Longnecker Gallery collects new stories in a new space
The works comprising “Collected Stories” create a short, intriguing tour. The two artists represented — Floyd Newsum and Meredith “Butch” Jack — didn’t collaborate for the show, but they are friends and colleagues, and their work, it turns out, intertwines naturally. The exhibition at Nicole Longnecker Gallery offers a flow from bright acrylic and oil-on-paper works by Newsum and slender sculptures by Jack. Neither draws from the other. Rather, they cut a path through a new gallery space that feels lovingly assembled and natural.
The exhibition is the inaugural show at the gallery in its new confines. To spin around the bright yet warm gallery space is to see Newsum’s explosive use of color interweaving with Jack’s subtle, twisting shapes that stretch from midnight blue to dark black depending on perspective.
Each artist prompts a different physical reaction. Newsum — a longtime Houston resident who works at the University of Houston-Downtown — creates mesmerizing paintings that draw the eye to flat surfaces that reveal data according to perspective. Step forward, and you see the paint in vibrant swirls. Step back, and shapes reveal themselves: houses, mushrooms, faces, dogs, fish. Step forward again, and little details grab the eye: themes that unite his work, such as ladders, with their metaphorical lift.
“He’s a storyteller,” Longnecker says of Newsum. “So he uses his work to talk about community. Things that bring people together. There’s so much folklore here.”
Where Newsum’s works reward long looks for the data revealed — shapes that subtly emerge from the periphery or little three-dimensional entities affixed to the canvas — Jack’s come to life when circled as their shapes are unsolvable riddles that are somehow better understood through circling the powder-coated steel.
Several of his pieces in the show are part of a series designed to honor Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancus. They strike a tantalizing balance between austere — vertical shapes with a charcoal exterior — and restless.
The ripples Jack works into the steel for “Constantin’s Rapture” are entrancing. He makes an unforgiving substance flow like melted chocolate. A native of Kansas City, Jack has been in Texas since the mid-1970s and today works as professor emeritus of sculpture at Lamar University in Beaumont.
Formerly on Colquitt, the Longnecker Gallery recently moved to a space that, on first blush, feels unorthodox. But its commitment to presenting work by female artists and people of color always suggested a novel path. Nicole Longnecker Gallery recently moved from an area full of places for art to one surrounded less by purveyors of painting and more by companies that could help you renovate a bathroom, serviceable institutions with serviceable names like Flowserve.
But the move wasn’t simply an attempt to set the gallery apart from a cluttered space around Kirby and Richmond. Rather, the Nicole Longnecker Gallery now shares an astounding warehouse type space near the northwest corner of the Loop with businesses that seek not to sell art, but to provide services to clients of means. The gallery sits inside a giant space largely dedicated to Alara, a storage spot and garage for those who own automobiles that are best protected from the wear and tear Houston presents on its streets. Another section caters to those who acquire rare bottles of wine. The space, renovated aggressively more than a year ago, is designed as a hub for affluent collector culture. The tenants within represent very different areas of interest — art, cars, wine — but the overlap among the clientele is formidable.
Right now the Longnecker Gallery is operating through appointments.
But the hope is to use the area in new ways. Already storage and safety are an upgrade, as the building has a fully modern system for stifling fires. Turns out desirable objects — whether they hang on a wall or roll down the street — require similar degrees of security.