Announcing a New Series—Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History

Visualidades: Studies in Latin American Visual History seeks to further the exploration of visual history as a distinct field of inquiry on Latin America in dialogue with other disciplinary fields. This series conceptualizes visual history as the study of images and the past in the broadest sense and asks how images have shaped Latin American cultures. The series editors invite projects that both ground visual forms of communication in the rich and complex histories through which they took shape and that examine the direct agency of images in crafting historical narratives, stimulating change, and reshaping thought.

Proposals and queries may be sent to the series editors, Ernesto Capello at ecapello@macalester.edu and Jessica Stites Mor at jessica.stites-mor@ubc.ca, and the acquiring editor Kerry Webb: kwebb@utpress.utexas.edu.

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Dr. Jessica Stites Mor is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Transition Cinema: Political Filmmaking and the Argentine Left since 1968 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), editor of Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), and coeditor of The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2018).

Ernesto Capello is an associate professor of history at Macalester College. He is the author of City at the Center of the World: Space, History, and Modernity in Quito (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

www.utexaspress.com

Q&A with Catha Paquette on Diego Rivera

Collaborations during the Great Depression between Mexican communist artist Diego Rivera and institutions in the United States and Mexico were fraught with risk, as the artist occasionally deviated from course—serving and then subverting his patrons. In her book At the Crossroads, Catha Paquette investigates controversies surrounding Rivera’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, his proposed and revised

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compositions for his Rockefeller Center mural titled Man at the Crossroads, and the Mexican government’s commissioning of the mural’s reconstruction at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She proposes that both the artist and his patrons were leveraging art for extraordinary purposes—to weigh in on debates concerning labor policies and speech rights; relations between the United States, Mexico, and the Soviet Union; and the viability of capitalism, communism, and socialism.

We asked her a few questions about her research and the role of art in public and political life.

Briefly set the scene for Rivera’s dynamic relationships with his patrons at MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and the Palace of Fine Arts during the early to mid 1930s—the circumstances behind their collaborations and conflicts.

The circumstances Rivera and his patrons faced were extraordinary—the intensifying financial crises of the Great Depression; the mixed effects of technological modernization, industrialization, and foreign investment; the competing pressures of nationalism and internationalism; and escalating union, socialist, and communist activism. Relations between the US and Mexico, the US and the Soviet Union, and Mexico and the Soviet Union were in flux. Many US politicians and corporate leaders were intent on thwarting communism, but others wished to exploit trade and investment opportunities in Mexico and the Soviet Union. Although workers’ and activists’ opportunities for public speech and assembly were restricted, recent Supreme Court rulings legitimized independent union organizing and oppositional expression.

What’s interesting is that in the U.S., Mexico, and the Soviet Union those attentive to what was politically and economically at stake trusted in the communicative power of visual culture. Competing constructs of national and class identity and notions of social equivalence and difference were kept in play in works of fine art, commercial art, and popular arts and crafts. Also, art museums and galleries were increasingly emphasizing the social function of art—acknowledging that art was a valid means of characterizing national character, history, and experience, including the status, value, and problems of laborers.

In your research, how important were the intentions of Rivera, patrons, critics, and viewers versus the functions visual discourse likely served? How much of a challenge was it to parse motivations and functions?

Intentions and functions are not easy to ascertain, but I felt it was important to explore both. I consulted internal planning documents, press releases, artist guidelines, and the writings of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to determine the aims officials had for the Rockefeller Center art program. For Rivera’s mural commission at the Palace of Fine Arts, I looked at political documents produced by the ruling party, especially its Six Year Plan. In discerning Rivera’s aims at both Rockefeller Center and the Palace of Fine Arts, I considered his writings as well as his artwork—preparatory drawings and completed compositions.

The Rockefeller family, which was instrumental in establishing and supporting MoMA and was undertaking the massive urban development project of Rockefeller Center, had much at stake—investments in Standard Oil, which had assets in Mexico, and Chase National Bank, which was attempting to secure Mexico’s repayment of foreign debt. In an effort to forestall attempts by independent unions and communists to organize laborers, John D. Rockefeller Jr. was struggling to protect company unions. In Mexico, competing officials in the ruling National Revolutionary Party—supporters of capitalist development and promoters of socialist reform—were implementing a Six-Year Plan that involved not only modernizing industry and agriculture but also achieving labor reform, redistributing land, and instituting socialist education. Rivera, who was lauded as one of the world’s greatest living painters, was increasingly drawn to the political solutions proposed by anti-Stalin communists—Jay Lovestone in New York and Leon Trotsky.

