After 30-year tenure, Joseph Havel says farewell to Glassell School of Art
Houston-based artist plans to spend more time concentrating on his own creations
On at least two occasions, Joseph Havel noticed a bird had built a nest atop his sculpture “Exhaling Pearls.” As an artist with a current exhibition that found him collaborating with his pet parrot, Havel finds the birds’ approval of his work — a towering, seemingly teetering piece with two orbs connected by a hearty rope — comically comforting.
“It clearly has these heroic overtones,” he says of the work. “But I like that the birds have found a comfortable space there. The museum will clean them off at some point, but I don’t care. It’s just part of the work to me.”
The piece rests amid the other works in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s sculpture garden adjacent to the Glassell School of Art, where Havel has worked for more than 30 years. He has walked past “Exhaling Pearls” countless times over the years.
“For a few years, I’d kind of lower my head when I passed it,” Havel, 68, says. “But now it seems both recognizable and distant. I don’t think I could make something like that today if I tried, frankly. I’m doing things that are more intimate.”
The work will remain, but Havel retired from the Glassell school at the end of last month. The MFAH recently announced Paul Coffey as its new director, and he will step into sizable shoes in July. In addition to “Exhaling Pearls,” Havel left an indelible impression on the Glassell school, reconceiving aspects of its Core residency program, which has over the years had notable artists, such as Trenton Doyle Hancock, Shahzia Sikander, Julie Mehretu and Leodro Erlich, pass through. These artists enjoyed a space in Houston that nurtured their early careers, with the city later receiving the rewards of their work. Erlich’s “Seeing Is Not Believing” installation opened at the MFAH at the end of June; and Sikander’s “Extraordinary Realities,” a solo exhibition, ran at the museum for three months this year.
Havel has also overseen the design of the school’s new home, a $476 million campus expansion that these days offers classes taken by 4-yearold kids with their parents and a 92-year-old woman learning about photography. The new Glassell campus opened in the summer of 2018, enjoying a year and change before the pandemic shut it down. But these days, it buzzes again with activity.
MFAH director Gary Tinterow credited Havel with helping make the school “an essential laboratory for creativity.”
Havel planned to retire one year earlier, “but then COVID hit and management became a much bigger part of my job just to get through this. But I think the school is in a great position now. There are a large range of things happening there again.”
And, he says, “it’s less a retirement than a shift. I keep saying when you’re an artist … Havel laughs. “When you’re an artist, you don’t retire, OK?”
Nouns become verbs
Havel left a tenured position at Austin College in Sherman. But his youth was spent in Minnesota, where he was born. He cites a moment while he was an undergrad at the University of Minnesota as particularly formative: Havel heard the innovative poet John Berryman read. He was drawn to Berryman’s “Dream Song 368,” and a line in the second stanza in particular. The scene Berryman draws ties back to William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: “The airport was closed down. Animals were untied.” Two lines later, Berryman wrote
“all nouns became verbs.”
“I thought, ‘This explains my work,’ ” Havel says. He’d formally studied ceramics, but he also felt inclined to meddle with mediums. By the time he was teaching in Sherman, Havel found himself in his car monthly scouring the city on heavy trash night, where he’d look for discards he could repurpose into art.
“It went back to that Berryman poem,” he says. “Decay and reuse. Taking debris and putting it in this gestural, active situation where it’s reconfigured into a new idea, but still has the history of what these objects had been. In a
different context, they have this fluidity. They’re still active.
“I guess I don’t think about it that much any longer. It’s just intuitive to me.”
Havel recalls a dress shirt he purchased at the insistence of his father. One day, he cut off the collar and used it for a sculpture that, he says, represented both him and his aversion to a desk job pursuit as well as broader commentary on an American workforce. That intuition led Havel to regular walks during sunrise along Galveston Bay, which is where he happened upon a segment of a mooring hawser that had come loose from a boat in the Houston Ship Channel. He used bronze to cast both the rope as well as some paper lanterns that represented his time living near Chinatown in San Francisco. One orb teeters precariously 11 feet above the other. “Exhaling Pearls” lived in his yard for a while, which is when it acquired its first avian tenant.
“When I made it, I said it should go in the middle of a museum sculpture garden,” he says. “Now it’s in the middle of a museum sculpture garden.”
Trading tenure for a new school
Havel says he took the Glassell job in 1991 because he was intrigued by
the Core program, which offers a residency for young artists. “It was an opportunity to be in a major city with a great art scene,” he says. In the early days, he wasn’t all that much older than some of the fellows and students. One of Havel’s first big decisions was to reduce the number of Core fellows in order to offer more money and more space to those chosen for the program.
“I just looked at it from the position of being an artist,” he says. “What would I want? What would be good to continue to make culture? I’ve made some dumb decisions over the years. But that was not one of them.”
So for decades, Havel ran his two pursuits — educator and artist — parallel. His days will now require recalibration. But he’s excited about what that might yield. For years, he’d work on four hours of sleep in order to wake up early and work in his studio before starting his day at Glassell. He’d return to his studio at day’s end and “wrap up technical things, things that didn’t have to do with larger aesthetic decisions.
“So what I’m doing is dropping out the middle part. And I think it’s a good time for somebody new to bring their thoughts and energy to the school.”
After leaving Glassell, Havel says he’ll spend a few months this year in France with his wife, artist Mary Flanagan, and may spend more time near her work when she teaches at Dartmouth.
Havel currently has a show at the Dallas Contemporary titled “Parrot Architecture.” The title is meant to be informative rather than opaque: The pieces are made from cardboard with some assistance from Hannah, Havel’s African grey parrot. Hannah has lived with Havel for 24 years. They began collaborating six years ago when Havel noticed Hannah’s chewing on soft wood blocks bore some resemblance to other sculpture. “Female parrots are nest builders, so they have this instinct to form something. Or sometimes it’s to chew through a box to say ‘Hello.’
“They reminded me of Giacometti. So it became a thing. It was a way for us to communicate.”
Like any artist, Hannah has her preferences for materials. Something about the cardboard of Topo Chico boxes holds particular allure. So Havel’s days are now open for all manner of work, be it alone or with a bird.
“I’m just doing with my parrot what I’ve always done,” he says.
“This all just came out of my life, and things get reconfigured into fluid moments.”
“When you’re an artist, you don’t retire, OK?” Joseph Havel