Keith Carter :  Unseen & Rediscovered

An exhibition of new and unseen works by Keith Carter,

the 2009 Texas Artist of the Year
 
September 18 - October 30, 2009
Main Gallery, Art League Houston

 

 

   

Horton Foote

(2001), from the Portraits series, Keith Carter, toned silver gelatin print, 15 ½" x 15 ½"

 

 

Art League Houston
1953 Montrose Boulevard
Houston, Texas 77006
 

Art League Houston is pleased to announce the opening of Unseen and Rediscovered, an exhibition of photographs by 2009 Texas Artist of the Year, Keith Carter, September 18 through October 30, 2009 in Art League Houston's Main Gallery.  This exhibition features previously unknown and never exhibited photographs by the artist, spanning a period of four decades (1970-2009).  
 
The opening reception for Unseen and Rediscovered is on Friday, September 18, 2009 from 6:00 - 9:00 p.m. with an artist talk at 6:15 p.m.  A catalogue, with essay by Clint Willour, accompanies the exhibition. 

Lauded by the Los Angeles Times as a "transcendent realist" and "a poet of the ordinary," Keith Carter has been making evocative and haunting photographs for nearly four decades.  For a number of years, Carter focused primarily on his home terrain along the Texas Louisiana border corridor.  One of the earliest of these images is included in the exhibition.  Winterwood (1970), a landscape of trees in water taken outside of his home town of Beaumont, was created as a gift for Pat, who would later become his wife.  On the mount of this nascent effort, a young Keith wrote the Don McClean lyrics from which the photo derives its name.  

Another early image included in the exhibition would influence his work for decades.  Taken by the artist while snowbound in the Guadalupe Mountains in West Texas and deriving its illumination from a single light bulb, Pine Springs Cafe (1972) depicts a weathered couple and their dog, against a wall chock full of crookedly hung images from their long and shared life. 
 
His recent loss of vision in his left eye to cancer has led to two new bodies of work: Splendore de Cappelli and Ocularia.  Splendore de Cappelli (Splendor of Hair) is a series of portraits taken in a studio setting, a first for Keith Carter.  Created digitally, Ocularia combine the artist's ocular images with photographs sent from the Hubble Space Telescope. 

 

 

 

Approaching Orion  (2009), from the Ocularia series, Keith Carter, digital pigment print, 36" x 36"

 

Along with these and other works, Unseen and Rediscovered also includes photographs of writers Keith Carter made for the New York Times in the 1980's (i.e. novelist Walker Percy and archeologist and anthropologist Tony Hillerman), a portrait of REM lead singer Michael Stipes without his hat, digitally reworked photos from a collaboration with artist Michael Tracy entitled Natural Histories, and a Hurricane  Rita water damaged nude of Pat Carter titled 1972, which in the words of Clint Willour evoke "the wrath of Neptune, creating a vision startling in its hurricane related fiction."

 

 

 

1972  (1972), from the Vintage series, Keith Carter, toned silver gelatin print, 7 ¾" x 7 ¾"

About the Artist
Keith Carter was born in 1948 in Madison, Wisconsin and moved to Beaumont, Texas as a young boy.  His father deserted the family early on, and his mother raised her son while working as a children's portrait photographer. The artist's earliest memories were of his mother developing photographs in the kitchen sink, while he watched on, captivated by the images that were revealed before his eyes.  As he grew older, he wasn't interested in being a photographer, and studied business in college, while helping his mother out in her portrait studio as a framer.  But Carter's disinterest grew to a passion after chancing upon a photograph his mother made of a little girl holding a basket of kittens.  According to his good friend Bill Witliff in an essay in Texas Monthly magazine "He got down on one knee for a better look. It wasn't so much the picture itself that grabbed him, but rather the light.  It was a small epiphany, he had never before realized light could be so stunningly, so supremely beautiful."
 
From that moment on, Carter learned all he could about the medium, thumbing through photography magazines until they fell apart in his hands, studying the works and methods of others.  He even passed himself off as a scholar of photography in order to gain unfettered access to New York's Museum of Modern Art's photography collection where he studied the works of masters including Paul Strand, Alfred Steiglitz, and Cartier Bresson, along with others.
 
Since those early beginnings in his mother's kitchen studio, Keith Carter has risen to international fame.  He has exhibited his work in more than 100 solo exhibitions in thirteen countries, and his photographs have been the subject of ten monographs, including the most recent A Certain Alchemy, published by the University of Texas Press in Austin in October, 2008.  Carter holds the endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University. His honor and awards include two NEA Photographer's Survey Visual Art Grants, The Lange-Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University (1991) the Stanley Marcus Award for Excellence in Design, Texas Institute of Letters (1997), and a Distinguished Faculty Lecture Award from Lamar University, and most recently a 2009 Texas Medal of Arts in Visual Art, among others.  His work is in many permanent collections including The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Illinois, the Witliff Collection of Southwestern and Mexican Photography, the Menil Collection, the George Eastman Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Yale University Museum.  He is represented by McMurtrey Gallery in Houston, Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle, PNDB Gallery in Dallas, Photo-Eye Gallery in Sante Fe, Stephen L. Clark Gallery in Austin and A Gallery For Fine Photography in New Orleans.
 
