About
HoustonArtHistory.com is the project of Pete Gershon, a writer, researcher, and curator specializing in the history of Houston’s art community.
He’s the author of Painting the Town Orange: The Stories Behind Houston's Visionary Art Environments (History Press, 2014) and Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston 1972 - 1985 (Texas A&M University Press, fall 2018).
From 1997 to 2013, he was the founding publisher of Signal to Noise, the internationally distributed quarterly journal of improvised and experimental music, and from 2012 to 2013 he worked with the Creating a Living Legacy Project's Houston team to document the artwork of multimedia artist Bert L. Long, Jr., and arrange his professional papers for access and preservation.
From 2013 to 2021, he was the Core Residency Program Coordinator at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he curated the exhibitions ‘Contemporary Artists in Houston from the Collections of William J. Hill and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’ (2018) and ‘Prints and Ceramics from Little Egypt Enterprises and Related Studios’ (2019). He also organized shows of previously unseen historic work by Sharon Kopriva (2018) and Joel McGlasson (2021) for the C.G. Jung Center gallery, as well as “In Dreams, Visions” (2015), a survey of artwork by Gulf Coast visionaries.
Since 2021, he’s been the curator of programs at the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, a non-profit alternative arts center based around the preservation and programming of a historic sculptural environment created by a self-trained builder working with found and repurposed materials. At the Orange Show Center, he’s produced community-centered programs with dozens of visionary artists including Lonnie Holley, Maria Chavez, Negativland, Bread and Puppet Theatre, and David Best.
He’s contributed to a number of other projects as a writer or editor, including “On Site: 50 Years of Public Art of the University of Houston System” (2018), “Two Front Doors: Fifty Years of Blaffer Art Museum” (2023), and “Impractical Spaces: Houston” (2022), an anthology of first-person interviews of founders of artist-run alternative art venues in the city from 1948 to the present day.
He received a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from Hampshire College in 1995 and a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of North Texas in 2015.
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An obituary for 120 Portland, Glasstire, 2020
A road trip to Huntsville Texas
2002 Interview with Herbie Hancock
Pete Gershon working with Bert L. Long, Jr., July 2012. Photo by Joan Batson