Houston Art History

When I arrive at Forrest Prince’s compound in Houston’s Kerrwood neighborhood, he is standing outside his camper, feeding the eight feral cats he brought with him from his previous residence near Hobby Airport. "It's kind of like serving the least among us," says Forrest as he doles out food to the mewling felines, his long, white hair and beard fluttering in the breeze. At 78, thin as a rail and with a deeply lined visage, he has the appearance of a wizened biblical hermit, which is not far from the truth.

He tells anyone who asks about how God saved him in 1969 after he awoke on a bathroom floor, having overdosed on amphetamines. Two years later, while on the path to recovery, he commemorated the event by painting the words, "Please God, Save Me" on a seven-foot-tall, rectangular piece of wooden siding scored to resemble brick. Like a plaintive graffito scrawled by a tortured hand in a back alley, it’s a bellwether work by one of Houston’s most uncompromising contemporary artists.

Prince is an animal rights activist and a strict vegetarian. A table setting created in 1990 features plates heaped with plastic bacon, eggs, fries, and biscuits; a cup of coffee; a glass of milk; salt and pepper shakers; a butter dish; and an ashtray. The piece is marked with its title, You're Eating Yourself to Death and You're Too Dumb to Know It. He’s also an anti-war advocate. A small wooden shadowbox diorama contains a plastic soldier pulling a missile and a gas can, and above it, a tiny camel set against a background erupting in flames. The 1991 work, It's Easier to Get a Camel Through the Eye of a Needle Than to Get an American into Heaven attracted the attention of FBI agents when it was displayed as part of the Art Car Museum's Secret Wars exhibition in 2001.

But above all, Prince is a man of God. A series of hearts trace his spiritual journey. A 1971 work features a heart shape containing the word "repent," spelled out in small mirrored tiles that the artist embedded into a piece of scrap lumber. Shimmering, mirrored hearts from the ‘70s and ‘80s are marked with the word "love" spelled out in a graceful, cursive script. A 2012 work has a heart wrought from a red neon tube mounted on a mirrored backing; at it's center, in blue neon, is the word "occupy."

The countless mirrored tiles that are so prevalent in Prince’s art--as well as the content of the work itself--force self-reflection on levels both figurative and literal. But if Prince's art is didactic, the man himself is not. While he clearly aims to communicate a message with his art, and ardently hopes to “raise people’s consciousness,” he doesn’t proselytize in conversation. He may answer the phone with a cheerful, “praise God, how may I help you?” but he freely admits, “I’m not big on the Bible. There’s a lot in there that’s not right.”

In fact, Forrest bases his faith on the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient biblical manuscripts discovered six decades ago in forgotten caves in Israel’s West Bank. He adheres to a strict diet of juices and raw vegetables, has taken a vow of poverty, and refuses to cut his hair and beard, which hang in a wispy, white tangle. While some of his pieces might suggest a Christian fundamentalist worldview, Prince is actually Unitarian in his beliefs. “Christians believe Jesus will save us,” he says. “I believe the Messiah will teach everyone to save himself.”

He’s dressed simply in a blue workshirt and jeans as he leads me through his warehouse studio. He shows me a cardboard model of a room-sized installation he’d like to make someday. The first chamber is painted black, with the words “hate,” “pride,” “lust,” “selfishness,” and “ignorance,” scrawled in white surrounding a crucifix-shaped cutout in the far wall. Peek through the cutout, and a second room as revealed, a brilliantly shimmering mirrored chamber containing the words “peace,” “love,” and “joy,” which will be illuminated in gleaming neon. The title of the work is Break On Through to the Other Side. “I'm just trying to draw people into the message of it,” he says, “so they can save their dumb ass, if you want to know the truth.”

Forrest has spent the past 45 years making art, but he has no appetite for museum receptions or ritzy parties at the homes of his wealthy collectors. Instead, he lives a quiet, hermetic life, having given most of his time and energy over the past three decades to servicing the poor, the sick, and the elderly in assisted care facilities. It’s a life far removed from the one he led as a young man, when he roamed the streets of the East End and the nightclubs of Montrose as a pimp, a thief, and a drug addict.

