A vivid sense of absence
The start of another visual art season should be full of anticipation, but this year it feels empty.
Four influential members of the community, from different branches of the tree, have died of natural causes in the past six weeks, leaving a broad void.
The news began July 8 with the passing of the quietly prolific painter Perry House, 75, whose health had been failing awhile. The 95-year-old Venezuelan kinetic master Carlos Cruz-Diez, whose work has long been key to the city’s Latin American art scene, died July 27. The salty feminist Nancy Reddin Kienholz, an internationally known photographer and assemblage artist, passed away on Aug. 7 at the age of 75. Then, in a cruel kicker, the patron and collector Marshal Lightman, 74, who connected all those disparate dots, died unexpectedly on Aug. 11.
“They were all part of this weird and fabulous chemistry that makes Houston tick,” suggests Museum of Fine Arts, Houston curator Alison de Lima Greene.
Author Pete Gershon, who has been documenting the city’s art history for some years, calls the crush of bad news “an existential crisis.” His hefty recent book, “Collision: The Contemporary
Art Scene in Houston, 1972-1985,” captures the highlights of a foundational era that shaped one of the country’s most vibrant art communities, but there’s so much more he’d like to tell, so much more he’d like to hear. And the people who could tell those stories are slipping away faster than he can catch them all.
Gershon was feeling especially morose about Lightman. They were planning to meet soon, to digitize piles of VHS tapes Lightman had saved of his early Looking at Art classes, an enterprise that has supported the careers of countless artists during the past 30 years.
“We can’t just always think everybody’s a phone call away,” Gershon says.
The perceptionist
Any Houstonian with open eyes knows the work of Carlos Cruz-Diez, who lived in Paris. His monumental “Double Physichromie” sculpture, a key holding of the University of Houston’s public art collection, snakes across ground near the university’s welcome center. On an even grander but more ephemeral scale, his “Spacial Chromointerference” installation enlivened the Buffalo Bayou Cistern from last May until January.
Cruz-Diez’s theories of color and light play out through various types of perception-challenging work, including Physichromies (three-dimensional hanging pieces that appear to change color as viewers walk by), Chromosaturations (immersive installations of pure color) and Chromo-Interference Environments (rooms with projected bands of color).
Starting in the postwar period of the 1950s, Cruz-Diez experimented as no other artist had before to liberate color from the two-dimensional plane — engaging it as a “living organism” that evolves in space and time, says Mari-Carmen Ramírez, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s powerhouse curator of Latin American art. “He made us see and experience color as a pure and sensuous pleasure; a participatory, interactive experience open to everyone, regardless of age, class, culture or social standing … . Despite the complex scientific and aesthetic theory that supports it, his work is easily accessible to anyone who cares to experience it.”
Cruz-Diez enjoyed rock-star status but was never elitist, says art dealer Maria Inés Sicardi, the founder of Houston’s 25-year old Sicardi|Ayers|Baccino gallery. Probably closer to el Maestro than anyone else in town, Sicardi has represented him for 17 years, last visiting the artist about 10 days before he died. Though he no longer traveled, she says, he was lucid and engaged with his work, thrilled that she’d gone to see his new installation in Brussels to bring him pictures of it.
Longtime Sicardi gallery partner Allison Ayers still tears up when she talks about Cruz-Diez, who would have turned 96 on Aug. 17. He was like family, Ayers says. The gallery featured the artist in six solo shows, building his collector base in the U.S. as well as collaborating with museums and managing his public artworks. “Houston really became his home in the U.S. … This is where the historic pieces were saved,” Ayers says. The nonprofit Cruz-Diez Art Foundation, which preserves the artist’s legacy through exhibitions and other projects, also is based here.
Ramírez and Hector Olea introduced Cruz-Diez to a broader public with their seminal
2004 group exhibition “Inverted Utopias.” His 1966 “Chromosaturation” environment — a multiroom experience — was such a hit, she organized his first largescale museum retrospective in 2011, an epic undertaking that featured more than 150 works. The MFAH’s collection now holds more than 10 major Cruz-Diez works, some of which will be featured again prominently when the new Kinder Exhibition Building opens next year.
A driving force
Some folks might not like the idea of sitting in a car for eternity, but Nancy Reddin Kienholz’s cremated remains are taking the driver’s seat alongside her late husband and art partner, Ed Kienholz, who is buried in a 1940 Packard Coupe atop a mountain in Idaho. “The family never let him drive,” says their longtime friend Sharon Kopriva, one of a number of Houston artists who were close to the pioneers of enigmatic assemblage art.
Nancy, who also was a photojournalist, collaborated with Ed from 1972 until his death in 1994 on challenging sculpture that held little sacred. Relentlessly probing social injustice with vignettes built from ephemera they found at junk shops, their work is collected by museums around the world. The Contemporary Arts Museum hosted the Kienholzes’ traveling retrospective in 1984-85, and they had reason to return because Ed’s buddy Walter Hopps was the founding director of the Menil Collection. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showed their “Merry-Go-World or Begat by Chance and the Wonder Horse Trigger” in 1993, a large-scale, participatory piece that invited viewers to spin a disk to learn how they might be reincarnated. None of the options were too appealing. “It was our first immersive installation in a way,” Greene says.
