Press Releases
News Release
Newly Acquired: Selections from
the Barrett Collection of Texas Art
February 28 – May 23
This will be the first chance the public will have to view the 18 works of art from the Barrett Collection recently acquired through a generous gift of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. When Nona and Richard Barrett began collecting art, they envisioned furthering the study, promotion, and exhibition of contemporary Texas art and artists, and eventually they gave over 200 works from their collection to the MFA, Houston, recognizing the important role the Museum plays in the life of Texas art. In the spirit of the original vision of the Barretts, the MFA decided to share a large portion of the Barrett collection with other Texas institutions that actively collect and exhibit Texas art. Among the Old Jail’s new acquisitions are works by Robert Levers, Jim Woodson, Denise Brown, Bill Haveron, Robert McAn, and Gail Siptak. A strong narrative thread runs through this eclectic collection. It will be fun for the viewers to invent their own stories about these works and to ponder their meaning in the place of contemporary art in Texas in the late 1980s and early 1990s when most of these works were created.
News Release
Katherine C. Taylor: "Sculptural Whimsy" December 13 – February 15, 2004
Whimsical is one word that comes to mind upon encountering Katherine C. Taylor’s sculpture. Delight, surprise, and wonderment are others. Her work definitely provokes one’s curiosity and tickles the funny bone. Ms. Taylor has created an alternate world in her body of work where large blown-glass ants crawl up walls and large soft-bodied creatures move among waves of sewn grasses. Her craftsmanship in blown glass and metal work, as well as in soft, sewn sculpture, is superb. She delights in transforming everyday objects into something else.
Ms. Taylor, a Midland native, is currently in graduate school at the University of Melbourne in Australia. A graduate of St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire, where she was awarded the Art Prize, and Dartmouth College, she taught art primarily to children for five years at the Hotchkiss School (Connecticut), the Norman Rockwell Museum (Massachusetts), and the Telfair Museum (Georgia). While her exhibition is up, Ms. Taylor will be an Artist-in-Residence in the Albany schools.
News Release September 4, 2003
Re: Grit & Glory: Laura Wilson’s Photographs of Six-Man Football
On Friday nights all over the Plains, football is the number one topic of conversation. People in towns large and small gather to watch a ritual that defines the region. Communities are galvanized by the struggle for victory. Spirit and pride are strong. The game itself is not only a struggle of the players to win, but it also becomes symbolic of the fans to recapture their own youth and aspirations. Six-man football is the exotic variant for those rural towns too sparsely populated to field an eleven‑man team. It is a wide-open, high-scoring game with lots of 140-pound hometown heroes.
Well-known photographer Laura Wilson captures the excitement and intensity of six-man football with her new images included in Grit and Glory. Running with the team on the field and turning her camera to the fans, she has produced iconic shots and found “decisive moments,” to borrow Cartier-Bresson’s famous phrase. Preferring series, she has worked since 1991 to produce this body of photographs, for which she has also contributed an essay explaining her personal fascination with the sport and her photographer’s perspective.
The exhibition includes 37 large-scale black and white photographs taken in several small west Texas towns that actively participate in the Six-Man league. A handsome companion book, published by Bright Sky Press, accompanies the exhibition. The Old Jail Art Center has organized this exhibition, which will be available for exhibition in other museums following its debut in Albany.
Laura Wilson lives in Dallas, Texas. Her photographs have been featured in numerous nationally acclaimed publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the Washington Post Magazine, TALK magazine and London’s Sunday Times Magazine. She was Richard Avedon’s assistant for six years on his project In the American West, and has just completed a new book of her photographs of Richard Avedon, entitled Avedon at Work. Her recent publications, Hutterites of Montana (Yale University Press, 2000) and Watt Matthews of Lambshead (Texas State Historical Association, 1989) have won numerous national awards.
Grit and Glory: Laura Wilson’s Photographs of Six Man Football provides an insightful look at the world of six-man football in rural America.
Contact: Margaret Blagg, 325/ 762-2269, ojac@camalott.com
Digital images available on request.
News Release:
June, 2003
"WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE
TREK TO ALBANY (population: 2,000)?
For starters, it has a serious art museum, an imposing courthouse,
picturesque storefronts, historic ranches--and every June it lets its hair
down with a Texas -size spectacular under the stars. Fandangle,
anyone?"
Texas Monthly ,
June 2003 by Anne Dingus.
News Release:
April 2, 2003
.gif)
Re: Citizen of the Year
The Old Jail Art Center is pleased to
announce that our very own Margaret Blagg, received the Citizen of the Year
Award from the Albany, Texas Chamber of Commerce. Margaret has
done an outstanding job as director of the Old Jail Art Center and, in a
very short period of time, has distinguished herself as a model citizen of
our community. Thanks for all that you do Margaret. Great
job!