“I was in so much trouble with the police, that I did what I said I'd never do: I turned to God for help.” Forrest squeezes oranges for juice as he begins to tell his tale. “My mother had tuberculosis, and my father divorced her while she was in the sanitarium and married his cousin. So I used to go around telling God what a sorry motherfucker he was, and I promised I'd never ask that guy for any help at all. Well, I ended up in such a trap, strung out on drugs, just as sick mentally as you can get, and I finally turned to God for help, and said, 'please God, save me.'”

Born in 1935, Forrest grew up on the mean streets of Houston’s East End around Navigation and Wayside. After his mother checked into the sanitarium, he lived with his alcoholic father and in a succession of foster homes. At thirteen he was racking balls in a dingy bowling alley, babysitting the children of the neighborhood prostitutes, running from the police, and developing a taste for drugs. He quit school and joined the Marine Corps in 1953, spending two weeks in the brig for leaving his post. After his discharge, he returned to Houston with his sights set on becoming a pimp.

He was fastidious in his appearance, dressing in custom-tailored suits with French cuffs and slicking back his jet-black hair. But even if he looked the part, he lacked the experience and the demeanor to make it as a pimp. He bought his first whore from a friend for $100 and a diamond ring, but she quickly ran away. Others came and went, and it proved to be a dangerous and chaotic life. Before long, Forrest wound up in the VA hospital, where he was treated for depression with insulin shock therapy. Once out of the hospital, he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills, and failed. Three years later, he tried again, and slit his wrists. Again, he survived.

After unsatisfying stints as a mail clerk and a car salesman, Forrest found work as an instructor at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio, then a thinly veiled front from which the rugged young teachers wooed the bored, wealthy wives of Houston’s oilmen. “I never got into the dancing,” he admits, placing a bottle of juice in front of me. “I hated every step of it. But I couldn't do anything else.” Bored in the break room one day, he wryly fashioned a little sign using rub-on letters to spell out, “Dancing Feet are Happy Feet.” Drugs still controlled his life.

“All my friends from those days are dead, or wish they were dead,” says Forrest. “I guess I'm the only one who was fast enough on my feet.” But back in 1987, he assembled a rogue's gallery of old pals to speak to a young writer named Virginia Moran, who spent a week with Forrest on assignment for Houstonian magazine. His pals from the “character life,” as they called it, included Jenna Coy, a lounge singer of some local renown, Skinny Don, a gambler and former club owner, and Jerry, a reformed armed robber with a wooden leg. “TV has got the underworld dramatized,” Jerry complained to Moran as he spoke about the old days. “Nothing ever goes right in it.”

Jerry hired Forrest to tend bar at the Seven West, a jazz club at San Felipe and Shepherd. Though small in stature, Forrest was a force to be reckoned with behind the bar. One night a mean drunk gave Forrest some trouble and was rewarded with a club to the head with a whiskey bottle. Even in those days, Forrest was known among friends as “a crackpot genius” according to Skinny Don, who put him in charge of Rembrandt's Paint Factory, his infamous club on Montrose where Forrest decorated the topless go-go dancers with Day Glo paint. He lived on a diet of Dr. Pepper, graham crackers, and amphetamines, becoming thinner, more manic, and more paranoid. Friends who happened to look into his apartment window one night saw him pacing around with a chrome-plated, sawed-off shotgun. “You think there's a bottom to the gutter,” Jerry told Moran. “But there isn't.”

Indeed, things were about to get worse. One of Forrest's acquaintances was an ex-DA, a violent man who’d killed his wife’s lover, plucked out his eyeballs and dumped the body in the Gulf, then bragged about the crime to Forrest.  Soon after, Forrest’s cousin told him the ex-DA's rich friend Leroy was hosting lavish parties in his home for vice squad detectives, complete with drugs and prostitutes.  “I couldn't stand people like that,” says Forrest. “They're beating people up and putting them in jail while they themselves were doing worse, so I decided to rob that house.” He loaded his VW van with everything he could carry: a safe, a gun collection, some paintings (“which were horrible, I might add, but I didn't know it at the time” says Forrest). He took it all to a fence, who called him the next day and told him to come and get the loot, which, he had decided, was “too hot to mess with.”

