RETURN TO FORM
AS ARTISTS’ SPLENDORA BLOSSOMS AGAIN, LIVES COME FULL CIRCLE
CLEVELAND, Texas — For 20 years, the compound of artists James Surls and Charmaine Locke was a nexus of creativity and bohemian reverie. Aside from their four daughters, it was their greatest creation together. In 1976, the place consisted of a tiny cabin down a dirt road on 22 acres of East Texas thicket near the hamlet of Splendora. With a well and electricity but no TV or washing machine, it was everything Surls and Locke desired. Until then, they had both lived too many places to count. They needed roots. They got married on the premises in 1978. They bought another five acres, built a bigger house and raised their daughters there. Eventually, they bought more land to expand the compound’s footprint.
Surls was on his way to becoming one of the nation’s most successful sculptors. His spiritual, nature-inspired work blossomed at Splendora, where he built a 12,000-foot studio with 25-foot-high ceilings in 1984, so he could craft monumental works of wood and steel.
The couple opened their doors to the rest of Houston’s art world for parties before that, but the studio was often a happening place, accommodating dinners for hundreds of people and performances with dancers from New York City Ballet.By 1997, their life had reached what Surls calls “a high-speed wobble.” And the towns around them were growing in ways they didn’t like. So they packed up and started over in a more remote paradise, near Carbondale, Colo.
But this week, somewhat miraculously, the
legendary Texas art space is being reborn.
The Studios at Splendora Gardens reopens with two days of festivities including an indoor art exhibition, an outdoor sculpture show, live music and a screening of Surls’ latest documentary, “The House, the Hand and the Hatchet.”
Surls and Locke have no plans to leave the idyllic Colorado compound they’ve now occupied for almost 20 years — that’s home at this point, with a gorgeous view of the Rocky Mountains.
But Surls cried every time he visited Splendora. “The dream didn’t go away,” he said.
He is now 73, and Locke is 66, and they are thinking about their legacy.
“How do you finish the last quarter of your life?” Surls said. “How do you establish what happens when lightning strikes and I’m in the big bower in the sky? This place should be able to keep right on rolling.” Never left home
Ruby Surls’ heart never left Splendora, either.
The eldest daughter of Surls and Locke, she is a writer and performance poet who turns 37 this month. She studied pastry-making and baking, and she holds a degree in social and cultural studies from Dominican University near San Francisco.
But there’s a bridge at Splendora, built by her dad, where Ruby carved her initials as a child — as if sealing her future there.
She has wanted to bring the compound back to life for a decade and sees this iteration as a unique destination for art, performance and nature.
She wants to build hiking trails, an organic garden, a community kitchen and cabins for resident artists during the next five years.
In some ways, she is completing the vision of her parents, who wanted their compound to be a place where the community could share art and ideas.
When they “went to the other side of the mountain and started over,” as Surls puts it, they took only their equipment and their wits. They held onto the Splendora compound, which now occupies about 200 acres. But they also didn’t know what to do with it.
For about a decade, the studio was leased to the late nightclub impresario Michael Condray, who co-founded the 1970s livemusic venue Liberty Hall in downtown Houston, where Toyota Center now sits. Condray wanted to turn Surls’ studio into a honky-tonk, but he struggled to get funding and permits. Then Condray got sick, diagnosed with brain and lung cancer. He moved out last fall and died in March.
“He had a valid dream for being out here. It probably would have been one level of fantastic if it had manifested,” Ruby said. “But I’m kind of glad it didn’t, so it was ready for us.”
After a big family meeting last year to hash out ideas, Locke formalized Ruby’s effort with a strategic plan they keep at hand, in a notebook.
Serendipitously, curator Jeff Wheeler was looking for a change this year, after a decade of teaching drawing at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. He connected with Surls through a mutual friend, artist Jack Massing, and is now organizing the studio’s art and performance happenings. He hopes they will occur monthly.
Wheeler and his brother and collaborator Bryan idolize the generation of Texas artists who came of age in the 1980s and ’90s. Honoring that period of the state’s art history, they have staged a series of shows called “Ulterior Motifs” since 1999 in Lubbock.
