Arthouse Texas Prize: Five for Texas (the prize, that is)

By Robert Faires
Austin Chronicle
Friday, September 7, 2007

It's almost time for Arthouse to bestow another $30,000 check on a lucky Lone Star artist, but before the statewide visual-arts organization hands out its second-ever Arthouse Texas Prize at a gala on Nov. 2, it's giving us a chance to see work by this year's five finalists in an exhibition at Arthouse's Jones Center for Contemporary Art, starting this Saturday, Sept. 8. Those five, chosen from 136 artists nominated by art-world professionals, are Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Bill Davenport, and Katrina Moorhead, all of Houston; Justin Boyd of San Antonio; and Margarita Cabrera of El Paso. Anderson comments on the ways that African-American history has been commodified in large-scale paintings on paper that appropriate styles and forms from pop culture, such as comic-book covers, movie posters, and ads. Davenport pokes fun at the attitudes and conventions of the art world through large-scale installations and sculptures built from cheap materials, such as Styrofoam and latex house paint. Moorhead, a transplant from Northern Ireland, explores the contrast between nature and the man-made through installations involving ordinary objects – ceiling fixtures, a billboard, bathroom graffiti – presented in ways that reveal new and beautiful relationships. Boyd reclaims the stories and traditions of historically marginalized American subcultures, such as Native Americans, early African-Americans, and Shakers, through multisensory works that combine sculptural components, objects from teakettles to herbs, audio, video, and performance. Cabrera addresses contemporary issues related to Mexican immigration, dislocation, and notions of the "American Dream" through playful yet provocative sculptures of consumer products disassembled and rebuilt with soft vinyl in place of metal or plastic. Making the call on these five was a jury led by Arthouse Executive Director Sue Graze and including Eileen Maxson, recipient of the first Arthouse Texas Prize in 2005; Frances Colpitt, chair of art history, Texas Christian University; Debra Singer, executive director and chief curator, the Kitchen, New York; and Franklin Sirmans, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston. New Arthouse curator Elizabeth Dunbar put together the exhibition and coordinated the accompanying catalog.

The 2007 Arthouse Texas Prize exhibition will be on view Sept. 7-Nov. 11 at Arthouse's Jones Center, 700 Congress. For more information, call 453-5312 or visit www.arthousetexas.org.

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Extra-Ordinary: The Everyday Object in American Art/Everyday Objects: Extra-Ordinary Austin Designs
Austin Museum of Art – Downtown, through Nov. 4

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, September 14, 2007

Who gets to call it art?

I imagine most of us have had those moments, shopping at HEB, when a box, a can, a shampoo bottle stands out as something other than an object for consumption. It might be the color on the label, the pleasing uniformity of repetition on any given shelf, but there are times when everyday objects go beyond their everyday impact. We can call this great design, superior marketing, or capitalism at its most refined. Or we can call it complicity, all the while smiling as we happily run that item down the little conveyer belt to the checkout. "Extra-Ordinary: The Everyday Object in American Art," Austin Museum of Art's current exhibition in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, rejoices over these blurred lines between interested corporate marketing and disinterested beauty. All the iconic figures of American culture (and American pop art) line up to have their say: French fries and ketchup make their appearance near Campbell's soup and a stack of Brillo boxes, while soda bottles, painted yarn, and some laminate sculpture share in AMOA's limelight. But why is this called art?

To answer just such a question, AMOA has dedicated a small room to the showing of Who Gets to Call It Art?, an 80-minute film by the former New York Metropolitan Museum's own Henry Geldzahler. Whether you sit through the entire thing or just a few minutes, this star-studded film has a lot of answers to give for such a fundamental art question and is a great introduction to American pop art and its implications. Ultimately, however, a show like "Extra-Ordinary" has more to do with asking questions than answering them, and with the addition of Austin's own designs and designers in the exhibition titled "Everyday Objects: Extra-Ordinary Austin Designs," we find ourselves back in the shopping aisles, wondering where we will next be so happily co-opted. The "L-Broom" by Design Edge is certainly elegant enough to be wall art, and the TurboChef 30-inch Double Wall Speedcook Oven, featured in countless interior-design magazines this month, is not only aesthetically pleasing, it is charming, inventive, and terrifically pragmatic (apart from the unsung sticker price, of course) in a way we might call "beautiful." In this beauty, though, the tension that was the topic of 1960s pop art, what gave those pieces their weight in the midst of their familiarity and iconoclasm, comes back into question. Who gets to call it art? Is it art because it is the everyday transformed into something lovely? Or is it art because it questions the very appeal and seduction of everyday objects and helps us to see our own contributions to capitalist consumption? I'd like to think it is a bit of both ... but given my love for packaging, design, and a great tomato-soup label, I'm not sure I can be trusted.

