Saintly Houston artist with a sinner’s past has died
Houston lost a spirit guide and an underappreciated artistic genius with the passing of Forrest Dean Prince on July 24.
An ascetic who made uncompromisingly bold political and moral sculpture, Prince had been in poor health since falling and breaking a hip in May. He was 84.
Prince’s art, which the curator and collector Jim Harithas has called “righteous,” can move viewers with awe, guilt or repulsion, depending on their point of view or personal demons. It’s the kind of work only a sinnerturned-saint could make sincerely, born from a conversion more than 50 years ago.
Prince reduced the dark side of his story — the part about his tough, troubled youth and early life as a hustler — into an oftrepeated sound bite: He was a pimp and a thief, addicted to sex, alcohol and speed, until all that crashed in on him in 1969. As he told it, he woke up one day in a bathroom, bleeding, with a syringe of amphetamines in the back of his leg, and did something he swore he’d never do because he blamed God for taking his mom and making his dad an alcoholic: He asked God to save him.
Friends and family took him in, away from the evils of the city, while he got clean, and something compelled him to make assemblages from objects he found. Although he had no formal art training, he was an exquisite craftsman. His art became his ministry, the medium for messages in works he crafted to perfection, often in heart or cross shapes.
“Praise God” became his mantra, and he incorporated biblical text into many pieces, but Prince did not proselytize about Jesus or even profess to be Christian. Basing his beliefs on the Dead Sea Scrolls, an early version of the Bible sensationalized through bestselling books in the early 1970s, he took a vow of poverty, stopped eating meat, fasted on Sundays and devoted his life to the service of “all living beings” — which could mean feral cats, birds, street people, the elderly or prisoners.
“He didn’t exclude any being,” said patron Laura Fain, whose family has supported Prince since the early 1970s. “They are all God’s creatures.”
Prince saw a little bit of truth in every religion, said Susie Kalil, an art critic and curator who is writing a major book about Prince’s life and art. “He had a personal concoction that worked for him.”
From fractured to whole
Seductively glamorous, mirrored mosaics were his first and most popular signature, beaming out placid messages about love and peace. “Everybody likes those. They’re decorative, and some people call them his disco balls,” Kalil said. But she sees a more challenging brutality in them, too. Prince cut thousands of mirrored pieces to build his mosaics, she noted. “He has taken something fractured and made it whole again. They’re also about reflecting narcissism and darkness. Looking into them, we’re fractured.”
Prince’s fearless political art, often assembled from dozens of found objects within frames or made to resemble signage, is more overtly aggressive. He attacks political corruption, corporate greed, the state of the Earth and the evils of eating meat. The spiritual and political often cross.
“My work, call it Art if you want to, consists of messages to wake you up,” Prince wrote. “I try to make the pieces where it gets your attention. They are signs that teach people who are not likely to read anything beneficial.” He wasn’t judgmental with friends, but he was unyielding about his art: “If the work you are doing is not contributing to peace on earth and the health and welfare of all the creatures who reside here, you are wasting your life and everyone’s time.”
Kalil finds his multi-faceted assemblage and installations impossible to categorize. “He shares sensibilities with visionary artists as well as mainstream artists through different decades. You could also say he’s a folk artist because he taught himself, but he was precise … almost to the point of being obsessive,” she said. “And he was a performance artist. He had a carefully crafted persona … saintly and thin but with such a presence. He had this way of moving, striding with great purpose.”
The artist’s austere diet was a penance. An essay Prince contributed for the April issue of Passage Vision, an online magazine Kalil compiles for Dallas’
Kirk Hopper Gallery, says as much: “I’ve grown spiritually, but I have a long way to go … I’m purifying myself to raise my consciousness so I can be ready to move to another dimension and I haven’t made any progress that I can see.”
He certainly looked the part of a saint with his long, straggly hair and a thin white beard nearly to his waist. His nephew Chad Prince, a kindred spirit who became a film producer, said the artist considered his beard a spiritual antenna, sensitive to vibrations around him, and it might have been a nod to his ancestry. Forrest Prince’s mother, whose maiden name was Cloud, was of Native American descent.
No light without dark
Prince’s life turned rough early.
