Chronicling Houston’s art ‘Collision’
Pete Gershon had never heard of Bert Long Jr. when he was hired in March 2012 to help the ailing Houston artist organize 40 years of professional papers and studio ephemera.
About a year later, after Gershon and Long had spent countless hours together, the artist died. But Gershon, an aspiring archivist who had published an experimental music magazine for 15 years, felt nowhere near finished. “Almost every day, I thought of another question I had neglected to ask him,” Gershon writes in his long-awaited book, “Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston, 19721985.”
Gershon published a smaller book about the city’s major folk-art sites, “Painting the Town Orange,” in 2014, and earned a master’s degree in library and information science in 2015 while working full time as the program coordinator for the Glassell School of Art’s Core Residency Program. But he was committed to documenting a history of Houston art he felt was slipping away.
Many of the now veteran artists featured in “Collision” will join Gershon at the book’s official launch on Sunday and are included in the related exhibition he curated. The show at the Glassell focuses on teachers or former teachers of the school, representing a wide variety of techniques, including printmaking, sculpture, assemblage and painting.
The show is a fun, way-back machine for viewers who have matured with these artists. But young people are intrigued, too, with some especially drawn to James Surls’ ominous but witty carved sculpture and the Art Guys’ glittering totems made from recycled bottles, Gershon said. “It makes me feel so good that they can connect.”
The book, of course, is a permanent, impeccably researched deep dive. It’s essential reading about the city’s history — not just its arts scene — capturing the free-for-all spirit, optimism and social issues of the 1970s and ’80s.
“What impressed me was the depth of the story and the depth of the relationships between these artists,” Gershon said.
The book’s title refers both to a show at Lawndale Annex in 1984 and to the spirit of a combustible era that brought clashes between artists with different viewpoints, between artists and administrators and between art itself and perceptions of what art was supposed to be.
Gershon frames his story between the 1972 opening of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s permanent home — a few steps from the more staid Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — and the MFAH’s landmark 1985 show of regional artists, “Fresh Paint.” “The years in between, that’s a real distinct era where the city’s art scene was finding its way, figuring out what it even was,” the author said.
During those boom years, the price of oil also skyrocketed, bringing a gusher of new money to a town that was seriously loosening up. (Restaurants, for example, began selling alcohol by the glass.) Then a bust cycle happened, which was mirrored in the art community for various reasons. A lot of Houstonians thought “Fresh Paint” would be a national breakthrough, as if “suddenly everybody was going to have a New York gallery, and Houston’s art scene was going to be considered on the same level as Los Angeles or Chicago,” Gershon said.
The time frame also yielded lively stories. In 1972, patrons excited to see architect Gunnar Bickerts’ new metal-clad building were shocked by the experimental art that CAMH director Lefty Adler gathered. He mounted a literal stinker of a show whose most notorious piece was a tier of caged critters, including cats (some of which died), rats and cockroaches (some of which escaped).
“It was the first time somebody had really offered this kind of new ideas,” Gershon said. Adler was quickly fired. His successor, Jim Harithas, was a different kind of provocative. “If it weren’t for him, we would not have the scene we have today,” Gershon said.
The well-connected former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Harithas filled the CAMH with shows by regional artists, insisting that their work was as good as art from anywhere else. “He had the credentials to say that and be taken seriously,” Gershon said. Harithas left the CAMH in late 1978, then cofounded the politically charged Station Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Car Museum with his wife, Ann Harithas, who had curated Lawndale’s “Collision” show.
The book also covers the parallel stories of Lawndale and the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, which fought for fair representation of female artists. But after six years and 444 pages, Gershon still doesn’t feel quite done.
“This is something I’m really trying to approach with a lot of care — the idea that this is a bigger project than just the book or just this show,” he said. “It’s going to be a whole series of shows and online content and side projects.”
He’s grown to appreciate a generation of artists who felt forgotten for years. A few, including Surls, John Alexander and Mel Chin, broke out and “did pretty well for themselves,” Gershon noted, but many stayed in Houston for decades when they were deemed inferior because they were not from someplace else. Many of them “were making art in a really authentic way” as a result, he added. They weren’t cranking out work because it would sell but because it was what they wanted to do. And they stayed because Houston was a cheap place to live, where they could afford big (albeit often un-air-controlled) studios.
Gershon was still a kid sorting baseball cards and watching “The Dukes of Hazzard” in Schenectady, N.Y., when the stories unfolded. “I know people are going to read it and think, ‘That’s not how I remember things being,’ ” the author said. “I’m merely interpreting the archives and the information I have gathered from interviews with over 80 people. If you talk to 10 people about the same incident, they’re all going to remember it slightly differently. But patterns start to develop, and you begin to understand what the truth probably was, or an interpretation of the truth.”