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"Extra-Ordinary" shows how art transforms the ordinary
Exhibit celebrates pop art and everyday stuff

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, September 20, 2007

What is art?

Good thing you asked. Because at the Austin Museum of Art right now, an exhibit from the famed Whitney Museum of American Art cleverly asks you to once again ponder that question.

"Extra-Ordinary: The Everyday Object in American Art" toys with one very fundamental and traditional definition of art -- that art is something superior to everyday life. Beyond the quotidian. Elevated above the commonplace.

Think that's true? So how about a 5-foot-tall fiberglass replica of a brown paper lunch bag? What about a steamer trunk-size bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich made of vinyl?

Today, both are on pedestals, in a museum and worth thousands of dollars. But in the 1960s, when Claes Oldenburg created his "Giant BLT" and Alex Hay his "Paper Bag," they rattled the status quo. These were renderings of crass common objects, not art-worthy subjects. Of course, that attitude can be hard to understand nowadays when most people don't raise so much as an eyebrow at any of the few dozen artistically decorated 10-foot guitars currently sprinkled around Austin thoroughfares.

It's not as though the artistic glorification of the ordinary object is exactly new, after all. Common objects were depicted artistically in ancient times. By the 17th-century, still life paintings of fruit and flower arrangements or lavish banquet tables with fine silver and crystal gained enormous popularity. And many times these weren't just ordinary objects -- these were commodities worthy of bragging about and claiming ownership of. Seventeenth-century masters such as Rembrandt were commissioned to paint portrait after portrait of wealthy merchants and their family members surrounded by the glorified stuff of their economic prowess -- arguably, a type of portrait painting that never has fallen out of favor (think of Tony Soprano commissioning a painting of himself and his beloved race horse).

So why not artistically glorify the ordinary lunch bag and sandwich -- the stuff of everyday life? In the early 20th century, European avant-garde movements such as Surrealism established the idea of using ordinary materials to make art. And when the American economy exploded with prosperity after World War II, artists built on the Surrealist traditions while also responding to the new deluge of advertising images they encountered -- and the attendant surfeit of stuff.

A new artistic iconography emerged. Suddenly, Campbell's soup cans were celebrated for the beauty of the sheer ordinariness. Commercial logos took center stage in painted portraits. Private, personal concerns were shoved aside as subject matter; mass media and commodity culture became the stuff of artistic inspiration.

And as "Extra-Ordinary" demonstrates, that shift in thinking meant art could now also be defined as that which transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Long live the BLT.

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Finding inspiration in the ordinary
From ancient arrowheads to plastic toys, it's all good for artist Faith Gay

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, September 27, 2007

Faith Gay is busy. All the time. She likes it that way. It's second nature. Habit. Part of her upbringing.

"I come from a line of Southern women who were always in constant motion, doing things all the time," says Gay on a recent morning, her voice tinged with just the slightest touch of twang left over from her hometown, Port Arthur. Perched on a window seat at D Berman Gallery, where she currently has a solo exhibit, the 37-year-old artist grabbed a few minutes to reflect and, well, just not multitask for a moment.

Faith Gay calls herself a hunter-gatherer and searches thrift shops with her daughter for vivid toys she uses in her art.

"I'm a process artist," she says. "The more I can do, the more I can put color and pattern together, the more interesting art-making is for me."

Gay has certainly been very busy making art since finishing a bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of Texas in 1995. Her work has been shown across the state and snapped up by collectors who are undoubtedly seduced by Gay's creative patterning and extravagant use of color. And by the very stuff Gay uses, too.

And what a range of stuff that is: plastic craft beads, fluorescent-hued packing and labeling supplies, circular paper punch-outs of all sizes, yarn. The typically taken-for-granted stuff of everyday life is Gay's artistic medium.

"I was a crafty kid, always doing something, always had a project going," she says. "We spent a lot of time on weekends on our deer lease in the Big Thicket doing everything ourselves: fishing, hunting, shelling beans, making all the food. Listening to the bugs at night."