While their aims and interests were complex, Rivera and his patrons each desired change—either restoration, reform, or dramatic transformation in public and private policies. They believed art, exhibitions, and commissions had the potential to effect that change. But exhibitions and commissions were a challenge because each aimed to speak through the other. In giving voice to the artist, officials at MoMA, Rockefeller Center, and the Palace of Fine Arts hoped themselves to be heard; in fulfilling art commissions, Rivera aimed to speak both for himself and the groups he was aligned with and to test institutional restrictions on art imagery and ideational content.

It was fascinating to see how often art images and transactional documents were ambiguous, not in the sense of indiscernibility but equivocation. I argue such ambiguity as strategic. Rivera and his patrons wielded strategic mixes of clarity and equivocality in their efforts at collaboration and exploitation.

In ascertaining the functions that artwork and acts of patronage and censorship served, I was primarily interested in the degree to which they promoted notions of national, racial, and class equivalence, made possible political alignment on public and private policies, and brought pressure to bear on legislative and judicial initiatives. While I conclude that the aims of neither the artist nor his patrons were fulfilled, I propose that Rivera’s imagery and the groundswell of protests against censorship of his Rockefeller Center mural were integral to a broad array of oppositional pronouncements concerning labor rights, which culminated in important legislation, congressional action, and judicial rulings.

At the center of your study are images of workers and the political functions these representations served. Were labor unions able or interested in shaping how they were visually represented?

The working class was crucial for all parties, those advocating the reform of capitalism, the adoption of socialism, and the institution of communism. Because it was a targeted audience, the image of the worker became an indispensable icon. Rivera and his patrons were all interested in infusing images of workers and work itself with symbolic meaning.

Communists in the Soviet Union and the US were initially interested in facilitating creation of global “proletarian” art—images by workers of working conditions, oppressive labor relations, and “revolutionary” action. Communists and sympathetic leftists involved with New York’s John Reed Club initially organized art classes and exhibitions at workers’ clubs. But they eventually concluded that leftist middle-class artists and writers were better suited to the task. The question of how individual workers responded to these efforts to train them in art warrants further investigation; the challenge lies in securing evidence.

Given the current political climate between the U.S. and Mexico, and between the U.S. and Russia, is it conceivable that governments still “trust in art’s ability to fulfill urgent aspirations for change”?

Images, words, and actions still matter. Entities in the public and private sectors continue to leverage visual culture in their efforts to defend and challenge the status quo. Art exhibitions and commissions remain important means of communication. Thanks to desktop and mobile technology, visual and textual information can be circulated through a variety of social media. But, as always, equivocation abounds. So questions concerning functions and consequences are generally at issue.

Given your research findings, what further study would you like to see?

I mention in my conclusion that circumstances today somewhat parallel those of the 1930s. There are debates about the role of artists and the function of art, the impact of global capitalism, the benefits and risks of science and technology, the needs and speech rights of workers, and the nature of national, racial, class, and gender identities. I think it’s important to investigate the broad range of declarations about these issues—the varied meanings of images, words, and actions. Also, who is now able to speak publicly and give voice to others? What is said and not said? Do possible meanings and interests converge or diverge? In the case of identity constructs, is social equivalence or difference intimated? How is censorship perpetuated and challenged? And ultimately what impact does speech—artistic and otherwise—have on coalitional efforts and relations of power?

www.utexaspress.com

Eleven Images from Picturing the Proletariat

In the wake of Mexico’s revolution, artists played a fundamental role in constructing a national identity centered on working people and were hailed for their contributions 

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to modern art. John Lear's new book, Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico, 1908–1940, examines three aspects of this artistic legacy: the parallel paths of organized labor and artists’ collectives, the relations among these groups and the state, and visual narratives of the worker. We asked Professor Lear to pick a handful of images studied in the book to represent the progression and politics of the Mexican proletariat.

Eleven Images from Picturing the Proletariat

By John Lear

The late John Berger proposed a fundamental “way of seeing” art. He wrote, “The question: what went into the making of this? supersedes the collector’s question of: what is this?” As a historian of Mexico’s working people, I began my research for Picturing the Proletariat with the related assumption that art both reflects and shapes the world in which it is produced. This would hardly be a surprise to the politically engaged, Communist-inspired artists who came of age during Mexico’s 1910 revolution, or to anyone who has seen the monumental, government-sponsored murals painted on public buildings in subsequent years by “los tres grandes” (Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros). At one level, my new book is about how post-revolutionary artists “discovered” the working people of Mexico after 1910, came to see and organize themselves as “intellectual workers,” and reached out to newly organized unions. On another level, my book is about the ways these artists “pictured” working people stylistically and discursively over three decades. I found hundreds of long-forgotten or largely ignored prints, photographs, and murals. Many were embedded in journals and street posters, or painted on union and market walls instead of government buildings; and many were by lesser-known artists with more intimate ties with working people.

