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Article
"Broken Obelisk and Racial Justice in Houston" Cite Digital, 9 September 2020 Dedicated in 1971, Broken Obelisk has stood in a reflecting pool outside the Rothko Chapel for fifty years as a memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. When John and Dominique de Menil initially offered to bring the sculpture to Houston, however, they proposed neither the dedication to King nor the Rothko Chapel as site. In examining the history of the commission, this essay reveals how the couple used the sculpture to make a powerful statement about racial justice. It also uncovers a little-known connection between Broken Obelisk and Houston's first public monument, a statue of Confederate Lieutenant Richard W. “Dick” Dowling, which may have influenced their decision to make the sculpture a memorial to King. Read the article. |
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Book Chapter
"Robert Smithson" Charles A. Birnbaum and Scott Craver, eds., Shaping the Postwar Landscape: New Profiles from the Pioneers of American Landscape Design Project (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2018). Shaping the Postwar Landscape is the latest contribution to the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s well-known reference project, Pioneers of American Landscape Design, the first volume of which appeared nearly a quarter of a century ago. The present collection features profiles of seventy-two important figures, including landscape architects, architects, planners, artists, horticulturists, and educators. Read more about the book. |
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Review
Ed Ruscha and the Great American West Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 4.1 (Spring 2018). The contributors to the catalogue, Breuer, Kerry Brougher, and D. J. Waldie, each explore a set of key critical themes in the artist’s oeuvre that have defined the American West for Ruscha and prove to be deeply interconnected, including the vernacular landscape of the open road, the topography of Los Angeles, and Hollywood cinema. Although these subjects are standard points of address in the literature on Ruscha, the exhibition’s focus on the American West brings a fresh perspective to the analysis of his work... Read more. |
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Review
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971 caa.reviews (23 March 2018). Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971, the first museum exhibition to chronicle the eleven-year run of Virginia Dwan’s bicoastal gallery, anticipates the promised gift of the art dealer’s collection to the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC. During a period of incredible transformation in American and European art, Dwan was at the forefront... Read more. |
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Journal Article
"Curating on Campus, a Dialogue" with Andrée Bober Public Art Dialogue vol. 7, no. 1, Higher-Ed: College Campuses and Public Art (May 2017): 90-103. “How do you build a model program for campus art from the ground up?” This is the question Andrée Bober faced a decade ago as founding director of Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas (UT) at Austin. The program stems from a 2005 university policy that aimed to engage the campus community by presenting works of art in the public realm. Bober's vision not only transformed the university's landscape, but also established Landmarks as a leading public art program in the country. Download the article. |
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Book Chapter
"The Memory Frame: Set in Stone, a Dialogue" with Paul Druecke Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie, eds., A Companion to Public Art (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2016). For his projects, Paul Druecke has solicited strangers door to door, christened a park and courtyard, rolled out the red carpet, been a benefactor, initiated a Board of Directors, and memorialized the act of memorialization. Recent projects have resulted in permanent, public installations of bronze plaques that commemorate their own quasi-legitimacy. Read more about the book. |
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Journal Article
Claes Oldenburg's Geometric Mouse Nierika: Revista de Estudios de Arte (Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México) vol. 4, no. 7 (enero-junio 2015): 46-57. Published in a special issue on multiples in sculpture that I edited with Sarah Beetham. Claes Oldenburg’s Geometric Mouse, Scale X – Red (1971) stands outside the public library in Houston’s Civic Center. It is made up of a square with two rectangular windows punched out for eyes, and two circles that are the mouse’s ears, with a more organic appendage that Oldenburg identified as “the nose.” Read more. |
