Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/221565
CAMH AT 65 FIRE, BREAD, FLOOD, ICE AND INSECTS PLUS A SIDE OF ANARCHY HIGH JINX AND HIGH POINTS AT 65 If you wanted to understand the DNA of today's thriving Houston art scene — the third largest community of working artists in America and a lucrative market shaped by discerning, powerful and independent collectors who have now lured two art fairs to town — you need to begin with the archives of one museum. No, it's not the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Menil Collection or the Blaffer Art Museum. Look instead to the bold parallelogram of metal that punctuates Montrose and Bissonnet, aka Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The current CAMH, which occupies a timeless structure by Gunnar Birkerts, opened March 18, 1972, as the third location and second building of one of the oldest institutions in America dedicated to the avantgarde. What can be said about the CAMH at 65 is mirrored in its building, which always seems to be shifting into the future. The gleaming stainless-steel structure (unveiled the same year as Louis Kahn's immortal Kimbell Art Museum to the north and in advance of the Mies van der Rohe addition of its neighbor, the MFAH's Brown Pavilion, dedicated in 1974) still seems architecturally of today. Its sculptural exterior leads into a cavernous 10,000-square-foot interior of raw, unbroken space, while the Kimbell and MFAH arguably are rooted in the earlier traditions of classical modernism. Then you get into the art programming. In a different manner perhaps than either Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum or the MFAH, a stance for Texas as an art-making place and a defense of the cutting edge were forged with this museum, which often was at the very forefront of artists and movements before they even hit, like a divining rod for fresh, destined-to-be-important talent. Along with that role, however, came a side of contention and a big heaping of controversy — that latter centering around the lightning-rod position of directors. A book could be written about this museum's litany of larger-than-life directors — in advance of both their time and certainly their place, that list included game-changing women at the helm — who altered the course of contemporary art forever in Texas, often at the peril of their own positions, by mounting provocative shows that many times could be way too much for trustees or the public, leading to stormy resignations and a threat of the demise of the museum. Here is a distillation of shows that set the bar, are still talked about in CAMH lore today and deserve their own chapter in the annals of Houston and American contemporary art history. When will that larger book be written, a successor to the seminal Finders/Keepers, done on the occasion of the museum's 50th anniversary? Model museum: Gunnar Birkerts' design for the future CAMH, grand opening March 18, 1972. Where it all began: MacKie and Kamrath A-frame, 302 Dallas, unveiling November 13, 1949. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK Contemporary Arts Museum Houston turns three score and five this year. Catherine D. Anspon delves into the history of the institution that defined the cutting edge — and one that was often edged in controversy. Cindy Sherman, Frank Gehry, Julian Schnabel, Francis Bacon, and nascent Pop art. Read on. ALL CAPTIONS UNLESS NOTED, COURTESY CAMH CONTROVERSY COMMUNITY Femmes friendly: Barbara Kruger soloed at the museum, 1985. AFRICAN ART ASCENDANT "Totems Not Taboo" (1959) was organized by the museum's first professional director, Dr. Jermayne MacAgy. A confidant of the de Menils, she influenced and shaped their collecting and is actually buried next to them in Houston's Forest Park Cemetery and memorialized in a Warhol painting commissioned by the de Menils. The show was mounted during a time when MacAgy curated exhibits for the CAMH at the MFAH in the newly opening Cullinan Hall. "Totems" was actually the first show the CAMH presented in the new space, specifically noted in her bequest by building benefactress Nina Cullinan to be available for those purposes. "Totems" set the benchmark for a new way of looking at African art, which previously was