Suddenly everyone seemed to know about the burglary: the sheriff, the police chief, the former DA, everyone. Forrest noticed he was being followed. He was afraid to go back to his apartment, and with good reason. A friend who went to check in on him instead found a couple of goons lying in wait, and they beat him senseless.

“That's the kind of deal I was in,” says Forrest matter-of-factly. “I don't know if they thought I'd kill myself or what. I mean, I was seeing little green men everywhere.” He painted the name of the ex-DA on the back door of his 1967 VW van in glue and black glitter so if he turned up dead, people would know who was responsible (“I guess that might have been my first piece,” he muses.) The police couldn't arrest Forrest for the theft without bringing unwanted attention upon the ex-DA and members of the vice squad, but they seemed determined to get to him one way or another. If the cops were doing their best to ruin Forrest's life, he himself might have been doing a better job. One morning he woke up on a bathroom floor in a pool of blood, with a hypodermic needle full of amphetamines stuck in the back of his leg. It was the point at which he finally did what he had vowed never to do: he turned to God for salvation.

Now out of the club business and scarcely able to work, Forrest had been cleaning out old houses slated for demolition to make room for the South Freeway. He'd refinish leaded glass doors and salvage old papers and historic memorabilia which he'd then resell to antique dealers and directly to collectors. But an artistic impulse had begun to guide him as well. First, he began to place mirrors behind pieces of leaded glass and frame them for decorative display.

Out scavenging one day, he noticed an ornate wooden grate covering an old attic fan. He removed the grate, cut it to pieces and spent days reassembling them into a sculpture of radiating crosses. “Not because I knew what I was doing,” he remarks. “I was being led. It just sort of came together. I can't take credit for it.”

He'd been hanging out at the Family Hand, a hippie restaurant on Brazos Street that offered home-cooked meals and live music by the likes of Townes Van Zandt and Lightnin' Hopkins. “It was the first time I'd been around people who weren't criminals,” Forrest says. “They were doing drugs, too, but they had love in their hearts and at least they were trying to do the right thing.”

With the piece completed, he went to bring it over to the Family Hand to see if anyone might buy it. A police cruiser pulled up and offered him a ride. Forrest demurred, but the officers insisted and he climbed into the back seat. When the police asked about his object, he told them it was called A Tree Again. One of the policemen said he thought it looked like a cross. “It's just your Catholic upbringing that makes you say that,” Forrest told him, but examining the piece more closely, he realized the cop was right. It did resemble a cross. A friend, though skeptical of the work’s value, took him to see his accountant, an art collector, who offered him $250 for it. “That's when I realized I must be an artist,” says Forrest.

Forrest brought his friend George Fuermann interesting bits of Texana he discovered while salvaging houses, and Fuermann loaned Forrest his deer lease cabin near Huntsville so that he could concentrate on his art, away from the city and away from temptation. Forrest knew an antiques dealer and fellow drug addict who let him display one of his new sculptures in front of his shop on Westheimer. It caught the eye of Dorman David, a freewheeling young artist who also sold rare books and documents around the corner at his store on Fairview. David knew a good thing when he saw it. He bought the piece for $300 and resold it to Nieman Marcus founder Lawrence Marcus for a tidy profit, and he introduced Forrest to his sister Diane, whose David Gallery on San Felipe gave Jim Love, Bob Camblin, and other Texas artists early exposure.

One day at the David Gallery, he met a woman named Lollie Jackson. A socialite and heir to her grandfather’s cotton fortune, she was dressed in the uniform she wore as a volunteer at the Junior League. “I’m in there,” Forrest recalls, “still doing drugs at that time, just toxic and nasty, and of course I said something really smart alecky and stupid like, ‘I never saw you volunteering in my neighborhood.’” He next encountered Jackson again a few years later, after she fell in love with a mirrored heart he’d hung at Tony Mandola’s restaurant. “She couldn't believe that something like that could have been made by such an asshole,” says Forrest. But by then he’d finally cleaned up. He was off drugs and following a strict vegetarian diet. “So I made her a heart like that and tracked her down, and we became great friends.”