I include here eleven of the 146 works of art in the book. The images mostly speak for themselves, but I offer some commentary on what went into the making of each piece. Together they suggest some of the ways artists and labor leaders represented working people in revolutionary Mexico.

1. The Pre-revolutionary “Worker-Citizen” 

Saturnino Herrán began Allegory of Construction/Allegory of Labor in 1910, before the revolution, as a commission for the government of dictator Porfirio Díaz. Immersed in the urban transformations of the capital and aware of recent landmark strikes at Rio Blanco and Cananea, he was one of the first fine arts painters to introduce the worker as a subject, using the visual strategies of symbolism and allegory. His strong, fair-skinned construction workers labor at essential tasks, building the monumental structures of Mexico City, while a wife feeds her resting husband and children on the margins of the worksite. They invoke the shared goals of the pre-revolutionary elite and mutualist workers’ associations, by which male workers were to reject recent labor conflicts yet assume their proper roles as “worker-citizens” who construct the nation.

2. The Pre-revolutionary “Worker-Victim”

By contrast, the artisan printmaker José Guadalupe Posada developed years earlier a primitive style of relief prints for the satirical penny press for workers that challenged elite notions of development and highlighted conflict between the working class and its exploiters. As this 1903 front page of La Guacamaya demonstrates, he distinguished between two subsets of the exploited working class: in the masthead, the virile and outraged artisan class (with whom he himself identified), and in the caricature below, the victimized worker-campesino, literally consumed by factories, his flesh converted to gold. But while Posada’s prints denounced abuses of this “worker-victim,” they never advocated strikes and suggest an ambivalence to the outbreak of the 1910 revolution. Herrán and Posada, who both died during the decade of revolutionary fighting, offered two distinct archetypes of the worker that would clash and mingle over the next thirty years.

3. The “Worker-Citizen-Consumer” of the 1920s

This is a typical cover of the post-revolutionary union periodical Revista CROM, published for around a decade starting in 1926. Artists organized and participated in the revolution’s first several years of mobilization3 and fighting, but only in the national reconstruction of the 1920s did their representations of the working class flourish, in the context of intense labor organization and cultural politics. The officialist CROM labor federation, closely allied with President Calles, published its own journal illustrated by commercial artists. Drawings blended the earlier style of Herrán with art deco and art nouveau styles and conveyed the reformist politics of the federation itself. Like this cover, illustrations depicted attractive, muscular, Europeanized and above all individual workers who, together with industrialists and government leaders, constructed the post-revolutionary nation with their tools and the national flag in hand. This worker was also bound to middle-class consumer aspirations featured in articles and advertisements aimed at their wives, a “worker–citizen–consumer” with an explicit and unprecedented political role and palpable aspirations of individual social mobility.

Q&A with Flatbed Press Co-Founders

Flatbed Press, a collaborative publishing workshop in Austin, Texas, has become one of the premier artists’ printshops in America and an epicenter for the art form. Founded in 1989 by Mark Lesly Smith and Katherine Brimberry, Flatbed provides studio spaces for visiting artists to work with the press’s master printers to create limited editions of original etchings, lithographs, woodcuts, and monotypes. Prints produced at Flatbed have been collected by major museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Brooklyn Museum, among others.

We asked Katherine and Mark about how Flatbed Press developed its ethos, how it has survived over the years, and about that time James Surls got Olympic marksman David Bradshaw to fire nine bullets at his artwork.

Don't miss the final weekend of the East Austin Studio Tour, where you can visit Flatbed Press!

Flatbed Press has hosted an impressive array of artists with incredibly diverse backgrounds. We won’t ask you to choose favorites, but how do you think Flatbed has been shaped by the work of its artist collaborators over the years?

Jack Hanley, Plague Doctor (1990)
Soft-ground etching and aquatint

Katherine Brimberry: Each Flatbed artist has brought their own vision, concepts, working practices, and history. One of the pleasures has been to learn and grow through each artist. My job as Master Printer has been to try to think like the artist and find a way to transform their concepts and working practices into one or more printmaking techniques. With every successful collaboration, I have learned something, created a new way of working, found a way to put ideas into print media. I believe that over time, Flatbed’s “style” may seem more varied than many other presses because of our insistence that we meet the artist where they are conceptually instead of giving the artist a formulaic way of working.

Some important collaborations sealed this direction early in our history. Jack Hanley’s work pushed us to try experimental etching techniques. He wanted to be “out of control” with the color field of the etchings we planned. His key plates were extremely controlled soft ground drawings printed over the chaos of the background plates. His concept pushed us to find ways to remove the artist’s direct control of the marks and etch.

