texas artist today

Acknowledgments/Patronage Opportunities Texas Artists Today, coming Fall 2010 from Marquand Books. This volume is funded through the nonprofit The Menninger Foundation Clinic toward developing artistic programs for under-served youths, thanks to these munificent major benefactors (to date): Platinum Underwriters: Timothy Lee, Poppi Massey, Tatiana and Craig Massey, Karla and Mark McKinley,PaperCity magazine. Gold Underwriters: Deborah and William Colton, Meredith and Cornelia Long. Silver Underwriters: One Arm Red, Carola and John Herrin, Penelope and Lester Marks, William and Sharon Morris, Nina and Michael Zilkha. Additional patronage opportunities available by contacting Advisor/Project Manager Craig L. Massey at 713.303.3127, craig.massey@morganstanley(pwm).com; or author Catherine D. Anspon at 281.224.5244, [email protected]. Contributions are tax-deductible, with all book proceeds afterexpenses donated to four nonprofits: The Menninger Foundation Clinic, Lawndale Art Center, Dallas Contemporary, and Beyond Batten Disease Foundation.

About the AuthorCatherine D. Anspon covers the visual arts in Houstonand Dallas as PaperCity magazine’s Fine Arts Editor. She has served as the Houston correspondent for Artnews; written for Art & Antiques, Art in America, Art + Auction, Art Lies, and Spot; and produced onlinefeatures for Glasstire and Citysearch. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Missouri, Columbia,and a BA in History and Art History from Rice University.Anspon is based in Houston, where she first observedthe energy and talent of the Texas scene and came upwith the concept for this volume, sparked by the supportof the Texas Art Team.

Preface by James SurlsJames Surls founded the Houston contemporary artscene when, as head of the art department at the Univer-sity of Houston, he established Lawndale Art Center in1979. Under Surls’s stewardship, Lawndale provided aplatform for experimental, avant-garde performing and visual arts, and first presented talents such as The Art Guys. The internationally exhibited sculptor also hasties to Dallas, where he taught as Southern Methodist University in the early 1970s, met his wife (fellow sculptor Charmaine Locke), and has exhibited throughout the pastfour decades. Surls’s monumental abstract sculpturesformed from wood and/or bronze have been shown fromTexas to China (including two Whitney Biennials, 1979and 1985) and most recently on Park Avenue in 2009and on the campus of Rice University, Houston, in 2010.

Foreword by Lester MarksLester Marks is one of the foremost collectors in America. His Marks Collection, based in Houston, annually organizes free tours for hundreds of attendees,from visiting museum groups to elementary school students and senior citizens. His commitment and philanthropy have been recognized by honors such asthe Texas Art Patron of the Year (Art League Houston)and inclusion in Artnews’ Top 200 Collectors in the Worldand Art & Antiques’s Top 100 Collectors in America.

Texas Artists TodayComing Fall 2010 from Marquand Books268 pages472 color images17 inches wide and 10 1/2 inches highPrice $75.00 hardcover

Texas Artists TodayThis lively, lavishly illustrated volume offers a fresh take on the mid-career players (plus a few up-and-comers) upon the rich canvas of Texas’s art scene. Sixty-two artists are surveyed—none of whom have been represented before in a monographic book—via insider studio tours, portraits, and examples of their work, accompanied by concise essays that elucidate each talent’s intent, inspiration, and working methods. The first book in a decade to highlight the visualists who create at the epicenters ofHouston, Dallas, and San Antonio, TexasArtists Today also ventures to lesser-known locales, including Lubbock on the plains ofWest Texas (meet The Wheeler Brothers andWilliam Cannings) and Nacogdoches, deep in the state’s piney woods, where Mary McCleary makes her obsessive works onpaper that resemble Roman mosaics morethan contemporary collages. Important and prominent artists such as Dario Robletoand Franco Mondini-Ruiz—both Whitney Biennial–exhibited—are explored, as well asthose who deserve to be more widely known, including Sharon Kopriva of the epic mummyinstallations; Sharon Engelstein, whose sculpture exists at the intersection of art and design; Neva Mikulicz, whose extraordinary animated drawings are both nostalgic and futuristic; and LudwigSchwarz, who devises wry interventions in commerce and global production. Texas Artists Today provides the reader tantalizing—and unprecedented—access tothese protagonists and more.