Lollie and her daughter, attorney Laura Fain, laugh at the memory as we sit with Forrest in Lollie’s sunny University Place living room. Its cheerful lavender walls are pock marked by the holes left behind by the temporary relocation of Forrest’s artwork to the Station Museum. Laura remembers meeting Forrest for the first time in the late ‘70s, when he was painstakingly covering the walls in an oval hallway in her mother’s previous home off Memorial Drive with tens of thousands of pieces of mirrored tile. “I remember it took months of you sitting there, cutting tiles. I remember how you could close the door, and if you lit candles in there, the effect was just spectacular. The detail was amazing, there was absolutely no effort spared.” Though Lollie moved from the house some years later, the tiles are now collected in boxes in a storage facility, each individually numbered so that the work could be reassembled someday. “That’s when it was official,” Laura says. “We started to think of him as family.” An entry in Forrest’s resume identifies him as Jackson’s house sitter, animal companion, chauffeur, gofer, and artist in residence. “Lollie and her daughters,” says Forrest as he refills our glasses with orange juice, “the three of them have kept me alive.”

Jackson and Fain are among a tight circle of collectors who’ve sustained Forrest. But even if they’ve been responsible for keeping him alive, it’s the Station’s director and de-facto chief curator James Harithas who deserves credit for cementing Prince’s place in the hierarchy of Houston artists. When Harithas booked a solo show of Forrest’s work in February of 1976 as the swashbuckling young director of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, he placed him on equal footing with such top-tier Texans as John Alexander, James Surls, and Dick Wray.

“The thing that struck me was the profound spirituality of the work,” Harithas remarks in a video produced a few years ago by Mark Larsen’s Artery Media Project. “ Every work is righteous, and it’s based on his own journey, to save himself from the degradation of life. I’d say Forrest stacks up with anyone, I don’t think there’s a better artist I know.”

At the same time he was establishing himself as an artist, Forrest was also establishing himself as a good Samaritan. Living in garage apartment with a blanket for a door, he noticed a woman hobbling to the bus stop each day. He began running errands for her, and after some money started coming in from the sale of his art, he bought a car and drove her to see her doctor twice a week.

He did laundry each week for a polio-stricken man confined to an iron lung in an assisted living facility, and when he heard anguished cries coming from a room down the hall, he went to investigate. The source was a wheelchair-bound woman who’d been beaten nearly to death by her pimp. The hospital staff assumed she was a lost cause, but Forrest managed to communicate with her by running his finger across a card with the alphabet until she blinked to indicate a letter. In this way, he learned the woman’s name and the location of her estranged parents. He contacted KTRX’s Marvin Zindler and the crusading investigative reporter orchestrated a tearful reunion on the local news; Forrest got the pool hall proprietor Slick Willie to pay the family’s airfare to Houston.

In 1983 he established the Praise God Foundation. He was starting to make some money from his art, but it disturbed him to think about how the taxes he paid on the income supported the military-industrial complex he abhorred. Most of what the foundation took in, Forrest channeled to serving the neediest people in Houston. He’d remained close with Dorman David, who remembers helping him get a gorgeous teal Dodge convertible. When Forrest traded the car to a bum for a Schwinn, David could only shake his head. “It was like, ‘Forrest, what are you doing?,” David says. “Whatever it is that you’re doing penance for, I think by now you’ve settled it.’”

Over the years, Forrest’s art has been shown at many of the city’s key art spaces, including DiverseWorks and Lawndale Art Center. And more than 35 years after his Houston debut at the CAMH, Prince’s potent combination of aesthetic vision and social commentary has exemplified the ethos of James Harithas’ subsequent venues, the Art Car Museum and the Station. A recent sculpture entitled Attention Artist makes plain Forrest’s attitude toward his craft. Vinyl lettering applied to the surface of a glass shadowbox spells out this unflinching declaration: “If the work you are doing isn’t contributing to the restoration of, or peace on our mother Earth, or the health and welfare of all the creatures on her, then you are wasting your life and everyone else’s time.”

Written early 2013 and published in Robert Boyd’s EXU#1 in summer 2015. Go HERE for more info.