The Great Heights Art Heist

For local artist Claire Richards, the opening night of her first solo exhibition, at a Heights artspace called H Gallery, should have been an evening to be remembered fondly for the rest of her days.

Chris Curry

Claire Richards has waited months to collect the proceeds from her first solo exhibition. Instead of money, she says she has been given excuses, promises and lies.

Joana Esteves Photography

Heidi Powell-Prera: Richards and other unpaid artists say her flower-child Facebook persona is galling and well past its sell-by date.

Details

• Larry Crawford: H Gallery Bilked Me Too (And He Has Proof)
• Heidi Powell-Prera accosted at Heights' First Saturday Arts Market.

• Connecting H Gallery to Three Prominent Recent Art Scams

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More About

• Heidi Powell-Prera
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And for a time, before Richards ran into months and months of lies, excuses, broken promises and stonewalling, before she found out she would end up thousands of dollars in the red, and before she found all those other artists who claimed to have been collectively stiffed out of thousands and thousands more by H director Heidi Powell-Prera and Powell-Prera's mother, H Gallery bookkeeper Sandy Bernstein, that show had felt something like the wedding night of her dreams.

For their part, Powell-Prera and Bernstein insist they have done nothing wrong, nothing that a little time to make things right won't cure.

"The Press is getting involved in what really should be a civil matter," says Bernstein. "No artist ever goes unpaid. It may be late. We don't pretend that we are sitting on a pile of money. A lot of people come and get their career started and leave, and I am very sorry this happened. I'm not lying to you...I would hate to see our business hurt, or damaged, or maybe even ruined because of a few people who are all going to get paid."

When first contacted by the Houston Press, Bernstein mentioned that her husband, Paul, was in the hospital after a stroke where he has been since May 2009.

For Richards and other aspiring artists who say they've heard the duo's excuses a few too many times, the explanations fall on deaf ears. Jason Ransom, another painter, said the women started telling him sob stories about Paul Bernstein before he ever sold a painting and that the stories only got sadder and more frequently told afterwards, when he tried to collect his money.

Other artists said they had heard the same thing, and eventually, they would all tell the women something similar to what another local artist/gallerist had to say about the matter: "I'm sorry for your dad, but that has nothing to do with business. That's personal. You should never breathe a word of the personal when you are talking business."

In Richards's case, the event last August at the small art gallery a few blocks west of the antiques district on West 19th Street was fairly well-attended, if not quite as studded with local art cognoscenti as she might have hoped. Still, some local art collectors did turn up, not to mention her family and friends — even some she hadn't seen since high school in Memorial more than 20 years ago, before she became a fixture on Houston's 1990s punk scene and then headed off into the wild.

Richards had covered the walls of the gallery with her enormous, gloomy abstract canvases — her interpretation of the decade the heavily inked, strawberry blond spent working in emergency medicine in False Pass, Alaska, a rugged village in the Aleutians known mainly to the outside world through its association with the Discovery documentary series The Deadliest Catch. Lots of broken bodies and long, dark nights went into the making of those paintings.

She'd invested not only her artistic soul and many hours, but also a lot of her own money. For three months prior to the exhibition, Richards had been writing $125 checks to H Gallery to reserve wall space for individual works, and the gallery had charged her $800 more for her solo show, which would run for a week. She had also catered the event herself, drawing on her contacts in the service industry to bring in the best food, drink and flowers she could find. Richards estimates her tab at more than $2,000: $1,200 on catering, $800 for the rental fee and $200 for mailings.

This was money Richards could ill afford. A single mother who does not receive child support, Richards had recently left her restaurant job to try to make it as a full-time artist. While that might seem rash, she says she was making about ten bucks an hour and forking over $600 a month for childcare. And more established artists told her she had the talent to make it. She weighed her options and decided that becoming a full-time artist would fulfill her creative dreams and eliminate her most pressing expense. She went to work in her studio space in an old warehouse under the Elysian Street viaduct in a devastated nether zone of Fifth Ward brownfields, financing the endeavor by dipping into her savings, most of which came from the sale of her Alaskan home.

H Gallery had also encouraged her dream. Powell-Prera and Bernstein told Richards they were really excited to have her. Richards says she felt like her art was unlike any of the other works the gallery had on hand, but the location was good — while West 19th is known more for antiques, it's still one of Houston's micropockets of hip — and the women talked a good game.

Not that Richards hadn't heard a few snatches of ominous minor-key music tinkling in the background. She was dismayed to see that H Gallery was absent from Spacetaker.com, Houston's top fine arts Web site.  The omission made her wonder how seriously H was regarded by Houston's more established fine arts community, and that also meant that her show was not on the site's calendar.