Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists

Pat Colville (born 1931, New Orleans, Louisiana) has lived and worked in Houston for decades, though her career stretches far beyond the city. Over more than sixty years, she has maintained a steady and evolving presence in American abstraction, one that bridges early postwar regional modernism with a contemporary sensibility that never quite settles 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 .... U s u a l l y Vol. 2, No. 3, p. 1 May 5, 2026 Pat Colville at Moody Gallery and Does Anybody Drive a Green Toyota? d. m. allison, The Mission News, April 5, 2026 (word count 2,996) Conversations (with Walter Benjamin) at Moody Gallery, April 11 – May 23, 2026 Pat Colville (born 1931, New Orleans, Louisiana) has lived and worked in Houston for decades, though her career stretches far beyond the city. Over more than sixty years, she has maintained a steady and evolving presence in American abstraction, one that bridges early postwar regional modernism with a contemporary sensibility that never quite settles. She studied at the University of Houston in the early 1950s and later completed her MFA at the University of Oklahoma, formalizing a practice that had already been underway for years. By the 1970s, her work had entered major museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Exhibitions followed in New York, London, Tokyo, and Toronto, placing her within a broader international conversation. A significant period of her life unfolded in New York during the 1980s and 1990s, where she exhibited regularly and taught at institutions such as The Cooper Union, Sarah Lawrence College, and Bennington College. Alongside this, she received recognition that confirmed what many already understood: that her work was not only consistent, but deeply considered, shaped over time rather than chasing it. In Houston, her long relationship with Moody Gallery has provided a kind of continuity that is increasingly rare. Decade after decade, the work has returned here, not as repetition, but as continuation. And so, the room filled as we gathered to hear Pat Colville speak. "DOES ANYBODY DRIVE A GREEN TOYOTA?" Does anybody drive a green Toyota? In the garden room at Moody Gallery evidently not, a cry in the wilderness called out, no one looked to one another to find out if it was one of their friends, and they just continued on loudly interested in their shoe wear. I was seated in this sea of social interaction in one of two club chairs reserved for old men with broken backs and turned to see from the corner of my eye Betty Moody ever vigilant not only watching over her gallery but genuinely concerned for her patrons. Someone's car was about to be towed. Armed with a quart size water bottle In one hand and a rolled up paper I assumed to be an exhibition list in the other earnestly whacking the bottle, no glass, no spoon, no Ting-Ting-Ting for attention or a toast, to cut through the crowd chatter and get attention. After all, where were our manners? We are in Betty’s house -- literally. That's when, with an urgency and decibel usually reserved for land mine potential "HEY" just blew right out of my mouth, and momentary quiet, and " …….does anyone have a green Toyota, It's about to get towed." For a few seconds everyone did look around, evidently not, and then it was right back to shoes, shoes, shoes, while the guest of honor artist Pat Colville was waiting to give an entertaining, humorous, and enlightening talk about her work, and how she got started in New York. Shoes, shoes, shoes, peas and carrots, peas and carrots, the decibels rose again and continued in this movie set of a prelude. Standing room only in a room with a glass wall. Let's face it, I'm guilty too, we go to the events we think are important, we think they're important because the gallery has that reputation, and we know that the people that go to these events will be there, and “we” will be interesting for “us,” and somewhere in the crowd we do know about art. "I hate art openings I can never see the art." Well, my dear, that's because everyone else in the room that you're interested in has their funny hat in the way. Some actually do go back later and sit with the art. It was time for the talk. Again, Betty, "I would like to introduce Pat Colville .... I would like to introduce Pat, our artist.... " Shoes, shoes, --- peas and carrots, peas and carrots, "SHUT UP," a second wily Houston favorite David Aylesworth fired off his mouth cannon to silence the room once again. I looked over and he was just grinning from ear to ear. David is a standard of the industry, having fun, realizing, but breaking norms when necessary. I was not alone and sometimes yelling at an opening is allowed. Time to time all of us forget about our green Toyota Finally, Betty got her chance, "I would like to introduce our artist, Pat Colville. I've known her forever, I loved visiting her in New York way back when. She's won every award in fine art circles and is recognized internationally." I'm paraphrasing of course but it was a short introduction and Pat started right in. Eventually, after a second, more forceful interruption from across the room, the chatter subsided enough for an introduction. And just like that, the reason we were all there resettled in her chair and focused. Colville began without ceremony, which felt right. She spoke about her history in a way that didn’t linger on it. New York came up, those years of working, teaching, showing, moving through a scene that was, at times, both exhilarating and dismissive. Painters, she reminded us, were not always in favor. There were periods, particularly in the 1980s, when painting itself was treated as something outdated, something already resolved. And yet, she stayed with it. What struck me most was not the résumé, but the way she described working. At one point, she talked about a series of drawings that began under constraint, black and white, specific dimensions, parameters set by a project that required reproduction and