About Texas Artist of the Year
In 1983 Art League Houston created the Texas Artist of the Year award as a dynamic and informative annual project documenting Texas art history. Through this project, tribute is paid to outstanding members of the visual art community.  Since then, twenty-six outstanding artists and eight exceptional patrons have been awarded the Texas Artist of the Year.  The 2009 Texas Patrons of the Year are Karol Kreymer and Dr. Robert Card, two of Houston's most respected collectors with a reputation for being strong supporters of cutting edge, intelligent contemporary art.
 

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Birds: A Collection of Verse

September 18 - October 30, 2009

Front Gallery, Art League Houston

 

 

The opening reception for Birds: A Collection of Verse and Vision is Friday, September 18, 2009, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Additionally, there will be an artist talk and poetry reading by Jim Blackburn on Monday, September 21, with wine at 6:30 and reading at 7:00 p.m.  This event is co-hosted by Houston Audubon Society's Night Owls, a young professionals for conservation group. 

The depiction of birds, used as a symbol of spirit, is a subject Isabelle Scurry Chapman has returned to over the years.  This passion was instilled early on, through her father's gift of a Peterson's field guide to birds, and their shared trips to a fishing camp where she became acquainted with a blind man who could identify birds by sound.  In 1975 she met Jim Blackburn through her husband, and it was he who taught her the true art of bird watching.

Scurry Chapman's current body of work initially began as a group of portraits of her favorite Galveston birds, but soon grew to include others Texas birds as well.   The birds in the Art League exhibition are painted on cigar boxes, chosen because they represent a place to store treasures, and because of their "ribcage size - perfect for things of the heart and soul," as Scurry Chapman says.

Although a serious writer who eloquently addresses issues such as coastal preservation and sustainable development, Jim Blackburn had not considered his poetry to be anything other than a form of entertainment he wrote or made up on the cuff for himself and his friends.  This all changed in the fall of 2008.  "The idea to collaborate came when I walked into [Isabelle's] studio, saw the birds on the wall and literally said, "I can write poems to go with these birds."  The poems Blackburn created, in response to his friend's work, allowed him to more fully express his spiritual devotion to nature or what he refers to as "Earth Church," in ways he had only touched upon in his prose.

Isabelle Scurry Chapman says of Birds: A Collection of Verse and Vision,"For me, the book is about an amazing collaboration with a wonderful friend, two birds of a feather responding to the magic of birds."

About the Artist

Isabelle Scurry Chapman has a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Mississippi (1970), and an M.S. in Occupational Therapy from Texas Woman's University (1975).  In 1986, after the loss of her parents, she began taking art classes and studied at the University of Houston, Rice University, and the Glassell School of Art. Isabelle has exhibited her work extensively throughout Texas, with exhibitions at the Galveston Arts Center, Women and Their Work, Lamar University, and UT Health Science Center of Houston, among many others.  Her awards include a 1994 Mid America Art Alliance/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two grants from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston/Harris County (1998, 1999) and a 2006 Mayor's Award for her work with ART BRIDGE, an art program for homeless children.  In addition to volunteering with ART BRIDGE for 8 years, she has also volunteered with Urban Harvest Gardens since 1997.

About the Poet

An attorney for more than 30 years, Jim Blackburn is a partner in Blackburn Carter, P.C., a firm devoted to environmental law and planning.  He is also a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University, where he serves as Director of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Energy and Water Sustainability, and is a Faculty Associate at the SSPEED Center and China-U.S. Center.  Blackburn is the recipient of a 2007 Barbara C. Jordan Advocate Award from Texas Southern University, a 2001 National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, and a 1998 Bob Eckhardt Lifetime Achievement Award for his coastal preservation efforts from the General Land Office of the State of Texas.  In 2003 he was awarded an honorary membership in the American Institute of Architects for legal work associated with urban quality of life issues.  In October 2004, Texas A&M press published Blackburn's manuscript The Book of Texas Bays, which focuses upon the current environmental health of Texas bays and efforts undertaken to protect them. 

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Art League Houston is funded in part by grants from the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
 

 

 

This project is supported in part by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Art League Houston also acknowledges the following private foundations, public funders, and corporations for their support this season: Art Colony Association Inc., The Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston Endowment, Inc., ExxonMobil Foundation, Felvis Foundation, Mrs. Katherine McGovern, The Oshman Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, Saint Arnold Brewing Company, Target, and Wortham Foundation, Inc.

Art League Houston also wishes to thank its many generous individual donors for their support.

 

 

CONTACT US

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info@artleaguehouston.org
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