Untitled Art, Houston taps into a city where artists can thrive

The second edition of Untitled Art, Houston (until 4 October) brings together 98 galleries at the city’s sprawling George R. Brown Convention Center, an 11% increase from the inaugural edition’s 88 exhibitors. About one fifth of this year’s exhibitors hail from Texas, with Houston galleries especially strongly represented.

Returning Texas galleries include Houston stalwarts such as Inman Gallery, McClain Gallery, Moody Gallery and Sicardi Ayers Bacino, alongside younger galleries including Laura (the gallery) and Seven Sisters from Houston and Martha’s from Austin. Notably, all five of last year’s Dallas-based exhibitors are sitting the fair out this year. This edition has also attracted some international heavyweights, like the New York- and Milan-based gallery Kaufmann Repetto⁠ (which is sharing a stand with Anton Kern Gallery) and the New York-, Rio de Janeiro- and São Paulo-based gallery Nara Roesler.

Sales made during the fair’s VIP preview on Thursday (1 October) offered a snapshot of the market for artists with strong Texas connections. Moody Gallery sold Mary McCleary’s Earth Felt the Wound for $80,000, while McClain Gallery sold Dorothy Hood’s Tixo in the Morning for $95,000 to a new local collector.

Night Gallery from Los Angeles reported selling multiple works by the Houston-based artist Tomashi Jackson in the $80,000 to $100,000 range to local collectors, while Richard Saltoun Gallery (which operates spaces in London, New York and Rome) sold paintings by Bea Scaccia for prices between $15,000 and $40,000 to new and international clients. The Los Angeles-based galleries Megan Mulrooney and Feia both reported selling out their stands during the VIP preview, while Laura (the gallery), PFA Gallery from Washington, DC, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship and Night Gallery reported near sell-outs.

For the Houston-based art adviser Katharine B. Barthelme, the fair’s preview day had good energy. The new floor plan at the George R. Brown Convention Center also helped improve the flow of the fair, she says, making it feel more open despite the increase in exhibitors.

“They’ve really been able to get people excited about an art fair, which is hard, and George R. Brown is not necessarily a sexy space,” Barthelme says. “We were probably a little trigger shy about having a fair come through, but I do think that Michael [Slenske, the fair’s director,] and his team did a really good job of courting Houston.”

That courtship comes as the Houston art scene’s profile continues to rise. The city is home to major institutions including the Menil Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and there is a longstanding culture of philanthropy and support for the arts among its sizable donor class. But Houston’s appeal to artists extends beyond its institutions, collectors and even its oil money. The city offers something increasingly difficult to find in large American art hubs: space to work, room to experiment and a relatively low-cost environment in which to build and sustain an artistic community.

“There's a certain openness to the city,” Slenske says. “That’s the problem with the art world right now—people are jaded. I think we need to go back to basics in a lot of ways. Why are we all in this? Let’s start with artists, let's start with projects to be inspired by. When I got into the art world, it was fun.”

Untitled’s programming in Houston this week reflects some of that enthusiasm and local character. A section inspired by artists’ markets draws on Houston’s homegrown DIY culture, offering smaller works at more accessible price points that visitors can purchase and take home.

Local legends make a stand

Tessa Granowski, the founder of the nomadic Dallas gallery Nature of Things, has brought that spirit directly into the fair with a dual-artist stand featuring two artists with strong Houston roots. The painter Cody Ledvina was raised in the city and works as an archivist at the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, the non-profit behind some of Houston’s best-known folk-art sites, including the Orange Show Monument in the East End. The organisation also operates the Beer Can House, begun in the 1960s by John Milkovisch, who covered the exterior of his Rice Military home with around 50,000 beer cans.

The Orange Show Center also organises one of Houston’s best-known annual events, the Art Car Parade, in which hundreds of decorated vehicles make their way through the city. The photographer Harrod Blank has documented the event for decades and is also known in the horror-film community for acting in the 1988 cult classic Killer Klowns from Outer Space. The Nature of Things is selling his photogaphs of art cars in Houston over the years.

“Harrod and Cody are extremely dynamic people who have a lot going on beyond what you would see just in their artwork, which I always find makes for a more interesting outfit,” Granowski says. “Energetically, Cody and Harrod were the most Houston people I could think of.”

