Show and Sell
Austin art is getting national buzz, but is anybody buying it?

By Clayton Maxwell
Austin Chronicle
Friday, March 14, 2008

Austin is a city proud of its talents and wares, and we try to buy accordingly. There are many among us who take a kind of twisted pride in spending our last dollar on concert tickets or music by local musicians. Food from local farms, coffee from local coffeehouses, clothes from local designers - the prevailing attitude is that it's all cooler, tastes better, and is good for the local economy, not to mention the culture. Shouldn't the same go for art? Is it too much to ask to enter someone's house - or new condo Downtown - and want to see local artists or galleries represented on the walls?

After all, the energy generated by Austin galleries and artists over the last few years has grown from cool hum to high-frequency buzz. The East Austin Studio Tour, started by three young artists six years ago, has become one of the most popular art events in town. It was a group of Austinites (from Bolm Studios, Camp Fig, Gallery Lombardi, Eastside Coop, and the Dougherty Arts Center) that launched the Texas Biennial, a multiple-gallery show of emerging Lone Star contemporary artists. Okay Mountain, a nine-member art co-op, has managed to pool resources and bring in artists from Tokyo and Egypt, run a store, and publish first-rate books of their members' tag-team drawings. Austin Art Alliance's Art Talk Austin, a series of discussions by artists, collectors, and curators, has helped people learn more about art-collecting. The visual-arts scene has seen better-attended openings; friendlier relations among artists, galleries, and museums; and a larger and more involved public.

Even the national media has noticed. A December 2007 article in Art in America, "Report From Austin: Art by Southwest," suggested that the visual arts might no longer be this city's neglected child, outshined by our longstanding love for music and film. Earlier in the year, readers of AmericanStyle Magazine voted Austin eighth best art destination in the U.S. For a 2006 article on Texas style, New York Times fashion writer Cathy Horyn visited Austin gallery Art Palace and became smitten, writing that she "felt an exhilaration seeing the work" and that "it was exactly what I'd hoped to find." Since its reopening two years ago, the Blanton has boosted Austin's presence on the international art radar, as has the hard work of Dana Friis-Hansen, the much-praised director of the Austin Museum of Art since 2002. Austin art is on the rise.

Nonetheless, when I tell an art collector friend that I'm writing an article on the Austin art market, he replies, "It must be a very short article." This sentiment - that the art market here still lags behind the quality of the art being made - is prevalent. In talking with gallerists, the words "untapped potential" were used more than once to describe art sales here. And only one of those gallerists and not a single artist I spoke with for this story felt that things have improved remarkably in the art market here over the past three years, despite the buzz. More people are open to more types of art, but the new joy is not reflected in sales. Not yet.

Not that nothing is selling. You only have to spend time within the white walls of Art Palace to see that some collectors are snatching up local art. By the time Eric Zimmerman's show opened at Art Palace on March 1, almost two-thirds of his graphite drawings were already sold. Jonathan Marshall's December show, "The Book of Lenny," made at least $38,000 - pretty remarkable for a 24-year-old artist and a 2-year-old gallery. Even better is the fact that one of Marshall's pieces was bought by a private collector and then acquired by the Blanton, and AMOA bought another two: an unprecedented success for a young Austin artist. Another piece, still unsold at the time of our interview, was a 7-foot-bear, but the Palace's Arturo Palacios was confident: "I will sell that bear."

Gallery Shoal Creek, Wally Workman Gallery, and Stephen L. Clark Gallery, all of which have been selling art in Austin for more than two decades, are also seeing good sales - not a boom but steady growth. Workman, for example, set a goal to improve her 2007 sales by 25%, and she did. Still, she doesn't think that the new energy in the Austin art scene and attention in the media are necessarily changing the way that Austinites buy and sell art. "I thought it was quite interesting that some artists from L.A. called to tell me they hear Austin is a good place to sell art." In Workman's case, it seems that improved sales have more to do with her hard work and persistence than with Austin's increased visual-arts brio.