Other collaborations were with artists whose work was camped in the nuances of mark making, color, and control. Listening to these artists and striving to meet their standards gave us skill and precision that became the hallmark of our editioning. Working with Melissa Miller on “Anima,” I may have pulled as many as 40 color trial proofs to get to the final solution, leveraging her discipline as an artist to do whatever it took to get to a successful print.

Melissa Miller, Anima (1996)
Line etching and aquatint with chine collé

Mark Lesly Smith: Flatbed hasn't been just "shaped" by its artist collaborators over the years, it has been created by them! 

One of the things that has made Flatbed so successful has been the incredible variety of artists. Of course, we have always tried to work with artists of high artistic value, but the range of their work has been all over the map. It has made the work extremely enjoyable and interesting, and I think has established Flatbed as a very open shop that is diverse in every way, artistically and otherwise.

Flatbed feels more like a living, breathing organism than an institution. Over the course of its life, what periods of growth do you identify as the most transformative?

KB: We never set out to be an institution and I am happy that it doesn’t feel that way. Beginning as a “Mom and Pop” styled business with two people who shared a love a printmaking but divided the work load made us more like a family. When Jerry Manson became a business partner in late 1990, the printmaking family expanded. Printers and interns came to us to apprentice and learn. Even when they left, we considered them extended family. Business was done with a handshake and not detailed contracts.

Stephanie Sauer on Evoking the Royal Chicano Air Force

How do you write a history of a group that has been written out of history? Employing a creative mix of real and fictive events, objects, and people that subverts assumptions about the archiving and display of historical artifacts, Stephanie Sauer's innovative new book The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force both documents and evokes an arts collective that played a significant role in the Chicano movement.

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The RCAF started as the elusive Rebel Chicano Art Front that, through an understandable mix-up with the Royal Canadian Air Force, became the Royal Chicano Air Force, a group renowned for its fleet of adobe airplanes, its ongoing subversive performance stance, and its key role as poster makers for the United Farm Workers Union during the height of the Chicano civil rights movement. Reimagining herself as a fictional archaeologist named 'La Stef', Stephanie Sauer documents the plight of the RCAF, suspending historical realities and leaping through epochs and between conversations with various historical figures, both dead and alive, to offer readers an intimate experience of RCAF history.

A cofounding editor of A Bolha Editora, a bookshop and publisher in Rio de Janeiro, and executive editor of Copilot Press, Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary text-based artist and visiting lecturer at the San Francisco Art Institute. We talked to her about her approach to this project and how institutions should embed experiential learning, i.e.: "embodied knowledge," into pedagogical approaches.

What informed your approach to how you presented this archive, which is described in the introduction as your “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing”? 

Before I conceived of what is now The Accidental Archives, I spent a year writing what I had been expected to write. That is, I wrote a history of the Royal Chicano Air Force as I encountered it in the 21st Century. It was a story one would expect to read. It was a story I had read many times before. I was in Chicago then, a microcosm of a United States obsessed with its divisions, and found myself answering to the expectations of readers who wanted me to translate Chicanismo for them, to act as a type of mediator whose task it was to create a didactic, easily digestible history. This way of writing bored me, and I found it deeply problematic. I saw myself as facilitator to a kind of colonial fantasy that pitted me as an objective, rational (read: white, anthropological) narrator of an RCAF documentary. I didn’t want to perpetuate such ideas of otherness, so I threw out that entire manuscript and started fresh from three scraps, the very first notes I’d written.

Inaugural Flight of LaRuca 2012. With permission of use of Los Files © Juanishi V. Orosco.
Courtesy of Juanishi V. Orosco.

What Dr. Diaz noted in her introduction as “deeply personal, biased, and shared witnessing” is, for me, the richest way to present any history. Rooted in feminist practices of testimonio, embodied knowledge, “disruptive excess,” and collective witnessing, I found it vital to foreground the multiplicity of voices and their contradictions, the tactile ephemera, and the biases. Otherwise, when one tries to smooth over these elements in favor of a clean, linear narrative, the tremendous violence of silencing distorts the humanity of those making history. It is this type of silencing that alienates us from our own power to impart change. I wanted to offer an alternative. I wanted to upend the so-called logic of traditional, Western, male-centered historiography and imagine what a new kind of archive might include. 

Austin American Statesman :: Timeless Mexico

Timeless Mexico

By Susan Toomey Frost
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By Charles Ealy

Susan Toomey Frost was researching the history of tile-making in San Antonio when she came across an image of a young woman in traditional folkloric dress in a Mexico doorway.