News Release:
Star Telegram, Ft. Worth, Texas
posted on Sun, Mar. 30, 2003 (link to
full Article)
Small towns, big art
How some of the finest art in Texas ended up in
the tiniest of hamlets
Star-Telegram Staff
Writer;Special to the Star-Telegram
Amble down Main Street in Small Town, Texas, and you might just find something unexpected: a polished museum of scope and ambition. In some small towns, a museum might be considered a frivolity. And then there are small towns in Texas.
"There is something very strong in Texas called 'Texas pride,' and the very visible manifestation of that pride in many small communities is their museum," says Jack Nokes, executive director of the Texas Association of Museums.
The result is a state with many museums that have established regional, and even national, reputations well beyond the small towns they inhabit. Many of these museums make their mark by focusing on some aspect of regional lore. McLean is home to the Devil's Rope Museum. The American Cotton Museum honors that cash crop's history in Greenville. Others, like the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, pick specific areas of art to pursue aggressively.
"The presence of these museums shows how much people care about where they live and the reputation of their towns, no matter what the size," says Rebecca Cohen, a journalist and author of the forthcoming Art Guide -- Texas, a guidebook to Texas art museums. "The museums also show that small towns value the arts as something that improves the quality of life and signals that a town is doing well."
So where are the best places to see this phenomenon up close and personal? We take you to four museums that typify the accessibility, sophistication and vision that uniquely make small Texas towns a great place to enjoy high culture.
The Old Jail Art Center, Albany
Take a tour of the Old Jail Art Center in Albany and the constant refrain reverberating through its corridors is "Not bad for a museum in a town of 2,000 people."
It would be "not bad" for a town of 200,000. The Old Jail has been called by Texas Monthly "the best small-town museum in the state -- and maybe in the nation," and for good reason. With its unadorned, rough-hewn limestone facade and discreetly mounted National Register of Historic Places plaque, the 23-year-old Old Jail Art Center does not trumpet its interior riches with Texas-sized bravado. Rather, the Old Jail relies on a quietly built reputation for showing art consistently broad in scope (it has accumulated close to 1,900 objects) and deep in quality.
"I frankly think this little boutique museum would be at home in any big city," says Margaret Blagg, the Old Jail's executive director.
Where in the late 1800s inmates languished in solitary confinement, now discreet galleries chart a serpentine art history course from pre-Columbian pottery to Chinese Han and T'ang Dynasty tomb figures through 20th-century art. You'll find obscure-yet-inspired pieces by Matisse, Miro and Picasso here, as well as American artists such as Arthur Dove, Thomas Hart Benton and Alexander Calder.
While most of the above eras and artists are represented with just a few items for each, the Old Jail is particularly strong in its collection of Bill Bomar, Dickson Reeder and Kelly Fearing, artists who were part of the small-yet-influential regional art movement known as the Fort Worth Circle. Indeed, the Old Jail's current exhibition, "The Mystical World of Kelly Fearing: Selections From a Sixty-Year Retrospective" (running through May 25), is proof that this museum doesn't shy away from the comprehensive show. It vividly traces Fearing's sprawling artistic metamorphosis from early spiritual and immaculately detailed works through whimsically abstract and surreal meditative pieces.
The oldest of the Old Jail's galleries, located at the front and retaining the lockup's original bars, shows off the museum's most ancient art. Mostly purchased through New York and Chicago dealers and galleries, 37 terra cotta tomb figures, dating from China's Han through T'ang Dynasties (202 B.C.-A.D. 906), stand vigil on shelves, many projecting pastel color schemes. The Asian collection broadens to encompass 17th- to 19th-century Japanese prints and silkscreens.
The Reilly Nail Gallery, named for one of the Old Jail's principal founders, houses some of the museum's must-not-miss gems of European art. A composed landscape by French realist and impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, paired with 19th-century French painter Henri Fantin-Latour's lyric still life, begin the artistic sojourn through the room. Renoir fills his Woman With Hat with a sanguinary blush while Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's Au Bal Masque -- Les Fetes Parisiennes flaunts the painter's love of Paris' tawdry cabaret scene. Finally, Amedeo Modigliani's Young Girl With Braids (famously purchased in the late 1940s for the then-steep price of $4,000) contains the elusive, portrait-as-totem quality of so many of the Italian artist's greatest works.