Still, many in the local art scene are optimistic about the growth of the art market. One is Meredith Powell, director of Art Alliance Austin, formerly the Austin Fine Arts Alliance. It has been supporting the arts locally for five decades, beginning with the Fiesta arts festival at Laguna Gloria, which has moved Downtown and was recently renamed Art City Austin. Powell said that sales at the 2006 event were underwhelming, but 2007 was a record year: "The artists were very happy with results." When we spoke, Powell was particularly enthusiastic; in the first days of the recently opened exhibition for the organization's new office and gallery Downtown, they had sold several pieces, mostly to young people, some even to walk-ins off the street.

But it's still ebb and flow, and while there are signs of growth, it's still too early to get cocky and throw a party. Any line graph of art sales here would look like a landscape of the Hill Country. For example, Okay Mountain is one project that you'd think would be pulling in the sales. Their work is strong, fresh, affordable. They work hard and are the creative darlings of the Eastside, the ones that everyone loves to love. And yet, according to their talk at the Creative Research Laboratory in late January, not a single piece from their latest show, "Gold Rush," had sold to anyone in Austin. They had seen a notable increase in international sales via their website, just no sales to the locals. Sales were never their motivation, but at CRL, the group made it clear: They don't earn a dime with Okay Mountain.

Workman, who works almost exclusively with local artists and has a largely Texan collector base, believes that sales tend to fluctuate with the local economy. In the glory days of the late Nineties, art sales in Austin were booming, she says. But after 9/11, people stopped buying, just like in the rest of the country. So, despite the Austin arts' growing reputation, she hasn't noticed any really remarkable changes or trends in the past few years, just the same ebb and flow she has seen throughout her 25 years as a gallerist.

Inconsistent sales are to be expected, however, in a city that is still young, as Austin is in many regards. It only began to outgrow its identity as a strictly university-and-government town 30-odd years ago. Compared to Houston and Dallas, there is a short history of art collecting here. Peat Duggins, artist and Okay Mountaineer, characterizes it this way: "The recent energy/attention given to the emerging art scene is great, but we need to retain the stress on 'emerging.' A developed art scene has insightful writing, numerous types of galleries, respectable institutions, and strong individual creators, as well as a collector base. The city has had some of those things at different times in the past, though I think we are just now starting to develop them all in tandem."

While few gallerists had their sales broken down into buyer demographics, several said younger people are now buying, a good sign that this art scene will keep growing. The day before I stopped by Stephen Clark's West Sixth Street gallery, two women in their early 20s, both former photography students at St. Stephen's Episcopal School, came to the gallery to buy name photographers. Clark says: "Art collecting is now happening at different levels. I've seen many people in this town as they make that first step, buying what they can afford. My generation was a poster generation, but now I see the children of my generation, children who went to good colleges, have traveled, and have been exposed to art in ways that earlier generations in Austin were not. They know what they like and want to buy name photographers. This didn't use to happen."

This mindset is explained by Salvador Sosa, a 42-year-old art collector I met at a recent gallery opening. He and his partner, Chric McKoy, invest in local artists and would like to see their peers do the same. "About six years ago, I looked at what was happening in Austin, and it really drew me in," Sosa explains. "I had been buying from galleries in New York and Santa Fe, but what I started to see in Austin felt more like what you'd see in New York. I used to buy when I traveled, but now I buy in Austin." Furthermore, Sosa sees how art collecting can be contagious: Some of his friends have admired the art in his home and now are buying original works of their own. Besides, as Sosa told a reluctant-to-buy relative, "If you are a grownup, you can't have fucking posters on your wall." McKoy, 48, an art teacher at St. Andrew's Episcopal School, put it this way: "The art happening in Austin is fresh, young. And it's a mirror of who we are right now, a reflection of our culture. It's not like going to Dallas and buying something that matches your couch."

And because the market here is still emerging, it's also still very affordable; there is great work here that's accessible to a wider swath of the population. This helps attract the younger collectors. "The buyers here have been mostly people in their early 30s excited about the work," says Powell. "They are buying what they love, and they can because it's affordable."

Of course, money isn't everything. It doesn't seem to be even a significant factor to many - they consider other positive factors much more important. Judy Taylor, who opened Gallery Shoal Creek in 1965, says more Austin collectors are now open to a wider range of contemporary art, far beyond the landscapes and still lifes that once dominated local art sales. Lora Reynolds has found a welcoming audience here for the cutting-edge international work she has brought to town since opening her gallery three years ago - and her fun, well-attended gallery openings prove it. Many gallerists see a fresh energy here. As Anastasia Colombo, the associate director at D Berman Gallery says, "I am incredibly optimistic about the Austin art scene. People are really sitting up and taking interest in being more supportive."

