CURRENT EXHIBITION
Bayou City Chic: Progressive Streams of Modern Art in Houston, 1950-1980 | February 14 – March 8, 2014
From 1950 to 1980, during three momentous decades, Houston became the titular capital of “modern art” in Texas, attracting a loose-knit colony of important painters nurtured in a burgeoning community of avant-garde galleries, collectors, museums and university art departments. Looking back, it is evident now that this thirty-year span represented one of the most vital and productive periods of the city’s cultural evolution, a “coming of age” of the Houston art scene which paralleled the region’s dramatic rise in population, economic influence and social vitality.
The current exhibition, Bayou City Chic, examines this watershed era, presenting an extraordinary survey of paintings by artists associated with the city’s remarkable mid-century journey, (as well as an interesting sampler of works by contemporaneous Texas modernists of the period whose output interfaced with that of the Houston scene).
With substantive works by many of Houston’s most esteemed modernists, Bayou City Chic captures the energy and innovation of an important period. It warrants attention as 2014’s first “destination exhibition” for local collectors and aficionados of Texas modernism, offering what is certain to be one of the most informative and inspiring art shows of the current year.
Bayou City Chic is a tribute to local genius and sustained artistic accomplishment, celebrating these artists and their times. The exhibition offers a visual treatise of the natural progressions of Houston art at a time that may now be heralded as the high-water point of a century past. William Reaves Fine Art invites and encourages serious collectors to consider these distinguished Houston artists as valued additions to important assemblages of regional and American modernism.
Featured artists include: David Adickes, Gertrude Barnstone, John Biggers, Harvey Bott, Jack Boynton, David Brownlow, Lowell Collins, Bill Condon, Ben Culwell, Don Edelman, Seymour Fogel, Michael Frary, Frank Freed, Henri Gadbois, John Guerin, Dorothy Hood, Perry House, Otis Huband, Ibsen Espada, Lucas Johnson, Ken Luce, Leila McConnell, Herb Mears, Robert Morris, Margaret Putnam, Bill Reily, Robert Rogan, Charles Schorre, Chester Snowden, Earl Staley, Richard Stout, Stella Sullivan, McKie Trotter, Arthur Turner, and Dick Wray.
In conjunction, the gallery will also present an intriguing collection of Dick Wray’s experimental prints and works on paper.
The exhibition is on view February 14 -March 8, 2014.
Special Events:
Collector Preview Weekend: 10am-5pm, Friday, February 14th - Saturday, February 15th
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 15th, 5-8pm
Gallery Talk, featuring art scholar and author Susie Kalil: Saturday, February 22nd, 2-4pm
Dorothy Hood, Orb’s Flora VI, c.1972, oil on canvas, 60×70 inches.
William Reaves Fine Art • 2313 Brun Street, Houston, TX 77019 • Gallery Hours: Tues-Sat, 10am-5pm • 713.521.7500