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ARNING AND MCCRAY IN A Q-AND-A: STATS. Arning: Director at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston contemporary art for general magazines like Time Out New York to rarefied academic journals on the theory of the human worldwide and penned essays for scores of museums, including Jim Hodges for his upcoming survey at the Dallas Museum of Art and on Peter Hujar for the Galleria Civica di Modena in Italy. McCray: Technical director at TBWA\CHIAT\DAY, which means architect and develop applications and software integrations for various departments in the agency. FIRST BRUSH WITH ART. Arning: My parents were not collectors, but my father was a Sullivan and Cromwell lawyer and considered his taste in art to be superb because he truly appreciated Picasso and Matisse and took us to MoMA regularly. I got from him a taste for going to museums at a very young age. My older sister Valerie had a more advanced sensibility, introducing me to Andy Warhol, John Cage, Rudolf Nureyev, Tennessee Williams and the Velvet Underground, and I devoured everything I could about the edgier art in all disciplines she shared with me. There were other collectors who were partners at my father's law firm, and one of them took my folks to SoHo in the '70s. I remember my father coming back livid that his friend had tried to get him to buy for thousands of dollars a geometric progression of rocks on the floor. Now I realize that was likely a classic early Mel Bochner, but my dad took that offer as an insult, as if he were being tricked. When he came to see the type of wild art I showed at White Columns, he tried to appreciate what I was working on, but he would always have to retreat to the relative safety of a good Picasso Minotaur. McCray: My parents were never art collectors. And I honestly think that the first exposure I truly had with art was seeing it up close at Chiat's Venice office. The office itself was a Frank Gehry–designed boathouse-binoculars-treehouse three-part building, which housed many pieces of Jay Chiat's personal collection. My first art "moment," however, was at the Whitney's American Century Childe Hassam. MANHATTAN DURING FACTORY DAYS. Top: Andy + Jonathan. In McCray and Arning's home office, Jonathan Horowitz's Pink Wedge looks down over McCray's desk, while Arning's very first art purchase as a young teenager resides above his head: two framed soup can invitations for an early Warhol show. Above: Art is served. On the dining room wall, paintings by hotly collected Shane Tolbert, Mary Heilmann, and Jeffrey Gibson, above a framed photo edition by Cindy Sherman titled Doctor/Nurse. On the right, sculptures by Galveston-based Nick Barbee and an early Andrew Masullo. NOVEMBER | PAGE 54 | 2012 Arning: I went to Friends Seminary in Manhattan from kindergarten through high school — a very good place for a culturally curious self-starter. We had a sound poet on faculty who had us cut our poems into pieces and reassemble the syllables Dada style. In junior high, my best friend's dad was the art critic for Newsweek magazine, and he also was one of the early pioneering video artists. I would go to their loft at 80 Wooster Street and see works by Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik, Komar and Melamid, and Sturtevant. The fact that Sturtevant was repainting artworks I knew were by other artists like Warhol really blew my teenage mind. It has taken 40 years to untangle her complex oeuvre. At Friends, we did anti-Vietnam war protests and Earth Day celebrations as school activities, and John Lennon, Patti LaBelle, Alice Cooper and Harry Chapin came and spoke to us. Warhol's