At first, she was mainly interested in the tile surrounding the door because that would help her figure out what kinds of tiles were being made in Mexico at the time and would help her distinguish whether tiles in San Antonio were made locally or imported.

But during her research, she began to acquire more images of Mexico, primarily on vintage postcards, and realized that she was drawn to the photographs not because of the tiles but because of "the inherent beauty of the subject matter."

And that's when she began to notice that the same photographer — Hugo Brehme — was responsible for nearly all of the images.

"Thus, a new obsession had begun," Frost writes. "I had to find out who Brehme was, and I had to collect more of his work."

By 2009, Frost had more than 1,900 Brehme items that she collected over 15 years.

That archive of images, which Frost donated to the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos in 2009, makes up the bulk of the new book "Timeless Mexico." The book is part of the Southwestern and Mexican Photography Series edited by Wittliff.

Read the full article at statesman.com »

Houston Chronicle :: The Trials of Eroy Brown

Bookish picks: 2011 Texas Titles
Reviewed by Maggie Galehouse

We are encouraged to buy local and regional in grocery stores and farmers’ markets.

Why not buy books with the same philosophy — to support Texas authors, stories and presses?

All the 2011 books listed below have a strong Texas connection.

Happy reading!

100,000 Hearts
By Denton A. Cooley, M.D.
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100,000 Hearts: A Surgeon’s Memoir, by Denton Cooley, M.D. (UT Press) Cooley, who founded the Texas Heart Institute in 1962, grew up in Houston and attended the University of Texas. While in medical school at Johns Hopkins, Cooley assisted in an operation to help correct a congenital heart defect in an infant. This led him to specialize in heart surgery.

Crazy from the Heat

By James H. Evans

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Crazy From the Heat: A Chronicle of Twenty Years in the Big Bend by James H. Evans. (University of Texas Press). This photography book offers landscapes and panoramas — in both black and white, and color — of the biggest state park in Texas. People, plants, animals, objects, even an “exploded view” of ‘Shirley’s Fried Pie’ make this collection personal and universal.

The Trials of Elroy Brown

by Michael Berryhill

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The Trials of Eroy Brown, by Michael Berryhill. (UT Press) In 1981, a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville killed two white Texas prison officials. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered, claiming self-defense. The Trials of Eroy Brown focuses on Brown’s defense and is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown’s three trials, which ended in his acquittal.




See the entire list at chron.com »

Austin 360 :: Gael Stack

Gael Stack
by Gael Stack
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Gael Stack gets a monograph from UT Press
By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

Layered with cryptic calligraphic symbols, fragmentary texts and half-hidden images, the richly imaginative paintings of Gael Stack read simultaneously as elegant palimpsests and frenetic narratives.

The latest addition to the Dunkerley Contemporary Art Series, “Gael Stack” (University of Texas Press, $60) is the first retrospective monograph on this respected artist’s career and makes welcome addition to the scholarship on Texas contemporary art.

Some 143 images luminously chart Stack’s four decades of paintings. Her canvases offer an intriguing visual exploration of memory and of how the past infiltrates the present. Exhibited widely, Stack, who for long time lead the art department at the University of Houston, rightly gets the catalogue raisonne that she deserves, and essays by noted critics Raphael Rubinstein and Alison de Lima Greene astutely examine Stack’s work in the larger context of contemporary art.

Read more at austin360.com »

Austin American-Statesman :: From Uncertain to Blue, Gael Stack

From Uncertain to Blue
by Keith Carter
Buy It Now

Gael Stack
by Gael Stack
Buy It Now

From Lady Gaga to the Louvre, a roundup of holiday books

They're big. They're full of photos. And they can make wonderful doorstops.

They're this year's holiday books, which range from geography, art and politics to portraits of pop-culture icons.

The American-Statesman features staff has selected some of the best volumes to help guide people who have book lovers on their gift lists.


"From Uncertain to Blue," by Keith Carter ($55, University of Texas Press)

Keith Carter made a photographic splash when he first published "From Uncertain to Blue" in 1988. This year, the University of Texas Press has published a re-envisioned book that includes the photos as well as a new essay by Carter, who describes how he and his wife Patricia visited 100 small Texas towns in 1986 and 1987 and documented their travels on film. In the latest book, Carter includes some of his original contact sheets, showing how he selected the singular photo for each town in the first edition.

— Charles Ealy

"Gael Stack," by Gael Stack (University of Texas Press, $60)

Layered with cryptic calligraphic symbols, fragmentary texts and half-hidden images, the richly imaginative paintings of Gael Stack read simultaneously as elegant palimpsests and frenetic narratives.

