Growing Pains
Susie Kalil

In recent years, as cultures and languages in Houston mutually invade one another and boundaries become blurred, we have witnessed the “borderization” of the city: communities are no longer Anglo, Asian, or Hispanic, but a hybrid of all three. Just off the Sam Houston Tollway in far southwest Houston, you drive by Chinese street signs, restaurants, and shopping malls, only to find at Hillcroft that the Chinese signage has morphed into Spanish billboards, El Salvadoran cafés, and Mexican tiendas. On Long Point in the middle class suburb of Spring Branch, Vietnamese and Latino merchants coexist, often displaying odd mixtures of commercial jargon. The richness of these neighborhoods, with their conflicting information, speaks forcefully about the variety of the lives lived there. Like everyone, I am shaped by the social and cultural constructs around me, all the way to the cooking smells that waft out to the streets. A greater attunement to these changes can limber up belief, healing the atrophied feelings that separate us from each other or exile us from ourselves. The new vocabulary of urbanism being formed by these communities is a language capable of bridging the differences between themselves and those institutions even now shaping the public realm.

We enter other people’s worlds to see how other people define themselves; when the wider conditions of cultural production are examined, we get a fuller sense of these communities’ struggling for their voices, as well as a fuller sense of what is possible. With Houston now in a time of cultural fusion, our task lies in gaining an understanding of its multiple voices. On any Saturday morning at the Farmer’s Market on Airline Drive, you can trace a line of migration and ancestry to virtually everywhere in the world: Africa, Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East. Can all these multiple Houston identities be made to cohere as some sort of mosaic, if not a unified force field? The question looms in this shifting and uncertain place, a city of sprawl whose only coherence is its incoherence, where everyone’s image of it is at best partial and self-referential.

Perhaps the people who have tried hardest to define Houston are the artists based here. They know that the past (personal or collective) is not what this city is about. People move here for the freedom to become something they can’t be anywhere else. Houston is a city that won’t stay fixed and can’t be defined because its energy depends wholly on imagination, on vision, and each of us—whether we are from Detroit or San Luis Potosi—reshapes the place according to our needs. When I moved to Houston in the early ’70s, it still seemed to be a small town, but one charged with an electrified sense of possibility. It was as if the American frontier were being kept alive in the minds and actions of every Houstonian. It was a wildcat city: Herman Short was its swaggering police chief, and Elvis played the rodeo. Steak-and-potato restaurants served liquor by the drink to patrons who joined their “clubs” as nightly members. Most Saturday nights, people lined up along Navigation to sample Ninfa Laurenzo’s tacos al carbon, then headed out to watch urban cowboys ride the electric bull at Mickey Gilley’s in Pasadena.

The newness of the city spawned an almost staggering creative freedom that was based on the sheer absence of structure or tradition. There were no dominant art movements; in fact, you could hardly find two artists doing the same kind of work. This independence was less a reflection of the spirit of the area than a response to the confusion of living in Space City, out on the open frontier. But just as Houston vied with other cities to be the center of the business and financial worlds, its artists assumed a spirited aggressiveness. Culturally, the New York art establishment may have represented the height of intellectual/historical aesthetics, but Houston insisted on its own romantic, nonexclusive artistic values.

Throughout the ’70s and into the ’80s, Houston ebbed and flowed across the New York art world consciousness. It was eyed greedily as a promising market by New York dealers and became known as the home of glossy museums, as well as the Rothko Chapel. New York curators and artists liked to visit and exhibit here, usually returning to New York with fabulous cowboy boots from Stelzig’s downtown. But despite its imported sophistication and designer buildings, Houston grew from a cowtown to energy capital without ever becoming an art center. With most of the historical structures and warehouses bulldozed for high-rise offices and condominiums, artists lived and worked in shacks, bungalows, apartments, or converted garages. Isolated, lacking any tangible support, they were compelled to reinforce their own creativity and energy.

Still, a good number of the artists from those decades have stayed in Houston. What kept them here? Maybe it was the freedom of working in a place where no ponderous tradition can suffocate new aesthetic impulses. Maybe they stayed for environmental reasons: Houston’s torrid humidity and radical weather systems serve as constant tensions for art-making. Or maybe it was their loyalty to a personal artistic vision, the kind of thing that makes Houston art so regenerative and life-affirming. Their work is important, especially at a time when we’re all yearning for some sense of global place, seeking out the cultural matrix that binds a society together. The diversity in Houston art—ranging from provocative depictions of the landscape, a rigorous figurative tradition, and intensely personal abstraction, to installations and sculpture that seek spiritual transcendence through ethnic roots—proves that the area is rich with ideas and possibilities. In recent years, artists have become more active in capturing that vitality, distilling the spirit of their cultural milieu into a new visual language.

Throughout those same two decades, Houston’s museums made progress in their attempts to bring the city up to par with the country’s other art centers, arranging vital shows and appearances by nationally prominent artists. And while each institution—the Menil, the Contemporary Arts Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts—has a different point of view, the goal is the same: a community that sustains art and artists in a meaningful way. But the issue, as always, remains access. How does a museum deliver art to the people? What about creative access? How a museum interprets art is at least as critical to establishing its profile as the kind of art it presents. The “how” gives the institution its character, especially how it builds bridges from one audience to another.