He had two brothers, one of whom became a government intelligence officer and was killed. They spent their early childhood in West University Place but were uprooted after their mother contracted tuberculosis. She was taken away in an ambulance, to a sanatorium, when Prince was 7 or 8, and he never saw her again. His parents divorced, and his mother died when he was about 10.
His father, a machinist who worked at the Houston Ship Channel, moved to the East End and married several more times. Prince rebelled. At 13, he was living on the streets around Navigation and Wayside. He dropped out of school at 15 and joined the Marines at 17, training at Camp Pendleton near the end of the Korean War. His company shipped overseas but never saw action.
Back home with an honorable discharge, Prince cultivated a less-than-honorable life. He often said wryly his ambition was to become a pimp. He was handsome and, according to Kalil, always on the make. He bounced between jobs at hair salons, dance studios and used-car lots. His artistic side was simmering — at least in a salacious way — in 1968, when he founded a shortlived strip club, Rembrandt’s
Paint Factory (Body Painting Division), where artists painted the dancers’ bodies. Playboy magazine took notice.
At some point, Prince also robbed the home of a former district attorney but managed to cut a deal to avoid prison. “He knew all these people,” Kalil said. She doesn’t like to focus on his dark side but also thinks it’s essential. “You can’t have light without dark. Without all that, could he have become the artist he was?”
Chad Prince was in the fifth or sixth grade when his uncle had the revelation and came to stay with his family for a while. “Overnight he went from being a gangster and pimp,” he said.
He remembers one of the first artworks made with a wooden wagon wheel from an aunt’s rural place in North Zulch, near Madisonville. The family had migrated there from North Carolina during the Great Depression. The wheel was on a pedestal with the words, “Whatever happened to the friggin’ world?”
Prince had art-world friends in high places from the start. Dallas collector Lawrence Marcus, a member of the famous retail family, bought one of his first pieces. Prince was hanging out at the David Gallery, a pioneering contemporary space founded by Dianne David, the daughter of a drilling mud tycoon, when he met the recently widowed Lollie Hamman, Laura Fain’s mother.
Hamman, who was a year younger than Prince, was slightly reluctant to befriend him at first because she knew about his past, her daughter says. But Lollie also was a creative force herself. And after she saw one of Prince’s mirrored pieces on a wall at Tony Mandola’s restaurant, she commissioned the artist to build a mirrored installation in the oval hallway of her Memorial-area home.
The piece took months to create, and Prince was there almost daily, said Fain, who was in her early teens at the time. She and her sister, Elizabeth Oliver, sometimes clock childhood memories as “before Forrest” time, but pretty early on, life was Forrest, she said. “He was incredibly kind, gentle and funny.” Her mother married and divorced someone else but remained one of Prince’s most important benefactors.
“He was someone we came to trust implicitly. There are very few people we feel that way about,” Fain said. “Our mother used to say the good thing about being an adult is you get to pick your own family, and we were lucky enough that he picked us.”
Her mother died in 2015 at about the time Prince was losing a living and studio arrangement near Hobby Airport. Fain and Oliver bought land in the artist enclave known as Itchy Acres, off North Shepherd, and set him up there with his last home and studio.
“We bought the property in honor of Mom,” Fain said. “It’s what she would have wanted.”
Lunch at Govinda’s
Art historian Sandra Jensen Rowland, another longtime, close friend who was a protégé of
Dominique de Menil, also has a book about Prince in progress. That one, titled “Forrest Prince: If You Want to Know the Truth,” is forthcoming from the University of North Texas Press. Rowland said its heart is Prince’s handwritten autobiography, which covers “the good, the bad and the ugly.”
She didn’t know about the artist’s past when they met in 1972. “He always brought goodness, peace and love,” she said. “He was complex, adorable and wonderful.” He was always there when she needed help, also becoming a kind of father figure to her daughter.
Sarah Balinskas met Prince in 1983, when they were studio neighbors at the Midtown Art Center. He put articles on her door that persuaded her to become a vegetarian, and traded art for framing services. “Our first piece of art was ‘You Have Eyes But You Cannot See,’ ” she said. “That was a big deal for me at 23 or 24.” Over the years, he came in periodically with framing jobs, “but I could never charge Forrest. I just couldn’t,” she said.
During his later years, Balinskas sometimes drove Prince around town on errands. People knew him everywhere they went. Prince never passed a street person without giving them a hug and a few dollars, and he spent most of his money on crates of animal food. He fed anything and everything that might be hungry.