About that time, the Kienholzes bought a home in the Heights, which was a lot funkier then, and a number of Houston artists became regulars every summer at their compound in Hope, Idaho. “They really came to Houston to lay low and be quiet. Like a lot of artists, they wanted their studio time,” Greene says.
The city’s freewheeling spirit must have appealed to the Kienholzes, along with its abundance of talented young artists that included the late Lucas Johnson, the Art Guys and others they embraced with generosity, respect and support. Kopriva and her husband, Gus Kopriva, met them the night the Menil Collection opened in 1987. The two couples were still careening together through town at breakfast the next day.
Kopriva, now nationally known herself, credits the Kienholzes with expanding her vision, encouraging her to create tableaus. She and Kelly Moran were with Nancy when she died. Still, her friends expected her to rebound. “She had plans,” Kopriva says. “About an hour before she passed, she was still talking about going to Idaho.”
And what a character, all of Kienholz’s friends say. Dan Allison, who also palled around with her, calls Kienholz the best storyteller he ever knew. “If Richard Pryor and Robin Williams could come back from the grave and sit down for lunch with us, she would be by far the funniest person at the table,” he says.
A House of his own
Allison has also been sharing memories of Perry House, whose work Allison exhibited several times in the past decade, when he operated a gallery on Colquitt. “Perry was hitting home runs every time he was at bat … which was about every day,” he says.
House’s big public moment came in 1985, when one of his early canvases was in the landmark “Fresh Paint: The Houston School” exhibition that put his generation of Houston artists on the map. That untitled canvas, and others in the same vein, contains layers of tangled trails. Just starting to paint, House wanted to achieve something like literature, he later said, “with chapters and a density that you had to go through and find the beginning and the end.” As the years passed, fellow artists appreciated him as a “painter’s painter,” but House’s always evolving style was hard to define. PaperCity’s Catherine Anspon pegged one period as “pop mystic.” His later “Helter Skelter” and “Happyville” series dazzle with detailed grids of neighborhoods, viewed from above, inspired by surveillance cameras. His last show, at the defunct Zoya Tommy Gallery, filled several walls with grids of small canvases that are kind of all over the place, a testament to House’s reputation as a “painting machine.”
“My art has always been about some particular opposites,” he says in a video made a few years ago at the Art Car Museum. “Elegance and violence, humor and horror, the sacred and the profane. Things are sectioned, distorted and exploded. That’s been my artist’s statement as long as I can remember.”
His work still deserves a wider audience. Finding notoriety is “such a crapshoot,” Greene says. “But Perry decided he was going to paint what he wanted to paint, and he didn’t go out of his way to be known. Fame is not every artist’s goal.” House also focused on teaching. He was an influential and beloved instructor at Houston Community College for about 30 years.
Dealer Deborah Colton has filled her gallery this weekend with a special tribute show that will remain up 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Sunday-Monday at 2445 North Blvd.
Community catalyst
Marshal Lightman came to Houston as an executive with Gilbane, the construction firm where he spent his career. But for about 30 years, he worked equally hard within Houston’s art community — sharing his financial expertise, building industry knowledge and good humor with the boards of major organizations that included the MFAH’s Core Program, the Houston Arts Alliance, Lawndale Art Center and DiverseWorks.
He was a big personality with a big heart, sculptor and Glassell School of Art director Joe Havel says. “In some ways, he had the same kind of heart an artist has. He wanted to be at the grassroots.”
A founding member of a committee to support the nascent Core Program in the early 1990s, Lightman threw a party every year for the school, cooking for everyone at the West End home he shared with his wife and soulmate of 42 years, Victoria Hodge Lightman. “Their collection shows a breadth of spirit that was key to who he was, as well as Victoria,” Havel says.
Lightman was remarkably generous to individuals — the kind of guy who, if your studio needed structural repairs, would bring a buddy from Gilbane over to examine it, Havel adds. “He was gregariously in love with the artists and became like family to many.”
During 30 years of leading their popular Looking at Art studio tours, the Lightmans helped hundreds of artists to mature, along with a generation of collectors. “Looking at Art people are the ones who buy art now,” Kopriva says.
Greene, too, sings Lightman’s praises. “More than anyone, he made sure I finished my Texas book. He helped me raise money, but the writing was also going slowly, and he sat me down and said, ‘This is important. Get it done.’ ” He was always straightforward but never mean, she says. “He propelled things along.”
Lightman was alone at the couple’s newly rebuilt home in Rockport when he died, discovered the next day by a fishing buddy. The news stunned everyone who knew him, including me.
There is so much I could say. He loved Victoria. He never cooked in small quantities. He could fill a room but always looked stealthy in black. He loved a bargain. He always had the latest electronics. A proper celebration of his life will be held in the fall.