This is Ledvina’s first time being shown at an art fair, and Granowski points to the enormous range of materials used in his work, including paint, leather, watercolour, rocks, wire, clay, ink and coloured pencil. Blank’s photographs of the Art Car Parade similarly document the resourcefulness of its participants, who have used feathers, found trash, intricate ironwork and cowhide to augment their vehicles. Nothing on the Nature of Things stand is priced above $4,000.

“Houston has artists who are art-obsessed, and they find a lot of joy in the investigation and obsession of art—a lot of artists that don’t separate art from their life,” Granowski says. “It's a very funky and free scene.” By way of another example she points to the Houston artist Mark Flood, whose own stand at the fair features canvases leaning against the walls to resemble a viewing room or studio. She describes Flood as a “living legend” and a figure who “sets the tone for Houston [where] the only rule is to break all the rules”.

For Granowski, that aesthetic lawlessness is partly environmental. “There’s a sort of looseness, which I think comes from extremely oppressive humidity most of the year,” she says. “And no zoning really feeds into the cowboy spirit.”

To each his zone

Houston’s unique lack of comprehensive, citywide zoning laws has also had more practical consequences for artists. The relative affordability of space has helped artists maintain studios and allowed DIY spaces to emerge in old warehouses, strip malls and residential neighbourhoods. Ledvina sees that freedom as central to the city’s appeal.

“There's nothing written in stone here, nothing. For better or worse, things are torn down. But it's also reinvented every ten years,” he says. “This place allows you to own a piece of Houston culture, as opposed to places—I lived in London for some time—where it owns you.”

He also sees a connection between the city’s artistic character and its history as hub in the global energy industry.

“It’s a fucking crazy place. There’s still a lot of cowboy in it. There’s a lot of prospecting as an energy town. That embeds itself in other elements,” Ledvina says. “It takes chances on big projects or interesting artists; it’s not self-serious. In fact, it should probably be more self-serious, and it’s evolved organically into this amazing place.”

Houston’s energy wealth has long shaped its collecting community, from the de Menil family to contemporary collectors with ties to the sector, like Leigh and Reggie Smith and Judy Nyquist, who attended the VIP opening. That combination of wealth, demonstrated philanthropic support, institutional infrastructure, affordable space and an independent-minded artist community gives the city a particular position within the larger art industry.

“I think people want a little bit of that Texas magic. My artists are always really excited about coming and showing here,” says Laura Burton, the founder of Laura (the gallery). “There’s a bit of a mystique, and people always talk about oil money.”

Burton lived and worked in New York before relocating to Houston when her husband, Owen Duffy, was hired by the local branch of Asia Society. At Untitled, Burton is presenting works by the Los Angeles-based artist Raina Lee, whose painted ceramic postcards priced from $2,000 to $9,000 have proved a hit.

Erin Dorn, the founder and director of Seven Sisters, is showing the work of Houston-based artist Emily Peacock, who is also an associate professor of photography at Sam Houston State University and moonlights as a stand-up comedian. Peacock’s photography is diaristic and nostalgic, drawing on her everyday life and different aspects of her identity. Her palette of soft pastels is paired with edgier subjects, including cigarettes and flowers and a cake impaled by a middle finger.

“There's always a wry, dark sense of humour, almost a balance between hope and despair, in her work,” Dorn says. “We envision this booth being sort of like a homage to a roadside smoke shop or flower shop.”

Peacock grew up in Port Arthur, around 90 miles outside Houston, and says she draws on her "white trash” heritage in her practice. She also cites local and regional cultural figures including Robert Rauschenberg, Janis Joplin and the rap group UGK. (At the fair’s preview, UGK member Bun B perused records at a special record-store pop-up created by the artist Dave Muller.)

For Ledvina, that mix of influences, people and possibilities is part of what makes Houston work as an artistic community, even if navigating it can be difficult.

“If you come here, you may need a Sherpa,” Ledvina says. “I find it a strange place that trips over itself, but somehow gets it right most of the time. But it’s a clumsy spot that allows for all kinds of opportunities to happen.”

• Untitled Art, Houston, until 4 October, George R. Brown Convention Center, Houston