A truly surprising attribute of the Old Jail is its mother lode of pre-Columbian art. The sprawling collection of artifacts (jars, bowls, animals, vessels, ceremonial plates and votive figures), spanning from 1,000 B.C. through A.D. 1,500, serves as a geographic counterweight to the museum's more limited selection of Asian art dating from the same epoch.
The deceiving depth of the Old Jail's holdings is best revealed by what is not on display. Behind the museum's heavy vault door and waiting to be rotated into the galleries lie aisles of sliding dividers containing, among other things, a Matisse nude print, a miniature work by Andy Warhol, a Goya etching and extraordinarily meticulous nude drawings by Paul Cadmus. (link to Full Article)
 |
News Release
For Immediate Release: February 18, 2003
Re:
The Mystical World of Kelly Fearing
Contact: Margaret Blagg 325/ 762-2269
The Mystical World of Kelly Fearing: Selections from A Sixty-Year Retrospective opens to the public on March 9. The exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, prints, and collages by the pioneering Texas artist and professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, Kelly Fearing, who has served as Trustee Advisor to the Old Jail Art Center (OJAC) for over two decades.
The exhibition celebrates the prodigious career of one of the state’s and the region’s most admired artists and art educators. It is the most comprehensive survey of Fearing’s work to date, presenting work in every medium and period of the artist’s illustrious career from 1939 to the present.
Born in Arkansas in 1918, Kelly Fearing studied art at Louisiana Tech University and Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree in 1950. Fearing came to Fort Worth, Texas in 1943 and joined a group of artists active between 1945 and 1955 known as the “Fort Worth Circle.” This group was responsible to a large extent for introducing modernist art and ideas to Texas.
Though not defined by a specific aesthetic, the Fort Worth Circle was important for moving beyond the realism and agrarian subject matter of American Regionalism, which dominated Texas art in the 1930s and 1940s. Fearing and his Fort Worth cohorts were the first artists in the state to respond in a significant way to European artists such as Picasso, Braque, Klee, Kandinsky, Modigliani, Ernst, Klee, Miro, and Dubuffet.
Over the years, Kelly Fearing developed a personal and highly subjective approach that integrates figuration and abstraction while experimenting with materials and processes. The mystical environments he creates in his paintings and graphic work reflect the artist’s own meditative journeys and explorative artistic process.
After teaching from 1945-47 at Texas Wesleyan, Kelly Fearing assumed the Ashbel Smith Professorship of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught for forty years. A noted art educator, Fearing co-authored several multi-volume art education textbooks from 1960 through the 1980s. He is now retired Professor Emeritus.
Creative Research Laboratory (CRL) and the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin organized and originally presented the exhibition in Austin in the galleries of Flatbed Press. Inaugurated in November 2001 as a site dedicated to research and production in contemporary art and design, CRL offers a year-round schedule of exhibitions presenting the work of students and faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Mark L. Smith, founding Co-Director of Flatbed Press, and Dr. Amy Freeman Lee, founder of the Texas Watercolor Society and a distinguished artist, philanthropist, and community leader based in San Antonio, curated the exhibition and wrote essays for the catalogue. Dr. Smith and OJAC Executive Director Margaret Blagg chose selections from the larger exhibition for this venue, which includes additional works from the Old Jail Art Center’s permanent collection. A fully illustrated, 64-page color catalogue documents the original exhibition.
“The Old Jail Art Center has long collected Kelly
Fearing’s work,” said Ms. Blagg, explaining that the museum now owns 30 of
his paintings, drawings, collages, and prints. About one third of OJAC’s
holding of Fearing’s work will be on display in the exhibition. She added,
“Kelly Fearing’s work ranges from deeply spiritual to delightfully playful.
He is still working and still teaching Texas audiences about modern and
contemporary art through his engaging and thought-provoking work. The
chance to show our audience a larger selection of his work is a great
opportunity.”
News Release
For Immediate Release: February 19, 2003
Re:
Sponsorship for Kelly Fearing Exhibition
Contact: Margaret Blagg 325/ 762-2269
The Old Jail Art Center has announced that its spring exhibition, The Mystical World of Kelly Fearing, will be sponsored by the Dian Graves Owen Foundation, Dr. and Mrs. Edmund Pillsbury, and contributors to the museum’s Exhibition Fund. The exhibition opens to the public on March 9 and will run through May 25. It will be on view during the regular hours the museum is open to the public, with the exception of Easter Sunday, when the museum will be closed.