Museums hold the promise of transforming an audience into a public. Even though an art audience and the art public both go to the museums, they’re not one and the same. An art audience seeks entertainment and diversion—it’s always prepared to move on to the next event. An art public, however, is actively engaged and participates in the production of cultural meaning. Yet a gregarious art audience is essential to a healthy art community: it’s the pool from which an art public emerges. The bigger the art audience, the greater the chances for a lively and contentious art public to break through. Over time, the art audience in Houston has grown steadily. And while the art public has grown, too, I wouldn’t say it has reached critical mass here, although the courage of conviction remains high among artists themselves. The problem is that similar conviction is lacking among the relevant agencies of local government. Culturally engaging the civic life of Houston is a tall order. It means finding a convincing, coherent, imaginative focus for its institutions—an invigorating image that is wholly integral to the multiple voices of Houston and that is both local in its commitments and international in scope.

The problem also lies in the institutions themselves, which frequently slip into thinking of themselves as the principal providers of culture. As a result, arts professionals, often preaching to the converted, tend to ghettoize art, separating it from the world we actually inhabit. Rather than serve as laboratories, presenting distinct voices and an art that you can argue with—art that aspires to do more than just affirm the fashions of the majority—museums function like echo chambers; they have become a venue of mass entertainment. Given the tentative way that serious visual art engages and moves our world, how do we bring back the innocence that the art world has lost with its gonzo careerism and excessively calculated museum exhibitions?

In Houston, we tend to think of art as an Inner Loop activity, but much of the city’s diverse population lives out in the sprawling suburbs. As our museums expand to accommodate a ballooning audience, the opportunities are there to investigate questions that will have implications for what the museums will become. Who do they serve? And who is speaking for whom? In their bid to reach out to a larger community, will our museums become increasingly wary of the art of the moment? Is the public to be given carefully shaped and predigested views of art? Making art coherent and sensible is a dangerous business when daily life has no such aims.

In a similar sense, the larger art community of critics and reviewers bears some responsibility. There’s a convoluted fear in the Houston art world of offending someone, but in the long term, nothing good comes from continuously praising shows. To not question the premise of an exhibition, or the specific selection of works and artists, is a disservice: it won’t make for stronger art, and it certainly won’t bring challenging work to the public eye. Consider as well that Houston’s only major newspaper employs just one full-time art critic. In contrast, the Los Angeles Times has two full-time critics and at least four free-lance art writers, publishing art reviews, artist profiles, and provocative critical discourse on a nearly daily basis—a kind of commitment that speaks volumes about the high regard for art as an integral part of our lives. The lack of similar commitment in Houston has resulted in a slew of packaged shows and more than a few exhibitions safely compiled from a circulating roster of “legitimized” artists.

Other cities are also faced with handling the myriad stresses and strains of a shifting public. Southern California museums and art spaces in particular have begun engaging their communities in meaningful ways. That the Los Angeles basin is home to the country’s second largest Vietnamese population is reflected in exhibitions such as “Simon Leung: Surf Vietnam” at the Huntington Beach Art Center or shows of contemporary Vietnamese painting and Bronze Age works at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana. Similarly, the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach acknowledges its varied Hispanic communities with a growing permanent collection and lively exhibition schedule. Such efforts analyze the symbols and languages by which Angelenos define themselves, examining who manufactures them, how they develop, how we read them, where we place them, and why we need them as emblems of present-day life.

Are our Houston communities being similarly served? Whose stories are heard? Whose histories are lost? We can look again at Los Angeles, where a multifaceted, city-led program is working to save David Alfaro Siqueiros’ 1932 mural American Tropical, commissioned for Olvera Street and whitewashed over by city authorities when instead of portraying a quaint Mexican village, Siqueiros depicted the mistreatment of Mexican workers in California. The city is now working to have it cleaned, conserved, and ready for public viewing by 2002. In comparison, the majestic, forty-six-foot long America, probably one of the most spectacular murals in this part of the country, completed during the 1950s by Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo for Houston’s Bank of the Southwest, was sold at auction after a series of bankruptcies in the 1980s placed its ownership in question. How could we have let it slip away?

And how do we explain that one of Houston’s greatest contemporary murals, Leo Tanguma’s The Rebirth of Our Nationality, a 240-foot mural painted in the early ’70s to record the struggles of the Chicano movement, has all but disintegrated on the side of the Continental Can Company building? The mural movement is especially pertinent here, born in the hands of grassroots artists and citizens to express feelings and opinions about their communities without censorship. Is a citywide mural program possible in Houston? Not the highly controlled “feel good” projects orchestrated by city agencies, but a mural movement of community activism, ethnic pride, and power.

The real issue will always be the art, which can help us to cope, to share our culture, to understand one another. Art can be a carrier of magical force, a conveyor of language, identity, and ideas. But it must also be able to distill a reality and make it available to others, moving from sharply observed specificities to the generality of a broader comprehension. It must form a connective tissue. In that light, it must concern us whether art professionals, in the years to come, will risk going outside the Inner Loop to search for artists in, say, far southwest Houston rather than make a telephone call to a reliable gallery. We stand at a pivotal moment in the city’s art history: Will Houston become a city of originators or of receivers?

Copyright©2000 Susie Kalil