translation into another form. Instead of resisting those limitations, she embraced them. “You have boundaries,” she said, in essence. “And you develop within them.” From there, something shifted. She described being in a studio, getting ready to move, cleaning a bookshelf, pulling out an old book she hadn’t thought about in years. It was fragile, falling apart, almost disintegrating in her hands and once on the floor her cats finished it off in a solitary quiet on the dusty floor she was about to leave behind. The pages ended up scattered across the floor, caught in that early morning light that only lasts a few minutes before the day asserts itself. There was silence for her in that moment. Not dramatic silence, just the kind that happens when something ordinary becomes briefly, unexpectedly present. That moment, pages on the floor, light moving across them became the beginning of the work we were looking at, as well as a remembrance of her work as an artist, a painter and her colleagues being diminished and disregarded by a book and one man's opinion. Walter Benjamin, a name I had never come across, an idea I had never really sat with. The basic idea, stripped of its academic weight, is simple enough: a work of art has a presence, something tied to its physical existence, its history, its being in one place at one time. Reproduction, photography, printing, endless duplication, changes that relationship. “Painting is dead.” Echoed back down the decades to me in the moment from Gene Jackson’s art history class at Sam Houston State shaking me awake for a moment like professor Jackson had to do after the lights went down and the slide show began, I'd pulled my head up momentarily, why would “painting be dead” somehow in the 1970’s? What I didn’t know (and went home to find out) There was a point in her talk, almost an aside, where she mentioned an idea that, at the time, I didn’t fully catch. Something about reproduction, about the way images circulate, about what gets lost when something is copied again and again. I let it pass. But later, it came back. That’s the part I live for now, the moment when something you didn’t fully understand in the room follows you home and refuses to let go. Gene Jackson is looking down and proud. No, painting is not dead, artists like Colville have and still fight hard for it. Standing in that room, looking at Colville’s work, it was clear that whatever that “presence” is, it’s still there. And more than that, it’s being actively negotiated. From there, she spoke about painting as a kind of conversation. Not metaphorically, but practically. You put something down. The surface responds. You adjust. It resists. You move again. Over time, something develops, not imposed, but negotiated. “When the painting finishes,” she suggested, “it’s not that you’ve won. It’s that both of you have.” That stayed with me. What she described in her studio, the back-and-forth, the adjustments, the decisions made in real time, that’s not something you can fully capture in a photograph. You can approximate it. You can document it. But the experience of it, the accumulation of decisions, the hesitation, the correction, that lives somewhere else. A painting is alive with the recorded journey of the artist's hand across the surface. I didn’t walk into the gallery thinking about any of that. But I walked out with it. Colville’s work has been written about, discussed, and revisited over the years by critics and curators who have tried to locate it within a broader context. What comes through consistently is not just a commitment to abstraction, but an ongoing willingness to let that abstraction evolve through process. Her work has absorbed influences, architecture, landscape, geometry, not as references to be quoted, but as structures to be worked through. Forms shift. Systems develop. What begins as one kind of order becomes something else over time. And that seems to be the point. Not resolution, exactly, but continuation. The paintings themselves require more time than an opening allows. They ask for a different kind of attention, the kind that doesn’t compete with conversation or shoes or the possibility that your car might be towed. That comes later. Because at some point, we all have to go back and actually look. And, from time to time, remember where we parked. What begins to emerge in the current exhibition is a language of fragments, geometry, memory, and restraint. The paintings do not announce themselves loudly. They hover. They lean inward. Pale grays, weathered blues, chalky whites, soft industrial blacks, and sudden flashes of coral, ochre, citron yellow, or oxidized red drift across the surfaces like pieces of a conversation overheard through walls. Shapes float, interrupt, overlap, and recede. Some resemble architectural plans abandoned mid-construction. Others feel like scraps of fabric, broken fencing, cracked sidewalks after summer drought, or shadows cast through blinds at four in the afternoon. There are passages that look rubbed down by time itself, surfaces brushed thin until the grain beneath begins to show through like old plaster exposed under peeling paint. Certain marks resemble crosshatching on worn drafting paper, while others feel almost biological, cellular structures spreading slowly across the panel like frost patterns on glass or dried riverbeds seen from the air. Black linear forms punctuate the compositions with the authority of punctuation marks, scaffoldings, or utility poles cutting through open sky. They divide space the way thoughts divide memory. In works such as Converse and Plot, the compositions feel simultaneously engineered and improvised, as though a city blueprint had collided with scraps from a studio floor. One shape presses against another cautiously, almost politely, while transparent grids and ghosted textures drift underneath like buried conversations. The paintings often appear suspended between construction and erosion. Things are being assembled while, at the same time, quietly falling apart. Elsewhere, softer organic