Houston influences art world

I thought this article from the NYTimes might be of special interest to the artists and art lovers on the BBS:

New Yorkers Now, Their Gifts Were Nurtured in Texas
By EDWARD M. GOMEZ

SEVERAL fast-emerging artists in New York have been generating the kind of creative heat that tends to catch the art world's attention — and lately has. All of them — Susie Rosmarin, Giles Lyon, Jeff Elrod and Julie Mehretu — are painters, and their work, ideas and personalities are unmistakably varied. But their professional histories have something in common, perhaps unexpectedly: strong, formative links to Texas, specifically to Houston's vibrant art scene.

"In Houston, there's a lot going on, but you're never overwhelmed by all the art that's available," said Ms. Rosmarin, a painter of bold, geometric abstractions who moved from Houston to New York four years ago. "There's no pressure to follow any dominant trend. It's easier to develop in a place like that."

Ms. Rosmarin's dealer in Houston, Fredericka Hunter, the director of the Texas Gallery, agrees. "Houstonians are especially nonhierarchical," she said, "without the social or economic restrictions you see, say, in Dallas. "For artists, if there's something they want to do, they can make it here."

Ms. Hunter, who has been involved in Houston's contemporary-art scene for three decades, credited the city's museums for supporting local artists. "Curators are really tapped into the local scene, where interest in abstract or nonrepresentational painting has been especially strong."

Ms. Rosmarin's abstract work is on view in her first solo show in New York, at the Danese gallery. Before heading north, Ms. Rosmarin, 52, worked in the shipping and receiving department of Tootsie's, a women's clothing store in Houston run by her brother. Her paintings, with their energetic colored grids and stripes, have been influenced, she said, by the gingham checks and other fabrics she saw there. Recently she based a painting on a pattern on a miniskirt that caught her eye in Chinatown.

"My early paintings were more conceptual, more mathematical," she said at her studio in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn. "I liked Sol LeWitt's art and made my own `all-the-variations-of' works based on geometric shapes." In black and white, Ms. Rosmarin painted the fuzzy gray "snow" of blank television screens, an early exercise in replicating random patterns in the everyday environment.

Later she developed a technique in which she marked off sections of canvases with narrow strips of masking tape. When painted over with acrylic, the canvases yielded precisely measured horizontal stripes after she removed the tape. By painting stripes in the same manner perpendicular to each previous layer of stripes, Ms. Rosmarin found that she could make either spontaneous or more controlled grid-based patterns that recalled woven or printed fabrics.

Well known among her peers as a disciplined artist who often experiments on small canvases before making larger ones, Ms. Rosmarin feels strongly, she said, that her work "is about sensation."

"For a long time in science and art, we've mistrusted our senses," she added. "But there's no irony in my work. I'm interested in the experience of seeing. I've had it with postmodernist cynicism that doesn't allow you to appreciate painting or a painting as an object. I'm interested in what we know through our sensory perceptions."

Ms. Rosmarin, who admires the hard-edged works of the veteran, tape-and-paint abstractionist Al Held, said she does not paint over errors. "If I make a visible mistake in a line of color, I don't fix it," she said. "It's all part of the process."

Giles Lyon said: "Susie's obsessed with process. As an artist, she's the real deal."

Mr. Lyon, 35, who shows his wildly abstract, mixed-media canvases at Feigen Contemporary in Chelsea, got to know Ms. Rosmarin after he arrived in Houston in 1989 to take part in the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art, which is operated by the Museum of Fine Arts. Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, the artist-run Core Program provides young artists with stipends and studio spaces for up to two years. It has become one of the most renowned museum-sponsored residency programs in the United States. Recently it started accepting critic-curator participants, too.

In an interview at Feigen, Mr. Lyon, a buoyant and loquacious native of New Jersey, recalled that thanks to the Core Program, he and his fellow artists "could really dive in and not think about anything except our work." In the 1980's, he said, Houston's "nascent art scene" was nurtured by Core Program alumni who remained in the city after their residencies ended to start their professional careers.

"I was probably as influenced by the sky and the light and the space in Texas as I was by the people I met there," Mr. Lyon said. An admirer of the painter Philip Guston's cartoonish abstract art, he said: "I don't want a painting to be a picture. I would like it to be a thing." With titles like "King Kong Napalm" and "Star Stock," his thickly encrusted works on canvas feature biomorphic squiggles, scattered puddles of color, thickets of Dr. Seussesque protrusions and such collaged items as cut-up credit cards and his grandfather's old neckties. "I'm fascinated by all the complexity in the world today," Mr. Lyon said. "Essentially, my work is about sprawl."

By contrast, the work of Jeff Elrod, 35, a native of Texas and a Core Program alumnus from the early 1990's, seems less dynamic and more studied. Mr. Elrod, who shows his work at Leo Koenig Inc. in SoHo, earned an art degree at the University of North Texas in Denton at a time when the artist-teacher Vernon Fisher was regarded as especially influential there. (Mr. Fisher is known for a wide-ranging body of conceptualist works that often combine texts and images.)

To create his spare canvases of nearly all-over color, Mr. Elrod first makes sketches with computer-based drawing programs. Using projections and masking tape to "draw" razor-sharp lines, he transfers an image line for line to canvas. After rolling paint onto a canvas, he removes the tape to yield larger versions of his initial sketches. Technically and aesthetically, Mr. Elrod's work combines analog (that is, handmade) and digital (or high-tech).

"He's plugged into so many interesting ideas," Mr. Lyon said of the inventiveness and concentration that Mr. Elrod, his friend, brings to his work. "He's a maniac."

JULIE MEHRETU, 31, who was born in Ethiopia and grew up in Michigan, has made the evolving nature of urban space a central theme of her abstract paintings and drawings. A Core Program resident from 1997 to 1999, she now keeps a studio in Harlem near the Project, the gallery that represents her in New York.

Ms. Mehretu, who has lived around the world, is now exhibiting a large painting, "Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation" (2001), in "Out of Site," a group show at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in SoHo. She also just exhibited her work at the White Cube art space in London.

"Houston offered a completely different visual experience," Ms. Mehretu said. "It was very open, sprawling, without a traditional center. I was there when, working backward, this largely suburban place renovated neighborhoods to create more of a downtown."

Ms. Mehretu uses a computer to make drawings or manipulate source material like architectural plans of airports, then she transfers this imagery to her canvases. Streams of dashes, arcing lines and colored forms swirl tempestuously in the broad pictorial space of her compositions.

While the imagery the artist uses in her work might refer to the actual built environment, she said she thinks of the marks she makes symbolically, "as agents that have character and behave in certain ways, as though they're constructing or deconstructing societies." Humans create and occupy many different kinds of spaces, Ms. Mehretu said. Her works seek to evoke the varied atmospheres and energies that characterize such constructed places.

The Core Program's current director, the sculptor Joseph Havel, attributes the number of notable artists Houston has turned out to its "very risk-taking, freewheeling" atmosphere.

"At first, that's a little disconcerting," he added, "but it also creates opportunities. This program has exploded the art scene and really made it international."

Of course, only time will tell whether these artists' accomplishments, separately or together, will be short-lived or viewed as something more emblematic of the art of an era. For now, though, veteran art watchers like Adam Sheffer, Ms. Rosmarin's dealer at Danese, are beginning to sense an art-historical current that may have a discernible context, even without a name.

"Looking back," Mr. Sheffer said, "many important artists of the 1970's had studied at Yale, and many significant artists of the 1980's were associated with CalArts, in southern California. Who knows? Someday we may look back and see that for many important artists of this period, Houston was that special, influential place."