And yet, there is a big difference between "taking interest in being more supportive" and actually buying art. Many strong artists and galleries still have to scrap and juggle to survive, as Colombo sees in her position as treasurer for Art Austin, a 24-member gallery alliance. "There are galleries in town that are not a part of Art Austin [any longer], not because they didn't want to be but because they couldn't pay the dues, which are very moderate. Galleries still close because they are losing too much money. It is a fact that in Austin it's crushingly difficult to keep a visual-art space open. You can go look at the art, think it's beautiful, but if the artists don't get paid, they can't afford to be artists. I would like to see more artists be able to support themselves with their art instead of taking second jobs."

Sterling Allen, an Okay Mountaineer who has had successful independent shows as well, has a similarly sobering view: "I can count on two hands the people that are out there supporting our contemporary art scene," he says. "They are also the people who support the nonprofits and museums by funding special projects and exhibitions. I don't have any friends who can consistently work on art. Everyone I know goes through cycles of work/art if they are lucky. ... Everyone at Okay Mountain works almost full time on other stuff besides art."

As Stephen Clark put it, "The only way to really support an artist is to write a check." He and several other gallerists said that one of the best parts of owning a gallery is exactly that: paying the artist when works sell. And they all would like to see it happen more, not just for the gallery's sake but because they genuinely love the work they sell and want to see their artists thrive.

If more people buy Austin artists' work, the quality of art will improve. Not to reduce art-making to monetary terms, but an artist getting paid for his work translates to more studio time and other resources for making better art. No artist I contacted would stop making art for lack of sales - no one is an artist for the money - but having someone buy work can be the ultimate compliment and motivator to keep on working. And as your career gets more serious, it helps you pay for supplies, studio space, rent, life. As Sterling Allen explains: "[Getting paid] didn't used to matter. I liked showing, and it was a bonus to sell. In the past few years, it has become more important. I respect my own work that much more, and it simply isn't enough to have someone like it. I want to be rewarded for it. I also would like to get to the point where I wouldn't have to go to work and sit at a computer all day and instead just focus on art. I will always make stuff no matter what, but it is very encouraging to sell work. It keeps you going. As we get more mature and ambitious in our practice, the cost of making work also goes up. I didn't used to need a studio. I also didn't used to worry about safely shipping work. The more serious and dedicated you become, the more expensive life gets."

Emily Hoyt, abstract oil painter at the Pump Project Art Complex, agrees but also believes the positive effects from increased sales will stretch beyond individual artists to the entire scene. "I don't think money could ever improve my attitude about creating. It's something I have done out of necessity for some time," she says. "Although the fact remains that money won't change my reasons for making art, it's still obvious to me that if I sold a larger piece, I would jump at the chance to quit my day job and focus on art for as long as the money kept me going. In this very significant way, the art market in Austin can benefit from artists getting paid real money for their work. More artists selling means more time and thought going into the innovation of work. For artists who have been struggling to remain active, this boost could mean significant gains in the quality of art-making in Austin."

For a city that thrives on its individuality and seeks to stay weird, more sales of local art doesn't seem too much to ask. As Powell says, "Austin is known as a creative city, but how do you expect to sustain a creative culture if you aren't supporting the ones who make art?"

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'Cult of Color' a creative collaboration
Artist Trenton Doyle Hancock. choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds create a wholly new multi-media dance

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
Austin American-Statesman
Thursday, March 20, 2008

A world awash in vibrant color versus one in lifeless black-and-white. Meat-eating, pleasure-seeking "Mound" creatures facing off against the self-righteous, colorless "Vegans." Good locked in an eternal fight against evil that never seems close to ending.

The cosmology created by Houston artist Trenton Doyle Hancock in his monumental collage-like paintings is as singular as it is all-encompassing. Its narrative is part Old Testament and part Marvel Comics, with god-like (superhero-like?) figures leading bands of disciples in dramatic battles against an enemy. It's rendered in a visual style that is equally inspired by the grotesque epics of Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch as it is by imaginative alternative cartoons or science-fiction movies. And Hancock has been adding to his story -- mapping out backstories, creating characters and their complex genealogies -- since he was a teenager in the northeast Texas town of Paris, filling notebook after notebook with his elaborate tale that still has not arrived at a resolution.