forms arrive unexpectedly. Rounded cloud-like passages float beside severe geometry. Thin coral arcs wander across pale grounds like pieces of electrical wire or quick notations drawn absentmindedly during a phone call. Some forms resemble fragments of wallpaper patterns from the 1950s; others feel like shadows from modernist buildings stretching across concrete. At moments the work carries the atmosphere of mid-century design, Japanese printmaking, architectural rendering, textile patterns, and urban mapping all at once without settling permanently into any of them. And then there is the surface itself. Colville’s paintings are filled with evidence of touch. Dry brushing, scraping, layering, translucent veils, rubbed passages, abrupt hard edges, delicate interruptions. The paintings feel worked through rather than merely composed. Nothing appears accidental, yet nothing feels rigidly controlled either. The balance is human. You can sense revisions, second thoughts, discoveries. The paintings breathe because they allow uncertainty to remain visible. What becomes increasingly clear standing in front of these works is that Colville is less interested in abstraction as style than abstraction as experience. These paintings are not puzzles to be solved. They are accumulations. Conversations between memory and structure, between instinct and order, between what is planned and what quietly arrives uninvited. The forms seem to remember architecture, weather, bookshelves, shadows, maps, fragments of language, and the slow passing of time itself. And perhaps that is why the work lingers after leaving the gallery. Not because it insists upon meaning, but because it continues unfolding in the mind afterward. A shape returns unexpectedly hours later. A color combination resurfaces while driving home. A thin black line suddenly recalls a telephone wire crossing a winter sky. The paintings keep speaking softly long after the room itself has emptied. Pat Colville’s work does not demand attention in the theatrical way contemporary culture often rewards. It asks for something quieter and far more difficult: sustained looking. The kind of looking that happens after the crowd disperses, after the conversations end, after the shoes and social choreography fade into the background. The kind of looking where painting is still very much alive. Colville also revealed something important during the talk that helps unlock the work itself. Beneath the apparent freedom of the paintings is methodology, almost a private system of inquiry shaped partly by her scientific curiosity, at least that’s what I got out of her talk. She's playing with systems. The paintings are not random arrangements of elegant forms drifting across gray space. They are decisions tested against assumptions. (Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen) Pat Coville, Converse, 2026, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Pat Colville, Subject, 2026, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 18 in. Elizabeth Murray Pat Coville, Converse, 2026, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 in. 1/26 Colville’s work has been written about, discussed, and revisited over the years by critics and curators who have tried to locate it within a broader context. What comes through consistently is not just a commitment to abstraction, but an ongoing willingness to let that abstraction evolve through process. If someone once said never paint to the edge, Colville painted to the edge. If a rule suggested avoiding the corners, she deliberately entered the corners. If balance became expected, she disrupted it. The process became less about obedience to composition than about questioning the premise behind it. One sensed that the paintings evolved partly through resistance, not anger exactly, but curiosity sharpened into method. During the talk she mentioned her longtime friend, the respected Houston artist Gail Stack, recalling conversations about painting and structure. If Stack suggested one compositional restraint, Colville might feel compelled to test the opposite. Not as rebellion for its own sake, but almost as an experiment. What happens if the eye is pushed where it supposedly should not go? What happens if tension is allowed to remain unresolved? What happens when the painting refuses to behave properly? Suddenly the work in the gallery begins to read differently. Those black linear interruptions, the floating grids, the cropped forms pressed awkwardly against edges, the shapes hovering near corners without comfortably settling into them, all of it starts to feel intentional in a deeper way. The paintings become negotiations between order and disruption, structure and instinct. Even the quieter passages carry a kind of subtle defiance. And perhaps that is why the work still feels alive after so many decades. Colville never entirely accepted inherited rules about how abstraction was supposed to function. She treated painting less as a fixed language and more as an evolving conversation, one where the next move might arrive precisely because someone once said not to make it. As I was rooting around and doing research I can't leave this alone I'd like to finish by making a few comparisons. I did an image search because I'm always interested in comparisons and this is what I came up with. Diebenkorn, especially the Ocean Park paintings, the comparison comes through structure, atmosphere, and spatial negotiation. Both artists build paintings that feel architectural without becoming literal architecture. Thin lines behave like scaffolding or mapping systems, while muted color fields create the sensation of light, air, and memory rather than fixed geometry. Diebenkorn’s work often feels like aerial views of coastal cities dissolved into sunlight; Colville’s paintings similarly hover between map, wall, landscape, and constructed space. Both allow revision and hesitation to remain visible on the surface. Elizabeth Murray offers another fascinating comparison, though Colville is quieter and far less