“Nexus Texas”

Lone Star artists are a breed of their own

Comments (0) By Troy Schulze Thursday, Aug 16 2007

“I’m just sitting in my car and I’m looking at stunt-jumping monster trucks coexisting with art cars. It’s a place of extremes,” says Toby Kamps, senior curator for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and one of three curators (with Valerie Cassel Oliver and Paola Morsiani) of “Nexus Texas,” a group show of work by 16 artists who call the Lone Star State home. Included are Dallas’s Jeff Zilm, who does abstract paintings, San Antonio’s Gary Sweeney, who creates mixed-media messages spelled out in varsity letters, and Houston’s own El Franco Lee II. Franco’s painting Rudy T. vs. Kermit Washington captures the iconic moment in Houston sports when then-Rocket Rudy Tomjanovich found himself on the wrong end of a punch thrown by L.A. Laker Kermit Washington.

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Kamps feels there’s an artistic energy that’s distinctively Texan, and in his eight months living in Houston, he’s felt it. “It’s an amazing mixture of really cosmopolitan and really down-home,” says Kamps. “It’s very fertile soil for good art. You can get a pickup truck and a decent studio and do your thing.” And maybe there’s something about the larger-than-life Texan mythology that breeds independent go-getters. “There’s a great tolerance of characters and eccentrics and individuals. An artist is an entrepreneur, and if nothing else, Texas gets that.”
Aug. 18-Oct. 21, 2007