Created and Produced by the Texas Art Team:

Written By Catherine D. AnsponWith a Preface by James Surls and Foreword by Lester Marks

Creative Director and Collage Designer Tatiana Massey

Photographed by Jenny Antill, Sueraya Shaheen, and Adam GravesAdditional photography by Shau Lin Hon, Everett Taasevigen, and Rick Dingus

Graphic Designers Michelle Aviña and John HubbardCover Co-Designer and Project Visual Advisor Poppi MasseyEdited by Sharon L. Taylor

Advisor and Project Manager Craig L. Massey

Project Manager for Dallas/North Texas Karla K. McKinley

Marketing/Book-Signing Director Margaret Bott

From ceramic cookie jars and anthropomorphic beings garbed in human attire to gargantuan inflatables and even a sequined flying saucer, Houston sculptorSharon Engelstein’s diverse artistic practice is unified by biomorphism and edged with a dose of humor. Engelstein’s post-graduate-school and early-1990s work (created during her Museum of Fine Arts, Houston/Glassell School of Art Core Residency) fabricated human organs from unfired clay, cast plaster, and mixed materials. Next followed a series of abstract creatures crafted of foam and mixed media—otters, dogs, and bears sporting scarves, negligees, and capes.“Boolean Unions” (Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2000) introduced small-scale industrialized sculptures produced through computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM).

In 2000, the artist began collaborating with Boulder Blimp Company to make inflatables—gigantic, bulbous blimps that stay afloat vis-à-vis a forced-air device that resembles a breathing machine. “They are monumental and buoyant at the same time,” Engelstein says of these towering aerated works. Her collaboration with the Lafayette, Colorado–based blimp manufacturer parallels an earlier artist/scientist pairing: Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Lab’s Billy Klüver. Engelstein’s forced-air sculptures also bring to mind Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (first exhibited 1966, also in collaboration with Klüver). Engelstein’s blimps, initially white, are now often executed in startling fuchsia, tangerine, or apple-green hues.

The year 2004 signaled a shift to clay and hand-built forms. Her current repertoire of functional and nonfunctional ceramics, all fired in her own kiln, ranges from phallic, foot-shaped vases to tiny hands that resemble the gloved paws of Mickey Mouse, plus a series of “blobby” unglazed cookie jars drizzled with acrylic paint. “My recent work takes me back to a more hands-on process ... though I continue to work with fabricators,” she says. “And though my work often changes in appearance, it’s always about the refinement of form and exploring the relationship between organism and mechanism.”

SHARON ENGEL STEIN

BESIDES THIS COLLAGE AND ESSAY, EACH ARTIST WILL BE REPRESENTED BY SIX TO EIGHT EXAMPLES OF THEIR WORK.

Sharon Kopriva’s life-size mummies are shockingly realistic in their depiction of decaying flesh. Formed from animal bones, papier-mâché, and found objects,these sculptures invoke the living dead and are frequently garbed in the vestments of the Roman Catholic Church. If religion is the last taboo in contemporaryart, Kopriva’s figures are closer in spirit to Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1645–1652) than to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987). Kopriva graduatedfrom the University of Houston in 1981 with an MFA in painting. Her mentors included James Surls and John Alexander (she served as their teaching assistant), as well as Ed and Nancy Kienholz. Her turn to sculpture was inspired by a post-graduate encounter with the mummies of Machu Picchu in 1982,but her childhood also offers clues: As a member of her neighborhood Catholic church choir, Kopriva performed in as many as two or three funerals a week.

“To this day,” she says, “I remember the powerful sight of the closed box in the middle of the church aisle.”

In the late 1990s, she returned to painting. Fin de Siècle (1987–2001), an epic, apocryphal canvas with sculptural elements, was completed days before September 11. Its impasto-ed surface features fragments of bone, from which three-dimensional winged skeletons grasp at the viewer. In the dusky background, a cityscape burns asbuildings crash down. The palette mimics fall foliage until further inspection reveals the gruesome reality.

Winds of Change (2008) addresses global warming. Palm trees—a symbol of the good life—predominate. The artist snapped the collaged photographs of local specimens, then painted and drew upon the surfaces, juxtaposing blue skies with smokestacks and windmills. An installation front and center amplifies her message: Styrofoam icebergs and actual thermometers. Of this canvas, Kopriva says cryptically, “Looking at our past, we consider our future . . .”

SHARON KOPRIVA


Bert L. Long Jr’s trajectory as an artist defies the conventional progression of formal study. He improbably launched his career from the banquet halls of the Ritz-Carlton and Hyatt Hotels, where his reign as a chef involved many of the ideas—a sense of theater, participation by the public—that still influence his multidisciplinary endeavors today. Most ambitious are his ongoing ice projects, begun in 1979, which unite multi-ton blocks of colored ice with the artist’s chainsaw.His largest to date, Carta, was enacted on New Year’s Eve, 2000, in Providence, Rhode Island. It encompassed “100,000 pounds of ice, carvedin public . . . Fifty-five thousand people came to watch the ultimate ephemeral art,” he recalls. Part performance, part action, the ice sculptures possess abit of carnival; they also have precedents in art history. “Every art movement that you can imagine happens [in the melting ice]: abstract expressionism, surrealism, colorfield, minimalism, conceptual, and performance,” says Long, who began distilling elements of his ice creations into video art in 2008.

