seductive is its painterliness: the soft maroon shading of her cheek, the curvaceous shadows of her hat, the almost velvety texture of the leaves behind her, the incisive puncture of her lips. Soft yet sharp, every object big and small commands its own presence and demands tactility.

5. Sunset on Annecy Lake, France, Nataliya Scheib


Nataliya Scheib, Sunset on Annecy Lake, France, 2015, Magazine collage on canvas, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

If someone were to describe Sunset on Annecy Lake to me on paper, I would want to rip my eyes out. After all, using fashion magazine cutouts to make a pretty sunset landscape sounds like something a wistful teenager would do. Indeed, there are a few missteps where Scheib is being heavy-handedly critical, pasting phrases like “there’s nothing like rubbing shoulders with a local celebrity.” But on the other hand, Scheib has seamlessly and so carefully blended her color scheme and handled the mountain scape, tree, and bridge with such care, we can look past some of the more obvious bits and pieces that comprise the collage. Tiny people scale the hillside; the entire scene is calming and strangely baroque. We know on some level Scheib is trying to be critical, but in the end we don’t care, preferring instead to be sucked into some dreamy L’Oreal undertow.

4. DIY! Step 3, 4, and 8, Ross Irwin


Ross Irwin, DIY! Step 3, 4, and 8, 2014, Ballpoint pen on printed newsprint, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Like some Rube Goldberg cacophonous mess, Ross Irwin draws on top of original instruction manuals, executing his lines convincingly enough to make it difficult to discern where the original manual ends and his inventions begin. There’s no explanation of what these contraptions are—as there shouldn’t be—and we’re left to figure out what they’re doing and why. It would be interesting to see this series carried out in a solo exhibition, to see what one of his machines would look like on a large scale.

3. Detritus 8, Tivakorn Sirinopawongsakorn


Tivakorn Sirinopawongsakorn, Detritus 8, 2015, Plastic bottles, plastic bags, fishing line, and LED lights on egg carton

The title is a little literal, but with Detritus 8, Sirinopowongsakorn does a lot with a little. Covered with a shiny, slimy brown hue, the sculpture cranes forward as an emergent head from a pedestal. It’s quietly animated, anthropomorphic and repulsive. It looks like a sewage accordion, or a neutral-faced robot.

2. Geometry #135-138, Fariba Abedin


Fariba Abedin, Geometry #135-138, 2015, Acrylic on wood panels, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

Upon stepping into the John M. O’Quinn Gallery, the viewer’s eye immediately gravitates to Geometry #135-138. The Stella-esque colors, lines, and patterning pop out immediately thanks to a flat, mid-gray background. Abedin forces our eyes continuously in circles through the perimeter of the painting, but also in each of the quadrants she’s delineated, with patterning similar enough to keep it cohesive but dissimilar enough to keep it dynamic. The center of each quadrant looks like pupils in reverse: lavenders and baby blues in the dead center with dark, near-blacks encapsulating them like irises. As the pattering has our eyes swirling circularly, the lighter points have us darting from corner to corner, in an alternating dance of quick steps and slow turns of movement.

1. 61st Street Pier, Steve Ross Fisher


Steve Ross Fisher, 61st Street Pier, 2013, Photograph, courtesy Lawndale Art Center

We’ve all seen them: Galveston pics. Galveston at sunset, Pleasure Pier, Pleasure Pier at sunset, the sea wall, the sea wall at sunset. But unlike most of these images attempting to advertise for or glorify Galveston, Fisher’s photograph feels more reserved and tentative. The water is murky and weirdly mystical; there’s barely a horizon line. The white and dark wooden slats of the pier stand in sharp contrast to the water and sky, like a spindly skeleton anchored and levitating in a cloud.

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

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.

Real Estate Art: 2001 Holcombe Blvd., #3201

Robert Boyd

Leave it to Swamplot to find the most interesting properties on HAR. In this case, it's a condo in the Medical Center on Holcombe, and it's packed with artwork. However, I couldn't recognize any of it. So I throw it out to you, Great God Pan Is Dead readers. Do you recognize any of the art in these photos?



The living room has this large blue abstraction, which is a little Hans Hoffman-lite.



More art in the entryway. Notice the little dog sculpture. Update: a commenter identified the dog as a piece of furniture. It's a child's chair designed by Eero Aarnio. You can buy one here for $89.



The piece on the right appears to be on an inset shelf, which makes me think that the owner of the condo had it built specially for this sculpture. (Or I might be reading the image completely wrong.)



The glowing round sculpture shows up in many of the photos. It apparently changes color. Personally, I'd find that a little irritating, but to each his own...



Here it is again, along with a vertically striped abstract painting. You can see a neon piece above the window. I wonder why they left it off but kept the round sculpture on. (Notice that no wires are visible for either piece--did the owner build electrical outlets right behind the sculptures? If so, it gives them a sleek appearance.)



It's pink...



Then green.



Pink again. Notice the small sculpture to the left.



Here's the neon sculpture again: "Happiness is expensive". Sort of the motto of the ruling class. Update: Kristopher Benson, the NOAA scientist I once accompanied on an expedition to find Forrest Bess's cabin,  pointed out on Facebook that this piece was by Alejandro Diaz, and in fact may have been purchased at the Glasstire Auction in 2012!



Amazing what you can do with a wide angle lens. This kitchen looks like it's 50 yards long.



The bedroom is designed so that you can screw while admiring a fantastic view of Houston. Therefore all the art is above the headrest or off to the side.



The double-chair office set-up is interesting.



Somewhat lighthearted, cartoony art in the bathroom. Personally, I am reluctant to hang art in the bathroom--I'm always afraid it will get damaged by the steam from the shower.

Anyway, I'm perplexed--usually I can identify at least one or two pieces in these real estate photos, but none of this art is familiar. Any guesses?