Jeff Wheeler’s first exhibition for Splendora, “Ulterior Motifs No. 15,” originated at the Arlington Museum of Art in August. Bryan Wheeler’s band, Los Sonsabitches, will perform.
“I would have called the band Los Ascension,” James Surls said, grinning.
He has always envisioned the compound as a kind of gentle bower in the woods, in the vein of the Romantic poets whose work he adores. Channeling the past
When Surls and Locke met at Southern Methodist University, he taught sculpture and she was a psychology student drawn to art.
With an ex-wife, Linda Samuels (with whom he has three daughters), Surls was feeling restless in Dallas, and cramped by a small studio that limited the size of works he could produce.
Another East Texas native, painter John Alexander, recommended Surls to the University of Houston’s art department head, George Bunker, who gave Surls a job and a cavernous work space — 100,000 square feet — across the freeway from the campus on Lawndale Avenue.
Event-driven art and performance venues were sprouting across the U.S., and Surls founded Lawndale Art Center in 1979 as a place for UH art students to experiment.
With a clublike atmosphere and pop-up events that drew crowds, Lawndale flourished, changed and eventually separated from the university. By the mid-1990s, it was a community-based museum with an executive director and a stable new home in an Art Deco building on Main.
Some of those aspects will be reborn at Splendora.
Ruby Surls would love to see dancers performing at Splendora Gardens again.
“We’ll have movie viewings and lectures, a multitude of things cover- ing our range of interests,” she said. “If people come out for an ecology talk, they also get to see the great art on the wall.”
Locke, who improved some of the landscape with native plantings during her years there, said she and Surls have long envisioned pathways through the woods, with small clearings for sculpture.
Ruby also wants to promote alternative building methods. She envisions resident artists in cabins across the woods, and wanted to build those spaces as recycled “earth ships,” she said, “But Dad was like, ‘Well, let’s research that.’ ”
Art education will be in the mix, too. Ruby hopes to revive the Amazing Space school program Locke and Surls built years ago for the local community. “Art, philosophy and science is still the underpinning, with an environmental and sustainable focus,” she said.
The biggest question today, though, is, who — other than resident artists — will go there? The compound is between upscale Kingwood and modest Cleveland, Texas, about a 40-minute drive from most of Houston’s art community.
James Surls believes “success” with art events can be a matter of attitude: “At Lawndale, we said if we got three people, we were going to consider that a crowd and go on with the show. Then if we got 300, it was — ‘Oh my god, look how great we did!’ ”
And then there’s the issue of staffing.
Lawndale had an army of student workers who could install a big show in a day. The full-time staff at the Studios, for now, is two: Wheeler and Ruby Surls. They’ve enlisted friends to help get the place going. Surls and Locke are part of the crew cleaning out the barnlike space and building gallery walls.
That’s one reason Splendora will be eventdriven, not open regular hours like a museum.
Wheeler plans to mix up genres: Early next year, he’d like to stage an event featuring fashion designer and “Project Runway” alum Eliza Jimenez alongside a show of works by her late father, sculptor Luis Jimenez.
“When we get it rolling and I get to really think about being a curator, what’s exciting is building on the history and being able to offer up this amazing space to artists,” he said. “I think a lot of them are going to say yes because we offer them such a special exhibition space.”
Importantly, Surls and Locke will always be present through their art. The studio still contains several large works by both of them, including pieces that never left the space or haven’t been seen in 25 years.
“It’s really special to have these around, to be able to bridge the history,” Wheeler said. A hot spot
There is one caveat to the Splendora plan: The studio is not air-conditioned.
In the old days, the magic of the place transcended that, Locke said. After all, it was about communing with nature.
Surls worked in the space all those years without climate control. “I thought heat rash was just part of your attire,” he said, joking.
But Locke remembers a gala dinner they hosted for visiting museum professionals who were in Houston for a conference at the Menil Collection in the early 1990s.
“Everybody was dripping. We couldn’t have enough fans,” she said.
They expect to eventually install some climate control, in small sections of the big building and several others where they’d like to have a library and show drawings.
“There’s no need to get ahead of the reality of what we can do,” Surls said. “But if you analyze a one-year, two-year, five-year, 10-year plan, it is our expectation that in five years, this place is not going to look the way it looks today. It will grow and change in meaningful ways.”