Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists

Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 1
March. 30, 2026

Inman Gallery 
From Houston’s art frontier on Travis Street, Inman Gallery stands as one of the city’s most enduring.  

d. m. allison, March 30, 2026, The Mission News (word count 1,097)

On another gorgeous Houston afternoon, as March 2026 comes to a close, Inman Gallery opened three exhibitions: Tommy Fitzpatrick’s Elsewhere, Jim Richard’s Modern Fragments, and Maggie Hills’ Hopscotch.

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It was my second visit to the gallery to see the Fitzpatrick show since Kerry Inman reopened last December in the former Station Museum of Contemporary Art building, after leaving her long-time Main Street location in Isabella Court. Memory has a way of collapsing time, but if I twist the old noodle just a little and wring out the gray matter, I can still picture her nearly forty years ago, just off Houston’s Market Square, adjacent to DiverseWorks and Square One alternative spaces. Somewhere in that mix were Houston arts visionaries Mark Lombardi, Charley Galleger, and, soon enough, Michael Peranteau.

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She was tucked behind what had to be the smallest gallery reception desk in Texas, sitting shoulder to shoulder with my Dad’s Club swim team buddy, Guy Hagstette, all six-foot-four of him folded into that impossibly tight space. Looking back now, it makes the most sense that Kerry was volunteering, or sitting with a show she had helped organize, in one of those alternative art spaces along Travis Street around 1987. Hagstette, I believe, was officing nearby.

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I couldn’t find actual images in front of Square One or DiverseWorks from that moment, but I did come across a photograph from the Heritage Society of Treebeards that gets you close. Still, memory does a better job than documentation here.

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Half the buildings around Old Market Square in the 1980s looked like they’d been abandoned mid-sentence, brick shells with broken windows, facades stained by decades of humidity and exhaust, iron fire escapes more ornamental than functional, and faded hand-painted signage from businesses no one remembered. The buildings weren’t curated; they were simply left behind. And yet, inside, lights were turning on. An art scene was emerging and unmistakably alive.

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Artists and soon to be noted influencers moved in not because it was desirable, but because it wasn’t. Like SoHo a decade earlier, the neglect itself carried a certain romance, a freedom to build something where nothing was expected to survive. That’s where someone like Kerry Inman enters the picture as someone who recognized the opportunity hidden inside neglect.

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When other galleries were busy establishing themselves closer to collectors and commerce, Inman stayed with the artists. The early spaces, first within Leslie Muth’s gallery and later on Main Street at Isabella Court, were never positioned ‘near the money. That distinction matters. Because what followed was not accidental. It was the result of an independent mind. Kerry Inman did not follow the crowd. She built something alongside it, adjacent to it, and often ahead of it.
 

Her connection to the Glassell School of Art during the 1990s makes more sense in that light. Glassell was a generative force producing artists, ideas, and conversations, and Inman was there, in proximity when she moved to Isabella Court, in dialogue, and in support. Many of the artists who would go on to shape Houston’s contemporary scene passed through the doors of the Glassell School, and her gallery became one of the places where that emerging work could find a serious footing. Isabella Court on Main Street, where the gallery remained for more than three decades, suggests not just survival, but a steady calibration of vision. 

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I wouldn’t fully understand what that meant until years later, when I opened my first gallery, The Nau-haus, in Houston Heights. Some said jokingly that I had crossed over to the “dark side,” from artist to the mantle of gallery owner. Yes, there are undeniable pleasures, studio visits, the thrill of discovering work for the first time, the rhythm of monthly openings, the social orbit of artists, curators, and patrons, the invitations, the visibility, and in my case the illusion of authority that comes simply from proximity.

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But done properly and responsibly, it is a heavy mantle. It is work defined by uncertainty, by false starts, sudden pivots, gallons of white paint, and forces entirely beyond your control. A show can falter because it rains on opening night. An artist can change direction after you’ve committed. Or, as happened in the 1980s and again in 2008, the entire economy can slide off into the ditch and take you with it. 

 

Few gallerists in Texas have sustained the kind of presence Kerry Inman has built over the years. It takes more than a love of art. It takes endurance, grit, and backbone in a field where there are very few clear models for long-term success. Which makes her most recent move feel less like a departure and more like a continuation.

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Taking on the former home of the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, originally shaped under the direction of James Harithas, is not a small gesture. That building carries its own history, one defined by risk, experimentation, and a willingness to show artists pushing at the edges: Mark Flood, Ed Wilson, George Gittos, among others.

In that sense, the transition feels inevitable. The architecture has been rethought but not erased.

Walking into the main gallery from the generous entry, I was struck again by the defining feature I noticed on my first visit in December, the light. Not just brightness, but a kind of clear, omnipresent illumination that holds everything in balance. On that first visit Kerry explained how much thought and expense went into achieving it, the calibrated whites, the fixtures negotiated down from $1,500 to just over $800 apiece, and the way her architect integrated them into the redesign.