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Review
From the Factory to the Street Art Journal 70 (Winter 2011): 114-116. Large Scale: Fabricating Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s is a collection of nearly four hundred photographs that document the fabrication of sculpture at Lippincott Inc. during the company’s first fifteen years of operation. Jonathan D. Lippincott—son of the firm’s founder and president, Donald Lippincott, and the design manager at Farrar, Straus and Giroux—selected the photographs from about ten thousand images that make up the company archive. Read more via JSTOR. |
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Time Lines and Supporting Text
Cedar Mesa: Moki Dugway, Navajo Nation Time Line, Cedar Mesa: Ancestral Pueblo Occupation, Bureau of Land Management, Lake Mead Time Line, Double Negative, Great Basin Geomorphology, Horseshoe Canyon, Bosque del Apache Time Line, Ana Mendieta, Acoma Time Line, Spiral Jetty, Chaco Canyon: Ancestral Pueblo Time Line, Chaco Canyon: Excavation and Preservation Time Line, Roden Crater Project, Wendover, Sun Tunnels, Grand Canyon, Colorado Plateau Geomorphology, Turkey Springs, Chihuahuan Desert Geomorphology, Marfa, Texas, Time Line, Donald Judd, Juan Mata Ortiz, Cebolla Canyon, Very Large Array, The Lightning Field, Otero Mesa Time Line, Glen Canyon Time Line, National Recreation Areas, and John Wesley Powell Bill Gilbert and Chris Taylor, Land Arts of the American West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009). Read more about the book. |
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Catalogue Essay
Erin Curtis: Perspective Threshold Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX, October 8 - November 14, 2009. Erin Curtis succinctly describes her art as taking architecture as “both subject and substance." Which is to say that Curtis’ work is, in part, fundamentally about space. Over the last several years, she has created a group of houses out of large-scale paintings, found textiles, derelict furniture, and architectural fragments. These painterly environments address the problems of pictorial space at an architectural scale... Read more. |
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Arts Feature
Fuse Box Collaboration Project Glasstire: Texas Visual Art Online (21 May 2008). For the Fuse Box Collaboration Project, curators Ron Berry and Jade Walker set up artists on what amounted to a ten-day blind date. They paired five Austin-based artists with five artists who live in a different city and work in a different medium. The artists were asked to collaborate during the run of the Fuse Box Festival (April 24 – May 3) while competing for a $5,000 prize. Individual works by the participating artists were shown in the exhibition Double Reality at the Salvage Vanguard Theater. Their collaborative works were showcased in Double Fantasy at Big Medium. Read more. |
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Catalogue Essay
Chris Taylor Atelier 2008 Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, April 19 - June 8, 2008. |
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Catalogue Essay
Yoon Cho: Nothing Lasts Forever Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX, April 3 - May 10, 2008. Perhaps the best way to begin to consider the work of an artist concerned with the performance of identity is with the photographs she has made of herself. In the Texas Self-Portrait series, six schematic images overlay six life-sized photographs of Yoon Cho. Each image posits a different answer to the question: What defines one’s identity? Is it a classic marker –the thumbprint? Is it where one lives? Or is it a set of biological data –the sum of our parts? Read more. |
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Catalogue Essays
Meggie Chou, Ali Fitzgerald, Alyson Fox, Baseera Khan, Museum of Natural & Artificial Ephemerata: (Jen Hirt and Scott Webel), Jill Pangallo, Matthew Rodriguez, Sarah Sudhoff, Raymond Uhlir, and Stephanie Wagner New Art in Austin: 20 to Watch Austin Museum of Art, Austin, TX, February 16 - May 11, 2008. |
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Arts Feature
Making the Scene The Austin Chronicle (24 August 2007). Anyone who's ever taken a 19th or 20th century art-history class has probably felt a little inundated by the parade of "-isms," movements, and schools that generally shape how we think about art. Attach a few artists' names and stylistic traits to these headings, and you're ready for the exam (or, perhaps, the museum), where images of paintings loom on a screen (or a white wall), devoid of context, ready for your appreciation. But did anyone ever test your knowledge of a scene? Read more. |
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Arts Feature
