Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists
P u b l i s h e d W e e k l y, N e w s, A r t s, & S t o r i e s F r o m T e x a s
Vol. 1, Issue 2,
Oct. 22, 2025
page 1
Jim Edwards: The Quiet Architect of Regional Visions A conversation between friends, “I wasn’t that good of an artist, but I had a good head for facts.”
D. M. Allison, Mission News, October 22, 2025
Jim Edwards, Dan Allison, David Brauer, pictured with BB the wonder dog, d. m. allison galler on Colquitt, 2015
I got to know Jim Edwards through a mutual friend, David Brauer, the former art history lecturer at the MFAH Glassell School. A few weeks ago, and kind of out of the blue, Jim sent me a postcard. Nobody sends postcards anymore, but just like our old friend David Brauer, Jim would prefer to do anything than sit in front of a computer, or text someone on his phone. He'd always rather have a conversation or write a letter. As I examined the hieroglyphics and collage on the handmade art card he had sent, I realized how out of touch we have gotten since he left Houston and how much I missed having conversations with him. It also reminded me that there were still a few of my mentors left standing from the good old days and I immediately gave him a call.
He and Victoria had just finished remodeling a large house in San Francisco. “That’s great,” I told him, “But sometimes finishing a big project feels like finishing a novel, the last chapter’s done, and then what gets you up in the morning?” He laughed and said, “A new studio. I’m playing again.” For Jim Edwards, it’s always about the next chapter. He said he was going back to his roots, he’d started out as an artist, something I had forgotten, and was making collages again, small postcard-sized pieces he mails out to friends.
I hadn’t known about his battle with stomach cancer, or that he had made a full recovery, and so much so that when a friend came to visit him and his wife Victoria in San Francisco, he and Jim spent the day museum-hopping and riding trolley cars. “We probably walked six miles,” Jim laughed. Sad to say, I can't imagine doing that at this point myself.
Our conversation trailed off is it usually does from the present day to stories from Jim about his experiences with art, artists, collectors and everything else under the sun. He spoke of studying under Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Rauschenberg, giants whose shadow could humble anyone. “I wasn’t that good an artist,” he said, “but I had a good head for facts.” That mind led him toward curating, teaching, and writing, the architectural side of the art world where he would leave his mark. Still, I’ll be glad to see another one of those new collages show up in my mailbox soon.
A Life Between the Studio and the Museum Wall
A San Francisco Art Institute graduate of 1969 and later a Rockefeller Fellow with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Edwards came of age when American museums were shaking off their dust and artists were storming the gates. His early years in the Bay Area placed him near the epicenter of post-Beat experimentation—an education in both discipline and rebellion that would shape a lifetime of curatorial work.
By 1972 he had traded California’s haze for Alaska’s frontier, becoming Curator of Art at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau. From there, his career traced a restless western arc—Idaho, New Mexico, Utah, Texas—each stop adding to his conviction that art is a form of regional storytelling. Wherever he landed, he built exhibitions that carried local voices into national conversations.
In Texas, Edwards’s curatorial eye found its permanent home. He organized Contemporary Narrative Painters of the Southwest for the San Antonio Museum of Art in 1989 and co-curated Pop Art: US/UK Connections 1956–1966 with The Menil Collection, showing his gift for linking regional artists to global movements. Over the decades his fingerprints appeared on shows from the Salt Lake Art Center to the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, framing work by painters such as James Francis Gill, Bill Komodore, René Alvarado, and Michael Roque Collins with essays that balanced scholarship and empathy.
When Houston Baptist University (now Houston Christian University) recruited him in the early 2000s to direct its Contemporary Art Gallery, Edwards shifted gracefully into the dual role of educator and advocate. He brought decades of museum discipline to an academic setting hungry for vision, curating exhibitions that gave Houston’s emerging and mid-career artists a professional platform. Students remember his critiques as sharp but generous, his office stacked with catalogs from every corner of the Southwest, his conversation as likely to drift toward poetry as pigment.
Photo credit 1, Michael Collins, David Brauer, Jim Edwards, Ed Wilson, Paul Kittelson, and Mel Ann Harithas Opening at HBU, ARM Archives
Jim Edwards belongs to that rare breed of curator who could translate between the worlds of artists and institutions without losing the trust of either. His résumé spans half a century, but it reads less like a climb than a map—of places where he built bridges, mentored painters, and reminded us that art history doesn’t just happen in New York or Paris. It happens wherever someone like Jim Edwards quietly insists that it does.