The latest addition to the Dunkerley Contemporary Art Series, "Gael Stack" is the first retrospective monograph on this respected artist's career and makes welcome addition to the scholarship on Texas contemporary art.

Some 143 images luminously chart Stack's four decades of paintings. Her canvases offer an intriguing visual exploration of memory and of how the past infiltrates the present. Exhibited widely, Stack, who for long time lead the art department at the University of Houston, rightly gets the catalogue raisonné that she deserves, and essays by noted critics Raphael Rubinstein and Alison de Lima Greene astutely examine Stack's work in the larger context of contemporary art.

— Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

See the full list at statesman.com »

NPR :: Kilgore Rangerettes

Kilgore Rangerettes
By O. Rufus Lovett
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The Unchanging Style Of The Kilgore College Rangerettes

by CRISTINA FLETES

For many Texans, fall is synonymous with football. But in some areas, the sidelines can be just as much of a spectacle as the actual game.

Enter the Kilgore College Rangerettes. Known for their high kicks and high glamour, the Rangerettes introduced the idea of the football halftime show to the world in 1940.

Many decades later, they remain largely unchanged in their signature style, complete with cowgirl hats, boots and a color palette to make the American flag green with envy. This throwback to a bygone era is likely what has attracted so many photographers to document them through the years.

One photographer in particular, Kilgore College professor O. Rufus Lovett, has been photographing this iconic dance team since 1989 and released a book of his photos in 2008. He explained in an email that the series was inspired by his "fascination with the small-town glamour juxtaposed with the football turf, metal stadiums, asphalt and concrete environment."

Though Lovett has trouble picking a favorite photo, he says he is fond of the image titled "Big Hair," which adorns the back of his book on the Rangerettes. For the Rangerettes, Lovett says, "hair is not only big in size but also big in terms of the drill-team culture."

See the slide show at npr.org »

The Memphis Daily News :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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O’Brien’s Lens is ‘Passport to the World’
By Andy Meek

Michael O’Brien regards his camera as more than just the tool of his profession. O’Brien, a former Memphian who now lives in Austin, Texas, considers it his “passport to the world.”

Most recently, he’s let that passport carry him to the homeless and disadvantaged people who eke out their lives on the forgotten corners and mean streets of America – the outcasts who live on, as his most recent photo collection is titled, “Hard Ground.”

At press time, “Hard Ground” – published earlier this year by the University of Texas Press and which is now in a second printing – was still one of top 10 best books of 2011 so far, as chosen by the editors of Amazon.com.

For the book, O’Brien’s often haunting images are married alongside the poetry of singer-songwriter Tom Waits. The photos of O’Brien’s subjects are mostly close-up and in black-and-white.

In press material for “Hard Ground,” photographer John Loengard – whom American Photo magazine has called one of the “100 most influential people in photography” – called the collection a “rare and powerful book.”

The product is familiar territory for O’Brien. He began his career as a staff photographer for the Miami News, and his photo essays depicting the homeless have won him two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards.

He’s 61 today, and he’s spent more than half his life – a period of some four decades – as a photographer. Recently, the National Portrait Gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian, acquired several of his photos.

“I feel that I was really fortunate to get out of college and get a job at a newspaper where I could make a living with a camera,” he said. “Not because so much of the photographic process or the artistry, but instead because of the life it exposed me to. All the places I got to go. All the people I got to meet.

Read more at memphisdailynews.com »

Houston Chronicle :: Lone Stars III

Lone Stars III

By Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and
Nancy O'Bryant Puentes
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Quilters have converged upon Houston from all corners of the world for the International Quilt Festival Houston. The internationally renowned event includes hundreds of vendor booths, hands-on classes for all ages, lectures, demos and exhibits of some of the highest- quality art and antique quilts available today.

If you are attending the show, here are 10 must-see events:

1. Lone Stars III exhibit:Texas Quilts Today

At the top of the list is the special exhibit Texas Quilts Today. Experience the work of top Lone Star artists in a variety of styles, techniques and subject matter.

Texas quilts are a special interest of festival founder and director Karey Patterson Bresenhan, who's from Houston, and her cousin Nancy O'Bryant Puentes, who lives in Austin. They've documented Lone Star quilting history in a trilogy of books. The third book, Lone Stars III: Texas Quilts Today 1986-2011 ($29.95 paperback; $50 hardcover, 400 pages, University of Texas Press), was published just in time for this exhibit as well as the opening of their new Texas Quilt Museum in LaGrange on Nov. 13. Festival representative Bob Ruggerio says several quilts on display at the festival will eventually be seen at the museum.