Site Unseen The Austin Chronicle (23 March 2007). Just inside the Austin Museum of Art's entrance, four rough-hewn stones, each one a little smaller than a shoe box, are mounted high on the wall. The stones are arranged in a row that's not quite straight, but their placement is very deliberate – a look at the wall label reveals the work's title, From the Making of Mount Rushmore (1986), and provides a clue to the stones' arrangement, which mimics the position of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln's iconic portraits carved out of a mountain in South Dakota. These stones were removed from the base of Mount Rushmore by Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, an artist couple who worked collaboratively from 1985 until Ericson's death a decade later. Read more. |
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Interview
Smile Forever: Interview with Michael Sieben Glasstire.com: Texas Visual Art Online (20 April 2007). AD: There is a lot going on in Smile Forever, your current show at Art Palace: paintings, drawings and one giant sculpture. Across the board, your subject seems to be, for lack of a better word, monsters. How long have you been working on these guys and where did they come from? MS: I’ve been working within this style for over 10 years now. The characters in my work evolved from a fascination with children’s book illustration, combined with skateboarding illustration from the 1980s. The marriage of the two styles resulted in imagery that is cute but gross. I like to use the term “soft-core gore” when describing my imagery. Read more. |
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Arts Feature
Curatorial Reportage The Austin Chronicle (24 November 2006). In the visual arts, we talk a lot about the white cube, a pristine gallery that promotes a focus on discrete objects displayed in a purportedly neutral space. There are no windows, fixtures, or anything else that might distract from the art enclosed therein. There is no place, no context, except that of Art. There is no time, only eternity. The white cube enshrines objects as Works: autonomous, self-contained, whole. It is the kind of space that signals what is inside it is art, that this art is contemporary, and that no running, touching, or maybe even talking, is allowed. Read more. |
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Arts Feature
From Stuff, Art The Austin Chronicle (14 July 2006). Chances are you'll notice at least one of the four modified "Exit" signs by Austin artist Kurt Dominick Mueller, installed in various places high up on the walls at Arthouse at the Jones Center. The sentiment expressed by the whole group, "Stay Here For a While," is a polite request that you might want to take Mueller up on. Arthouse is crammed with a whopping 72 artworks for the 21st iteration of "New American Talent." This year Arthouse invited Aimee Chang, curator of contemporary art at the Orange County Museum of Art in Southern California – she's also an alumna of UT-Austin's graduate program in art history – to jury its annual nationwide talent search. Chang narrowed the field of around 1,100 submissions from 48 states down to 56 artists. As Chang readily admits, she squeezed in as much work as she could, but what the show lacks in visual-fatigue space, it makes up for with sheer energy and a squeaky-clean installation. Read more. |
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Arts Feature
A Walk Around Donald Judd’s Block Glasstire.com: Texas Visual Art Online (2 November 2005). This year’s Chinati Foundation Open House was its eleventh since Donald Judd's death in 1994, but you still felt like no one would bat an eye if Judd walked in, pulled up a chair, and sat down for a round of tequila shots. And if Judd did come back to his old haunts, it would seem he wouldn’t find much amiss: there are dishes in the kitchens, sheets on all of the beds, even Judd’s favorite bedtime reading on the nightstand at one of his ranches outside of town. Read more. |
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Arts Feature
Paul Druecke - A Snapshot Glasstire.com: Texas Visual Art Online (2 January 2005). Of all the work Paul Druecke has shown in the last few months, my favorite piece is the only one that wasn’t exhibited somewhere in Houston. Travelogue (2004) debuted in September at the Jody Monroe Gallery in Milwaukee, the artist’s hometown. This was appropriate, since Druecke’s fourth self-published book recounts his travels in The Genuine American City. The book is comprised of twenty note cards, each of which includes a photograph on one side, and a dated journal entry on the other. Part meditation, part diary, Travelogue charts some of Druecke’s past projects, as well as his everyday movements through the city: the alley behind his house, the empty patch of cement he passes by on the way to work, the glowing night-time windows he enjoys while walking at night. Read more. |
For a list of Exhibition Reviews, see my CV.