His most indulgent act was inviting friends to join him for the buffet lunch at Govinda’s, a vegetarian restaurant adjacent to a Hari Krishna temple in Garden
Oaks. “A big group of artists would show up because he put it together,” Balinskas said. “He touched so many people, across an amazing range.”
Artist Mel Chin, another ardent admirer, wrote a foreword for Rowland’s book. “He believed in god, and despite my advice to him to reconsider, in me,” Chin quipped on Facebook after
Prince died. He first saw Prince’s heart-shaped mosaics 30 years ago. “My post-art-school criticality was full of high-minded opinions and I thought the shape was overused. But… it was intense enough to demand a deeper look, and I mused how it could reflect the accumulated belief of an artist. I even wondered how the bits could represent my own life.”
Now Chin sees himself reflected in a more murky, political work finished with automotive lacquer and a chrome MercedesBenz logo flanked by capitalized text: “WHERE HITLER GOT HIS TANKS.” Its title is “WHERE DID
YOU GET YOURS?”
“Forrest’s unflinching blend of historical fact and questions … will not let us escape self-examination,” Chin wrote.“I see myself in Forrest’s reflections, not as the best or worst of being human, but as trying to find options surrounded by darkness.”
Jim Harithas, the founder of the Station Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Car Museum, has appreciated and collected Prince’s work since the mid-1970s, when Harithas was a renegade director at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He organized Prince’s first show in 1976 at the CAMH.
“His work, as much as any other artist I’ve ever met, involves getting his spiritual mind in order,” Harithas said during a video interview a few years ago. “His work is based on great craftsmanship and profound creativity, a willingness to go all the way and to make as deep a statement as possible. … He’s more than (an) artist who works away in his room.”
Prince also showed his activist side at political protests, and he established the Praise God Foundation in 1983 to raise funds for people in nursing homes. He donated income from his artwork to the foundation, although it had no assets in 2019.
Kalil knew Prince for decades and spent many hours of research time with him in the past year. Her book aims to define Prince’s place in art history. “I don’t see anybody like him, with his uncompromising vision and use of materials,” she said. “He was brilliant in so many ways. … Many people speak truth to power, but he gives form to lived experience.”
As with others to whom she has devoted years of research, including Dorothy Hood, Kalil insists Prince is underrepresented by museums, especially in his hometown. The Menil Collection owns just one of his pieces, donated by a collector. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston owns none.
“Houston is like an art-history book with the pages torn out,” Kalil said.
Working until near the end
The mirrored hallway Prince made for Fain’s mother was years ahead of its time, conceived long before Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored infinity rooms became a hot museum ticket. The house was demolished some years ago, but the artwork was saved and cataloged so that someday, somewhere, it could be rebuilt.
Last year, the sisters who inherited it put the rest of their collection together for a semipermanent exhibition at Spring Street Studios. Kalil hung the works as if it was a museum show, in case Prince didn’t live to see a career retrospective. But he also worked there some, and left several unfinished pieces, including a huge cross-shaped frame containing images of Jesus.
He also was designing an ambitious installation, “Break on Through,” about finding light after darkness. He wanted it to be in a trailer that could travel.
“I’m just gettin’ warmed up,” he told an interviewer in January.
Prince broke his hip during one of his daily rituals, feeding birds. He spent several weeks after surgery in the VA Hospital, then developed an infection from bed sores after he was transferred to a nursing home. He tested negative for COVID-19.
With an assist from Balinskas and others who set up a GoFund-Me account to help pay for private care, Chad Prince got his uncle to another facility in Galveston sometime around July 18. But he couldn’t rally.
Prince’s nephew sat by his side during the artist’s final hours at the University of Texas Medical Branch emergency room. They FaceTimed with Prince’s friends. The nurses gathered around and prayed. “It had me weeping like a child,” Chad Prince said. “It was beautiful. He passed in peace.”
The artist’s surviving family includes Chad’s younger brothers James Hansen Prince and Jonathon Dean Prince, along with cousins.
Prince’s family and friends hope to host a memorial celebration when it’s safe again. “A bunch of his friends want to get together and tell stories,” Chad said. “We’ll have his ashes on a pedestal. It will be a good sendoff.”