Since the 33-year-old burst onto the art scene in 2000, when he became one of the youngest artists ever included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial show, he has been racking up the critical kudos, impressively expanding his exhibition credits (he had a solo exhibit at Arthouse, an Austin contemporary art museum, in 2002) and adding up the collectors who now jockey to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Hancock's paintings. (The Blanton Museum of Art is just one of at least 20 museums around the world that have acquired a Hancock painting for its permanent collection.)

But for all his meteoric art world success, Hancock's vibrant yet terribly personal mythology will explode here in Austin in a way that even the very imaginative artist never once imagined.

Thanks to creative contributions from Ballet Austin artistic director Stephen Mills and Austin composer Graham Reynolds, "Cult of Color: Call to Color" will see Hancock's tumultuous "Mounds versus Vegans" world erupt from the stage as a live hour-long ballet encased by its own wholly original musical score.

Opening April 3 for just nine performances in Ballet Austin's intimate 275-seat AustinVentures Studio Theater, "Cult of Color" has been three years in the making, and it represents milestones for each of its creative contributors, not just Hancock.

Just a distillation of one piece of Hancock's epic, "Cult of Color" finds the patriarch of the skeletal Vegans, Sesom (Moses spelled backwards), ready to lead his band of disciples -- the "Cult of Color," they sport names such as Baby Curt, Shy Jerry, F-Shine and Betto Watchow -- out of their colorless underground world into the warm, rainbow-hued world above ground. But rather than end with a neat, happy finale, the tale ends at an ambiguous point, the conflict not fully resolved.

To add to the public's understanding of just how the unusual collaboration took place, Arthouse is mounting the exhibit "Cult of Color: Call to Color -- Notes on a Collaboration," which opens Saturday and runs through April. Really, what the exhibit explains is that though "Cult of Color" is a collaboration and is based on Hancock's story, Hancock, Mills and Reynolds worked independently, each creating his own unique layer or part of the final project.

Hancock's preparatory notes, sketches and drawings for the costumes as well as four installations that represent different scenes of the ballet will be on view. So will Reynolds' entire score, with audio samples. Monitors will feature video footage of Mills working with the dancers to create the movement for the ballet.

"Collaboration is very important in a city like ours where we have a lot of small and midsize arts organizations, because that's how they can together make a huge impact," says Sue Graze, executive director of Arthouse and the person who introduced Mills and Hancock three years ago.

Already "Cult of Color" seems cued to make an impact. Art collectors from across the country and around the world have been scheduled for months to attend the ballet on opening weekend. Ditto with the specialized arts press and presenters interested in producing the ballet in other cities.

Even for someone used to being on the receiving end of a lot of buzz, Hancock is a little wide-eyed from this latest venture. "I still haven't wrapped my mind around the fact that this is happening," he says with a modest smile. He was in town recently to oversee the final touches on the scenery.

"I had been thinking about how to take my work outside the confines of the typical museum and gallery setting," Hancock says. "But I had never even seen a ballet before Stephen approached me three years ago."

Mills had certainly seen Hancock's work. A besotted fan and modest collector of contemporary art ("I own a very, very small Hancock painting," Mills says), the choreographer had long been dreaming of collaborating with an artist. And Mills wasn't just interested in doing what so many choreographers or opera directors have done before, which is to have a visual artist give his or her twist to sets and costumes for a pre-existing story.

No, Mills wanted to actually re-create the work of a visual artist as a ballet -- live and on a stage.

Hancock's immense -- and immensely complex -- narrative seemed perfect. "I like the way Trenton's work asks you to complete it," Mills says. "There's never -- really, there's no way -- this complicated mythology that Trent's been creating for years can be revealed in just one of his paintings. I liked that incredible richness."

Mills has also liked the way Hancock's otherworldly creatures -- not to mention the complex costumes -- have demanded that the choreographer come up with an entirely new vocabulary of dance movements. Mills' "Cult of Color" is not a ballet of pointe shoes and pirouettes, but of angular, expressive gestures and sometimes simian moves.