News Release: August 20, 2002
Re: Latin American Lyricism: Selections from the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin
The Old Jail Art Center announces the opening on September 14 of its major fall exhibition, Latin American Lyricism: Selections from the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin. Drawn from the Latin American Collection of the Blanton Museum, the selection of 18 works documents the variety of responses to international modern art currents in nine Latin American countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Fernando Botero (Columbia), Maria Luisa Pacheco (Bolivia), Rafael Coronel (Mexico), Antonio Henrique Amaral (Brazil), Joaquín Torres-Garcia (Uruguay), Jesus Rafael Soto (Venezuela), Miguel Ocampo (Argentina), Armando Morales (Nicaragua), and Herman-Braun Vega (Peru) are among the artists whose work is featured. The exhibition will continue through December 1.
Barbara and John Duncan of New York City formed the core of the collection during many years of travel, work, and study and Central and South America beginning in 1955. In a catalogue documenting an earlier exhibition of the collection, Mrs. Duncan wrote:
We encountered, in our continual travels in Latin America, a remarkable number of artists who, despite their geographical isolation from the main centers of contemporary art and from each other, were relating themselves and their countries to the relatively new aesthetic of modern art. Many of the artists in our collection studied abroad and then returned to work and exercise leadership in their own countries.
“The exhibition’s title refers to lyric poetry—a short form directly expressing the poet’s own thoughts and sentiments,” explained Margaret Blagg, executive director of the Old Jail Art Center. “Many Latin American artists in the politically turbulent 1960s and 1970s practiced a veiled lyricism, making art as personal and social commentary. Although cloaked in international styles of abstraction and new figural painting, their subjects are generally more politically charged than North American or European painting of the day.”
Some, like Fernando Botero, made gentle spoofs with portraits of rotund sitters from all aspects of Columbian society. Others managed to create abstract landscapes to convey personal messages and observations about their native lands. Gunther Gerzso (Mexican) evoked Pre-Columbian structures, while Armando Morales made aggressive forms that echoed the political strife in Nicaragua. Sarah Grilo (Argentinean), who worked in New York City in the 1960s, made work that showed the grit and confusion of urban life—wherever lived in the late 20th century.
A number of Venezuelan artists in the 1960s were influenced by Kinetic Art—an international art style that incorporated actual or perceived movement into works of art. Manuel Merida’s work depends on electricity to create ever-changing compositions. Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesus Rafael Soto, on the other hand, constructed static works that appear to change as the viewer moves past them. All three artists rely on the viewer’s direct observations to complete and extend the meaning of their work.
The exhibition features the work of one of the fathers of modern art in Latin America— Joaquín Torres-Garcia. Born in 1874, he spent many years in Europe, absorbing all the modernist movements from Cubism to Surrealism. Upon his return to Uruguay in 1934, he set up a workshop for artists and worked in other ways to spread an artistic revolution that he hoped would spark societal debate. His work influenced many South American artists, some of whom subscribed to his theory of Universal Constructivism, which used symbols arranged in a grid composition. Julio Alpuy (Uruguayan) and Marcelo Bonevardi (Argentinean) were two who employed symbolic images and forms meant to have universal meaning even in a non-representational context. Other artists went their own way but took Torres-Garcia’s passion to create a new visual language for Latin American art as license to pursue cultural identity in their work—at a time when “cooler” art movements, such as Pop Art, Op Art, Kinetic Art, and Minimalism, were in vogue elsewhere in the world.
Blagg, who curated the exhibition, said, “Many Latin American nations saw political upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s. Autocratic regimes stifled political dissent and social discourse; but, art mirrors its times. Because it was literally dangerous for most Latin American artists to create work that openly criticized the conditions of the day during this period, they found other means to express their opinions and frustrations. It does not take much imagination to read the lyric messages presented in the Art as Politics section of the exhibition.”
“For example,” she continued, “instead of depicting political prisoners, Amaral (Brazilian) evoked a cell and bound a swollen, bruised banana in his painting entitled So ém en verde (Alone in Green), and rather than portray contemporary political figures, Antonio Sequí (Argentinean) used the New Figuration art style to lampoon Napoleon, a despot safely ensconced in another continent’s history.”
“Seen from a perspective of thirty to forty years,” Blagg said, “the work in this show is vigorous, surprising, and provocative. I think our audience will be stimulated by the unexpected artistic responses to what were turbulent times in Latin America.”
“Since the Blanton’s opening in 1963, the Museum has been committed to the collection, interpretation, and teaching of modern and contemporary Latin American art,” explained Jessie Otto Hite, director of the Blanton Museum. Blagg added, “With more than 1,600 works of art, the Blanton’s collection is acknowledged as one of the finest publicly held collections of 20th-century Latin American art in the country—indeed in the world. We are fortunate to have a selection of this famed collection in Albany.”