HOUSTON ART HISTORY INTERVIEW PROJECT

Pete Gershon with Roberta Harris, October 13, 2019. Photo by Lindsay Kayser.

The Houston Art History Interview Project collects and makes accessible oral histories from significant members of the city’s art community, with an emphasis on those who’ve rarely had the opportunity to share their stories. Recorded, produced, and edited by art historian Pete Gershon with the support of the City of Houston through Houston Arts Alliance, these videos capture straightforward documentation of artists, administrators, and patrons speaking about their own work and their own lives in their own words, with archival images, video, and ephemera from public and private collections incorporated wherever possible and practical.

This project continues a generation-spanning effort to collect interviews with Houston artists and to preserve them for future use. As early as the mid-1930s, an art historian named Stella Hope Shurtleff mailed a questionnaire to people across the Gulf Coast region. She asked them to think back to their childhoods and provide such information as “the name of the first Art teacher in your town and county, names and address[es] of Artists, Craftsmen, Art teachers, Art collectors, Patrons, Art organization[s], owners of Paintings, Old furniture, etc.” Beginning in the mid-1970s, a project under the direction of archivist and historian Louis Marchiafava recorded hundreds of oral histories with Houston artists, musicians, and civil rights leaders; many are currently available online through the Houston Metropolitan Research Center. From 1979 to 1985, Sandra Curtis Levy spearheaded a project that borrowed collections of papers from dozens of Texas artists, galleries, patrons, and arts organizations and preserved them on microfilm under the auspices of the Archives of American Art. Se also conducted a number of oral history interviews that are still available through the Smithsonian Institution. In the mid-1990s art consultant Sally Reynolds began to record oral histories from prominent midcentury Houston artists. In 2008, edited transcripts of Reynolds’s interviews were compiled in a book titled Houston Reflections: Art in the City, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, published by Rice University Press in both a print-to-order edition and online. In the list of acknowledgements that begins her book, Reynolds writes, “As time went by, the list of those interviewed grew, but my collection of stories was my no means exhaustive. I leave to others the privilege of capturing those histories of another generation yet to be told.”

Laurie MacDonald, Mark Larsen, Cressandra Thibodeaux, Lee Benner, Ray Hylenski, Linda Gibbs, Kay Sarver and others have also documented the activities of Houston artists and shared the results in various formats.

I began gathering interviews for this project in December 2018, using a very simple kit: a Canon Rebel camera with first an external Rode microphone, then with ATK clip-on lav mics. I also added an LED light along the way. All videos are lightly edited in Adobe Premiere to eliminate false starts, interruptions, non-sequiturs, dead ends, and remarks that the subject asked to be removed from the record. They are presented here as long-form primary documentation of Houston’s art community with a certain ragged intimacy and the occasional blemish. Wherever possible, I’ve added images of artwork and archival images as appropriate and practical. Some individuals and institutions shared digital files; in numerous cases I was privileged to borrow original materials from their owners and in these cases I scanned them on an Epson Perfection V700. Videos may be revised as new supporting materials become available.

All subjects were given the opportunity to review and approve the results for public distribution. Subjects were selected somewhat intuitively, with the goal of presenting the broadest possible range of perspectives from those who have been active within Houston’s art community since the 1950s. We are making plans to transfer these videos to an appropriate archival repository for longterm access.

More than 35 interviews were recorded during 2019, and there is still a backlog of material to be edited and uploaded. Any links below not yet active will be soon, and we will continue recording additional interviews throughout 2020 and perhaps beyond. The opinions expressed in these videos are the artists’ own and not necessarily those of the interviewer or of the Houston Art History Interview Project. Pete Gershon