Mills invited Reynolds to join the project. A lifelong fan of classic comic books and sci-fi tales, Reynolds felt an immediate affinity for the source of Hancock's tale. And though Reynolds has scored movies (Richard Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly" among others), written symphonies, operas and multiple scores for theatrical productions, he'd never written for a ballet before, let alone for a visual artist. "It's an inspiring world to build on, but this is a story Trent has been creating his whole life," Reynolds says. "We were a bit cautious about poking at it too much."

Rather than poke, Reynolds decided to make the score almost its own free-standing effort -- a recording characterized by lots of studio-only effects where the individual movements weren't necessarily free-standing from the whole. Partly symphonic, partly electronic sounds, the score is recorded in the all-encompassing effect of surround-sound. "I thought of it kind of like the Beatles 'Sergeant Pepper' album," Reynolds says. "I wanted to create a score that couldn't be done live."

In other words, music that is just as other-worldly as Mills' unconventional dance movements and Hancock's completely other world.

"It all fit together like a puzzle in the end," Hancock says.

"Cult of Color" might be Hancock's world, but for a while Mills and Reynolds -- and now the rest of us -- will get to be in it.

For a while.

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'Jess: To and From the Printed Page'
Harry Ransom Center, through April 6

By Rachel Cook
Austin Chronicle
Friday, March 28, 2008

Part of the mission of the Harry Ransom Center is to present some of the rare books, manuscripts, photography, film, artworks, and other ephemera that it collects, preserves, and displays so that it's available to the public for research, scholarship, education, and delight. In this regard, one of the HRC's great features is its ability to present two exhibitions side by side, typically an exhibition on tour alongside one that draws from the vast range of material within the HRC's collection. The center's ability to frame the traveling exhibit within the context of this cultural material sparks a rich dialogue between the two that might not exist otherwise.

The paired exhibitions "On the Road With the Beats" and "Jess: To and From the Printed Page" remind us how the written word sparked a cultural revolution. Both speak of a time long gone, when radical change was being instigated through writing, poetry, and artwork. Using Jack Kerouac's original manuscript for On the Road as the centerpiece for "On the Road With the Beats" beautifully displays how the written word becomes a conceptual art object. The manuscript is actually a scroll, single-spaced with no paragraph breaks or chapter breaks, where the text weaves back and forth depending on the angle that the typewriter was typing in relation to how the paper was being woven around the rollers. It stretches across the entrance of the exhibit, causing an entire multiangle viewing experience from left to right to even slightly above. While the relationship between Kerouac and Jess - as artist Burgess Collins was known - might seem a bit oblique at first, curator Michael Auping explained in a recent lecture that he sees "the two men finding their unique critical devices within a large, developing 'underground' of cultural change that took the form of movable feasts and poetry readings between New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles." Maybe Kerouac could be considered part of the "East Coast family" and Jess part of the West Coast - either way, both were concerned with taking part in a cultural revolution through the written word.

"Jess: To and From the Printed Page" explores how imagery becomes a form of dialogue with the written word. Included in the exhibition are the artist's "paste-ups," collages composed of old book illustrations and photographs from magazines. Ironically, some of the paste-ups were used as book covers or posters advertising poetry readings or art exhibitions for Jess and his partner, poet Robert Duncan. Jess thought of "books as a form of collage space." He spoke about the paste-ups as containing "many stories, not just a story" and that someone could look at the "network of stories" there and "pick out any story they choose." For instance, in Boob #3 Jess takes an image of a scuba diver with flippers and places the words "Up, Up, Up" behind him, with a horse jumping to the left and a woman on her back, laughing, above; text runs along the edges and is neatly interspersed behind, next to, and in front of the various cutout images. Jess uses the text like taglines in a commercial or book-jacket cover, with phrases like "Keeps going on and on ..." or "But Questions Still Remain." Mind you, this is pre-Photoshop and animation; Jess' collages were being made in the Fifties and reflect a society on the cusp of change.

Jess' early work sheds light on the time period and speaks in reference to a cultural history from a specific geographic location, San Francisco, and an explosion that was about to happen to the youth in the community. Coincidentally, Jess himself took part in a literal explosion that also influenced his work: As a radiochemist with the Army Corps of Engineers, he had a small part in the Manhattan Project that developed the first atom bomb. (Jess had studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, painting in his spare time.) Maybe one explosion prompted another.

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