And finding awe in the colors and patterns of nature. "Ultimately, nature is where I get my ideas and inspiration from," she says.

That inspiration leads to vivid artworks that in some instances literally explode over gallery walls. Gay has arranged thousands of tiny plastic craft beads into undulating, organic collages, fused the beads together with a heat gun, then tacked the work on a wall, often wrapping the collage around corners.

More recently, Gay has been celebrating cast-off objects, particularly children's toys. "I'm a hunter-gatherer," she says. "I have a circuit of second-hand stores I visit every week."

Most days find her centered in the East Austin home she shares with her husband, graphic designer and ex-Ed Hall drummer Kevin Whitely, and their 4-year-old daughter, Honey. Art-making and child-raising are the priorities. (And a little DJing, too: Known for her eclectic music collection that ranges from classic soul to Brazilian funk, Gay has a regular Saturday night gig at the downtown restaurant Bess.) After a year or so of regular thrifting with Honey in tow, Gay gathered a sizable collection of plastic toys -- specifically Mattel See 'n Says and Fisher-Price Corn Poppers. She also developed a fascination with arrowheads she found during the construction of her home and on subsequent forays around Central Texas.

The results? The toys have become orderly, patterned sculptural arrangements. The arrowheads have emerged into explosive collages of carefully cut paper forms tightly arranged in radiating sunburst designs.

"I love knowing everything about where I am," she says. "And also the process of discovering it, too."

She does, after all, have to stay busy.

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The 2007 Arthouse Texas Prize Exhibition
Arthouse at the Jones Center, through Nov. 11

By Nikki Moore
Austin Chronicle
Friday, September 28, 2007

The Texas Prize. It simply may be the state name, but somehow the word "Texas," when associated with art made in this state, must be followed by musings about identity. This year's Arthouse Texas Prize amps up these musings, layering in not only state-related art-identity crises but also national art-identity issues. In the 2007 Arthouse Texas Prize catalog essay, "Global Regionalism: The Texas Art Scene in 2007," Rainey Knudson and Rachel Cook write, "At the risk of making sweeping generalizations, American-ness is not as sexy as Otherness these days, even though artists all over the country are producing some amazing work." Whether or not this desire for the art of the Other stems from reactions to American politics, to the xenophobia of the post-9/11 era, or to globalization, Knudson and Cook explain, is beside the point. The point is what remains unsaid, namely that identity politics are on the block again. Art as identification, art as identity, has shifted onto a global scale, and Texas wonders why America doesn't have more to say. Or, more to the point, Texas wonders why galleries, museums, and public spaces aren't exhibiting, encouraging, and supporting more of what is surely being said.

Enter stage left: The 2007 Arthouse Texas Prize. In its generosity and ample size, this $30,000 biennial award, given to one instate artist for work he or she has created within the last two years, is as big as Texas. As Arthouse Executive Director Sue Graze eloquently states: "Even the most talented and determined emerging artists seemingly always lack three things above all others: money, time, and exposure. The Arthouse Texas Prize is focused on providing dedicated artists financial means and momentum to do what they do best: Create the visual culture of our time, which makes a civilized society possible." In the Prize's second iteration, the works created for this exhibition by prize finalists Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Justin Boyd, Margarita Cabrera, Bill Davenport, and Katrina Moorhead are decidedly strong and share a common questioning as to what civilized society is, in Texas, America, and elsewhere. While Davenport's Stealth Fighter Piñata identifies with entities as large and looming as the American Military-Industrial Complex and as intimate as treasured birthday "bashes," it looks at American and Texas traditions in a new way. Reframing identities, Anderson's powerful work thinks through historio-racial stereotypes in a way that goes below and to the skin of this conversation, questioning the perky intentions of hero-making. Cabrera's work is a hands-in and -on examination of immigration that crosses borders in aesthetics, cultures, and thoughtful provocations to look more closely at America's influence on the fading of particular Mexican traditions and crafts. And while Boyd does Americana with four of your five senses, Moorhead's work with objects and emotional landscapes is both a process of and a working through identification in art, in relationships, in all subject-object relations. Nothing could be more American; little could be more Texan. As identity makes a come (from the) back, "The 2007 Arthouse Texas Prize Exhibition" gives it a very convincing face.

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