What's so special about Texas quilts? "There's incredible use of color," suggests Bresenham. "Our weather, our skies, our surroundings have influenced them. Color is very much a part of Texas."

Read more at the chron.com »

San Antonio Express-News :: Lone Stars III

Lone Stars III

By Karoline Patterson Bresenhan and
Nancy O'Bryant Puentes
Buy It Now

A stitch in time
Quilting has evolved from utilitarian craft to an expressive art form.
By Steve Bennett

The quilt is more than a security blanket. It can be a family heirloom, a work of art, a snapshot of history, a tangible connection to a person or place long gone, a political statement, a therapeutic release or, in the case of the quilting bee, a community project. Perhaps most of all, it is an expression of pride. To be sure, it is all of these and more. Most owners of a quilt passed down through generations wouldn't take a million dollars for it.

“I haven't met a quilt I didn't love,” says San Antonio quilt artist Leslie Tucker Jenison. “The quilt and quiltmaking is really a good lens to look at history, especially women's history, although there are men quilters nowadays. But it has been and remains basically a women's art form.”

Quilts, notes Nancy O'Bryant Puentes, co-author of a trilogy of beautifully illustrated books on nearly two centuries of Texas quilting, are linked to the entire life cycle, “from conception, to birth, to death.”

“And,” she adds, “they seem to fill some primal need not only for cover, but for self-expression.”

Basically, a quilt is three layers of fabric, stitched together (although some say two layers will suffice).

Quilters come down on two basic sides: those who believe traditional methods and patterns constitute the quilt, and those who create “art quilts,” often abstracted or touching on headline events, which can involve many artistic processes, including dyeing, batik, painting and embellishing surfaces with everything from sequins to buttons. Traditional quilters generally disdain the art crowd, while art quilters cling to the notion that anything goes. Both, apparently, are right.

Today, the art of quilting, which dates back to ancient Egypt, is big business. Some 21 million quilters in the United States spend $3.6 billion annually on their passion.

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Austin American-Statesman :: Texas State Cemetery

Texas State Cemetery

By Jason Walker and Will Erwin,
with Helen Thompson
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2 new books serve as memorials, each in its own way

There are a million ways to remember.

We keep photos on walls and in our wallets; we hang on to childhood artwork and filled-up diaries; we honor people and moments with rituals and recipes.

Two books landed on my desk recently that approach this idea in very different yet interrelated ways. One, "Texas State Cemetery,"by Jason Walker and Will Erwin (UT Press, 200 pp., $39.95),is about, as one might guess, the Texas State Cemetery. The other, "Visual Vitriol: The Street Art and Subcultures of the Punk and Hardcore Generation,"by David A. Ensminger(University Press of Mississippi, 334 pp., $35), is about, as you also might guess, punk rock.

Both are coffee-table books, with "Texas State Cemetery" fully embracing its coffee-table-ness — heavy paper, vellum cover, gorgeous photos. Coffee-table books are like CD box sets: a deluxe package to celebrate something significant. They are memorials.

"Texas State Cemetery" is about history as much as gorgeous photos of gravestones; its authors are the director of research and the senior historian at the cemetery, respectively. As Bob Bullock, quoted on the "In Remembrance" page notes, "Kids can come out here and in one day learn more about Texas history than a whole semester in class."

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Texas Observer :: Hard Ground

Hard Ground

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poems by Tom Waits

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by Dave Mann

In 2006, Michael O’Brien, a veteran photojournalist who’s shot for Life, National Geographic, Texas Monthly and many other publications, took on a different kind of assignment.

An Austin-based ministry called Mobile Loaves and Fishes, which aids the homeless, was looking for a photographer to document the people it served. O’Brien was looking for something to do. The changing media landscape had made life as a freelance photographer increasingly difficult. As O’Brien writes in the introduction to the new book Hard Ground (University of Texas Press, $40, 184 pages), “Newspapers were dying, magazines struggling in earnest. There were fewer assignments. My career was changing. I was looking for a way to stay busy.”

He began going to the Mission: Possible! Community Center in East Austin every Tuesday to photograph the homeless people who came in for a free meal and a place to sleep. What started as an effort to stay busy quickly grew into much more. O’Brien spent the next three years photographing and documenting the stories of homeless people in Austin.

In Hard Ground, O’Brien’s haunting photographs of the homeless are paired with poetry by musician Tom Waits. To make his photographs, O’Brien used an old view camera. “This is a large, bulky camera that sits atop a tripod … a view camera is slow and deliberate,” he writes in the book’s introduction. With a view camera, the subject must remain completely still or the photo will be out of focus. O’Brien also employed a black-and-white Polaroid film called Type 55, which produces a negative and print at the same time. When O’Brien took his photos, he kept the negative and handed the print to his subject.