And, there’s always a sense of place. In the public sculpture Field of Vision (2000; reinstalled in 2008 at Project Row Houses, Houston), 50 classical columns prop up ever-awake, painted, concrete eyeballs—the artist’s reoccurring metaphor for consciousness. The work suggests growing up in a place where opportunity comes through escape. Long’s own circuitous path brought him back to where he started—Houston’s Fifth Ward—with international stops including a studio in Spain and a Prix de Rome Fellowship (1990 – 1991), as well as more than 100 museum and gallery exhibitions, plus acquisitions by institutions ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NewYork to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1990—the same year he was tapped for a Rome Prize—Art League Houston awarded him Texas Artist of the Year honors.

Riding the Tiger (2000) is an undisguised self-portrait that Long labels “a pivotal painting . . . There are big handicaps to being an artist. We have to hold on—that’s what the hook is for. There’s no terra firma there. The tiger’s on fire. It has sharp, dangerous claws and fangs. If you fall off, you are going to be seriously hurt . . . And I have a smile on my face.”

BERT L. LONG JR.


Angelbert Metoyer exploded onto the Texas scene in 1995 when, at the age of 18, he was included in dual Houston exhibitions at Project Row Houses and theContemporary Arts Museum Houston. A series of solo exhibitions followed at Barbara Davis Gallery (Houston), New Gallery/Thom Andriola (Houston), and Gerald Peters Gallery (Dallas). When he was in his 20s, he left for New York, although he retained a strong presence in the Houston and Dallas communitiesthroughout the next decade, maintaining a studio in Houston while mounting annual Texas shows. Over the years, he has become an increasingly recognizableplayer on the international stage and remains involved in various ongoing collaborations with those beyond the visual-arts world, including post-punk poet Saul Williams, hip-hop performer Mike Ladd, Latin American sensation Rene Lopez, and indie crooner Joseph Arthur.

Metoyer displays a nomadic taste for wanderlust and describes himself as probing “the hidden language of religion.” His practice spans performance, sculpture, and video, but at the heart of his art making are dexterous, intuitive drawings. His undulating, calligraphic lines in charcoal or ghostly white chalk on paper and canvas sensitively depict animals, insects, star charts, anatomical studies, and haunting ancestral figures—most memorably a dissolving baby that provides insightful commentary on cloning, timetravel, simultaneity, and the African Yoruba concept of the twin. The drawings feature hermetic markings and text fragments; their surfaces, often encrusted with flecks of goldleaf or traces of dirt, are gathered from places as far afield as China, Vietnam, and Outer Mongolia.

Across all media, Metoyer’s art possesses a compelling immediacy, hinting at ritual and the primacy of spirit guardians disguised as animals. He channels the viewer into Jungian explorations of a priori archetypes that define being human. The artist believes his ongoing investigations into what it means to be alive will reach their zenith in Mirror:Mirror 2012—a complex global project that involves the installation of twinned, white-light-emanating black mirrors in multiple locations. This ambitious endeavor alsoemploys cutting-edge Internet technology to explore social connectivity and the profound experience of universal light.

Metoyer was born in Houston in 1977, and his due date (7-7-77) frequents his numerological stew. He moved to Georgia as a teen to study at the Atlanta College of Art and Design. Critics have compared his charismatic persona and art to those of the mythic Jean-Michel Basquiat. However, Metoyer’s take on the African-American experience ismolded less by street influences and issues of the diaspora than by his unique personal history—he is a 13th-generation descendant of a Creole family whose matriarch, the freed slave Marie Thérèse Coincoin, went on to become a plantation owner in the Cane River region of Louisiana. His multilayered art also manifests a fascination with Blakeanmysticism and the concept of expanding universes within a vast, unlimited cosmos.

London-based critic John-Paul Pryor summarizes the artist’s intention: ÒMetoyer’s fascination with time, memory, arcane symbolism, quantum physics, and cosmology takehim far beyond such stifling parameters [of being merely a commentator on race] and reveal a staggering breadth of scope. What truly drives Metoyer is a deeply personal vision quest, and a determination to map the psychological landscape of what each and every human being on this planet refers to as heaven.”

ANGELBERT METOYER


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