THE LEGACY OF JOHN BIGGERS’ ART CONTINUES.
The piece: “The Stop” The artist: Roy Vinson Thomas Where: In the show: “Protégés: The Legacy of Dr. John Biggers as Viewed Through the Art Works of Thirteen Students,” on view through Feb. 10 at William Reaves | Sarah Foltz Fine Art
Why: Some of John Biggers former Texas Southern University students from the 1970s have themselves become legends — Kermit Oliver, for instance, and Biggers’ most obvious apostle, TSU professor Harvey Johnson.
Roy Vinson Thomas is one of several in this show who more or less disappeared into the world of secondary education — a place Biggers would have appreciated. Thomas taught high school art for 40 years in Galena Park, a career that apparently consumed most of his art-making energy. He has begun to resurface in recent years, thanks partly to a surge of interest in Houston’s 20th-century art world.
All five of the paintings he contributed to this show are from the 1980s, yet look as if they could have been made a few decades earlier. Thomas has said that Biggers and his other mentor, Caroll Simms, were both demanding technically, but with different approaches. “Biggers would require a personal solution,” he writes. “Simms would require a simple solution.”
Biggers famously implored his AfricanAmerican and Hispanic students to explore the history of their people. In the 1980s, Thomas also clearly looked hard at paintings by Midwestern master Thomas Hart Benton.
“The Stop” has Benton’s sense of motion, with bodies bent into what appear to be gale force winds in an austere environment. They are waiting at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by brown grass. But this is also clearly Houston in the 1980s, maybe out somewhere beyond Fannin and Loop 610, since the Astrodome hovers dimly in the background.
Disconcertingly, the bus stop post splits the composition almost in half, partially obscuring a female figure. Perhaps the pole is a metaphor for cultural barriers blacks face; or whites, looking at pictures of blacks. (From either side, we can have empathy, but we can’t fully grasp what we have not personally experienced.)
The nearly silhouetted arm and hand of another partially seen figure balances the image from an ominous perspective, like something you might see in a noir or Western comic.
Vinson’s sweeping, expressionistic strokes — concentric rings that form the folds in his figures’ garments, blades of brown grass or whispy clouds — set him apart from his dozen classmates, all of whom are still active. The show includes works by Oliver, Johnson, Charles Criner, Gerry Crossland, Karl E. Hall, Earlie Hudnall, Earl S. Jones, Josie Mendoza Postel, Robert Meyers, Elizabeth M. Shelton, Jesse Sifuentes and Charles L. Thomas.
Most artists build in some way on what has come before, but developing one’s own voice under the wing of a teacher as powerful as Biggers was probably not easy. Even viewers who walk into the gallery unaware of what this show is about might recognize the Biggers spirit infusing its paintings and sculptures. The fun lies in how these artists were able to define themselves, as many of them did.
Thomas still thinks of himself as an “emerging newcomer.” He retired from his teaching gig in 2016; hopefully, that has given him a chance to return to his studio and keep it coming.