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The Wall Street Journal :: Crazy from the Heat

Crazy from the Heat

By James H. Evans

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BOOKS
AUGUST 27, 2011

Photo-Op: Big Bender

Texas's Big Bend—where the Rio Grande juts abruptly north on its path toward the Gulf of Mexico—is a hard place. A century ago one visitor wrote: 'The country isn't bad. It's just worse. Worse the moment you set foot from the train, and then, after that, just worser and worser.' Yet in 'Crazy From the Heat' (University of Texas, 192 pages, $55), James H. Evans shows off how beautiful the Big Bend's arid moonscapes can be, in their own gruff way. Mr. Evans, who moved to the small town of Marathon in 1988, captures the profound West Texas emptiness, where endless horizons are broken only by isolated escarpments such as the Chisos Mountains, which the writer and environmentalist Edward Abbey called 'a castled fortification of Wagnerian gods.' The humans who make the Big Bend their home are an eclectic bunch: a man wearing a necklace of live lizards, a crowd gathered for chihuahua races, a few tough-looking old cowboys. They share the land with intimidating creatures like the bull snake (above)—a constrictor that can grow as long as 8 feet—and other fauna best avoided by the faint-hearted.
—The Editors

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Wall Street Journal, Print Version [ jpg ] »

Cowboys & Indians :: Crazy from the Heat

Crazy from the Heat

by James H. Evans

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A Bold Look At Big Bend

No one has ever captured the vicious wonders of the Big Bend area of Texas quite like James H. Evans. Deciding that he wanted to dedicate his life to the region, the photographer moved to Marathon, Texas, almost 23 years ago. He was so enthralled by the surrounding landscapes, wildlife, and people that he knew he could make it his lifework.

Two decades later, Evans is still just as inspired. In his latest photography book, Crazy from the Heat, he presents his greatest ode to Big Bend, from its heavenly views to its hellish conditions. In the afterword, Evans writes, “I love Big Bend. I love the desert. I love the heat. I love the mountains. I love seeing whole storm systems form, build, and dissipate. I love knowing what phase the moon is in, and seeing the stars and constellations, and the feeling that I am living on a planet. I love seeing wild animals and trying to communicate with them.”

Evans also mentions one of the most difficult problems with photographing Big Bend: “A friend of mine said, ‘There are thirty pictures of the park, and everybody takes them.’ ” And anyone who has looked through tourism books about the area can agree. However, upon first opening this book it becomes immediately obvious that it is no travel guide. Paging through the collection, you see unique and wholly original images of geographical phenomenon, Chihuahua dog races, spiked amphibians, venomous crawlers and slitherers, cowboys, storefronts, artists, and animal carcasses. You undergo a range of emotions — from shock to bewilderment to awe to grief. Combined, all the images create an outstanding glimpse at a surreal and savage world.

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Texas Commission on the Arts Honors Melissa Miller

Melissa Miller

By Melissa Miller

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The Texas Commission on the Arts Has Named Melissa Miller 2011 Texas State 2D Visual Artist

The Texas Commission on the Arts (TCA) has announced the Texas State Legislature’s 2011 and 2012 appointments to the positions of state poet laureate, state musician, state two-dimensional artist and state three-dimensional artist.

Nationally acclaimed for her bold, imaginative, allegorical paintings of animals, Melissa Miller is an iconoclastic artist who has worked outside of prevailing artistic styles and movements since the mid-1970s. Her recent works focus on the ways humans are altering animal habitats and behavior. She has exhibited work at many of the major museums in America. These include the Hirshhorn and Corcoran Museums in Washington, D.C., the Brooklyn Museum of Fine Arts, the New Orleans Museum, the San Francisco Museum, the Fine Arts Museums in Houston, Dallas and Ft. Worth. Her work has been included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennial.

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Newsweek :: A Procession of Them

A Procession of Them

By Eugene Richards

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Psychiatric institutions around the world
Photographs by Eugene Richards

Basic human rights often seem not to apply to the mentally ill or mentally retarded. This was the conclusion of photographer Eugene Richards, who wandered the world to document the animalistic conditions of psychiatric institutions in Paraguay, Armenia, Mexico, Hungary and Kosovo for his new book, A Procession of Them . Most of these institutions mix patients together without regard for condition or temperament, leaving the dangerous ones free to prey upon other patients, including children and even a few perfectly sane castaways, who simply have nowhere else to go. Some of the worst abuses are being reined in, thanks to the efforts of Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI). Here, at a facility in Asuncion, Paraguay, nearly 50 residents hold their mattresses in a courtyard while their rooms are hosed down.

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