viewed through a anthropological lens; it influenced the MFAH to begin collecting in this field (prior to a de Menil gift in 1963, the museum had no art from the African continent) and set the stage for the connoisseurship that would culminate, in the Menil's African galleries decades later. POP WAS (AND IS) TOP The CAMH mounted one of the country's earliest exhibitions for the nascent Pop art movement — actually giving Pop its second ever museum show — in 1963. "Pop! Goes the Easel" showcased talents who would become the prodigal sons of the era, including Messieurs Warhol, Lichtenstein, Dine, Rosenquist, Wesselmann and Thiebaud. Pop did not disappear from CAMH programming. Roy Lichtenstein followed in 1972 and again in 1986; James Rosenquist in 1985, including the epic F-111; post-modernist Rodney Greenblat in 1988 (an elaborate tableau of hallucinatory colors and cartoony characters); and then painter Lari Pittman in 1996. In 2003, senior curator Valerie Cassel Oliver mined the genre in the engagingly smart "Splat, Boom, Pow!" which explored sociopolitical content in Pop and marked an early museum debut for Robert Pruitt, who would go on to be in the Whitney Biennial 2006. DESIGN TRIUMPHS Nowadays, design is the darling of the art world. No collector would venture to Miami Beach during Art Basel time without setting foot into Design Miami, where Zaha Hadid desks and Marc Newsom's chaises longues achieve the status of high art, not mere furnishings. Decades ago, design was already an integral part of the CAMH programming — starting with the very first exhibition, "This Is Contemporary Art," a group view in multimedia that opened October 31, 1948, in a wing of the MFAH. That landmark show juxtaposed Russell Wright dinnerware and Charles Eames chairs with Matisse graphics and architectural renderings by Frank Lloyd Marilyn Minter's Gold Tip, 2009. Minter's retrospective, co-curated by director Bill Arning, arrives CAMH 2015. "I CAME DOWN HERE TO … GIVE A LECTURE AND WAS ASKED TO LOOK AT THE [CONTEMPORARY ARTS] MUSEUM. MR. [F. CARRINGTON] WEEMS, THEN ITS PRESIDENT, DRAGGED ME OUT AND DROVE ME AROUND THE CITY. I SAW WHAT COULD BE DONE HERE. IT WAS CORBUSIER'S DREAM CITY IN THE RAW. WEEMS TOLD ME, 'IF YOU COME BACK TO HOUSTON, I'LL GET YOU BRICK AND MORTAR.' " —DIRECTOR SEBASTIAN ADLER, INTERVIEWED BY JAY JACOBS IN ART GALLERY, MAY 1970 Wright and Walter Gropius. The "Useful Objects" part of the show illustrated the impact of art upon daily living. When the Contemporary Arts Association moved to its first permanent home the next year (a jaunty MacKie and Kamrath-designed A-frame on a plot of borrowed land downtown), the inaugural exhibition was "Contemporary Art in the Home" — a full-fledged design show with a Bauhaus approach that christened the new space with a display of chairs, textiles, tables and lamps. The following decade was also design- and architecture-minded, mixing up gem-like shows such as "The Complexion of Interiors: An Interim of Color and Light" (1953, curated by Houston designer Herbert Wells); "The Common Denominator: Modern Design" (1958); "Ten Years of Houston Architecture" (1959); and Anni Albers: Pictorial Weavings" (1960) with exhibitions including "Collage International: Picasso to the Present (1958) and "The Romantic Agony: From Goya to de Kooning" (1959). Flash forward decades later. The museum was one of the first to recognize the genius of Frank Gehry when he was considered a way-out West Coast architect using metal and chain link in his building practice. In 1987, it presenting a traveling exhibition that examined Gehry's architecture as well as design, including ground-breaking cardboard chairs and the memorable fish lamp. BREAD AND ROACHES CAMH frequently was on the edge — and sometimes falling off the precipice — regarding environmental movements and other wild forms of installation art. Witness the exhibition for the opening of its dramatic new home. The architecture, billed as "a giant silver machine" by Newsweek, was not all that ignited controversy. The inaugural view, "Ten," featured 10 talents specially commissioned by CAMH "who are working in new statements reflecting our time," then director Sebastian Adler told Post reporter Charlotte Phelan (Sunday, February