theatrical. Murray exploded abstraction into animated, fractured forms that almost became characters or objects. Colville never goes that far, but there is a shared language of floating geometry, irregular shape relationships, interruption, and asymmetrical balance. Both artists reject rigid minimalism in favor of something more human and improvisational. In Murray, forms collide loudly; in Colville, they drift, overlap, and negotiate. But the DNA of constructed abstraction is there in both. And one more for the road. Howardena Pindell is perhaps the most subtle comparison, particularly in relation to surface accumulation and systems-based abstraction. Pindell’s work often builds meaning through layered textures, repetition, mapping structures, punctures, fragments, and accumulative mark-making. Colville’s paintings are more restrained and architectural, but they share an interest in abstraction as a process of layering time, memory, and physical decision-making onto a surface. Both artists create works that feel simultaneously analytical and deeply personal. (1.) Colville exists within a specifically Texas and Southern abstraction lineage that never fully surrendered to New York formalism. Her work retains atmosphere, landscape memory, and emotional weather inside the geometry. That’s important. Even at her most structured, the paintings still feel lived in. 1. Santa Ana Museum of Art, Texas Women: A New History of Abstract Art Surveys the Artistic Innovations and Impact Of Several Generations of Women Artists in Texas, January 28 – January 28, 2020

Visual artist Roger "Rock" Romano rides across the landscape of his canvas, mighty brush in hand, bringing chaos to heel before inevitable harmony. For most Texans who know Roger "Rock" Romano, the introduction usually comes through music. That makes sense. Music has been part of his life for more than seventy years. But outside the chaos of rock’n roll, he brings rounded serenity into his life backstage. 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 .... U s u a l l y Vol. 2, No. 5, p. 1 June 2, 2026 ROCKIT LIKE QUIXOTE Dan M. Allison, Mission News, 05-31-2026 (word count 2,492, images 14) Visual artist Roger "Rock" Romano rides across the landscape of his canvas, mighty brush in hand, bringing chaos to heel before his inevitable harmony. For most Texans who know Roger "Rock" Romano, the introduction usually comes through music. That makes sense. Music has been part of his life for more than seventy years. But outside the chaos of rock’n roll, he brings rounded serenity into his life backstage . Born on Valentine's Day in 1945, Romano grew up on Houston's Near North Side in a large Italian Catholic family where music was simply part of everyday life. Three generations shared the same household soundtrack: big band records, country music, popular songs of the 1950s, and eventually blues and rock and roll. By age ten he was playing ukulele. By thirteen he had picked up the guitar and formed his first bands. At St. Thomas High School he became the school's unofficial artist, founding the poster club and serving as what he jokingly calls the "house artist." At the same time he was already performing professionally with the Jim Askins Combo. His artistic education continued at the University of St. Thomas during the remarkable years when Dominique de Menil was bringing some of the world's most important artists, composers, architects, and thinkers to Houston. Buckminster Fuller, Claes Oldenburg, John Cage, and many others passed through the campus and left their mark on a generation of young artists. By 1969 Romano's artwork had already appeared in a university exhibition curated by Dominique de Menil while his musical career was accelerating. His band Fun and Games signed with MCA Records. "That was a sure sign we would break up soon," Romano likes to joke, adding. “Of course, I was really young, and girls, fun, and Rock’n Roll just took over.” What followed was a public life dominated by music and a private life increasingly devoted to painting. There were recording studios throughout the South, road miles measured in years rather than miles, and a succession of bands that eventually culminated in Dr. Rockit and the Sisters of Mercy, one of Houston's most recognizable musical acts. Audiences knew him as Rock Romano the performer, songwriter, recording engineer, and bandleader. Painting never stopped, but music occupied the public stage. In 1974 Romano returned seriously to painting, producing increasingly ambitious works in acrylic and pastel. By 1987 he stepped away from full-time touring and established what became known as The Red Shack, a modest studio in Houston Heights where much of his mature work would emerge. Caption: The Red Shack studio in Houston Heights. By 2013 Romano had spent decades developing both his musical and visual careers. Paintings filled nearly every available wall and surface, turning the small studio into an archive of ongoing experiments, finished works, and future possibilities. I first met Rock through photographer and archivist Melissa Noble. Melissa also introduced me to singer-songwriter Bob Schneider, a connection that would also later lead to an exhibition at DM Allison Gallery. My first visit to Rock's studio felt less like entering a workplace than stepping into the physical record of a creative life. Paintings covered the walls. New canvases leaned against older ones. Every available surface seemed occupied by brushes, pigments, sketches, instruments, books, and evidence of the next project waiting to happen. At the time I knew Rock primarily through his reputation as a musician and songwriter. What surprised me was the sheer depth of his painting practice. Looking around the studio, I was seeing decades of work at once, although I did not yet understand where it was leading. I would find out soon. To understand Romano's achievement, however, it helps to look beyond the chronology and examine the paintings themselves and the evolution of the work. One of the surprises of seeing nearly fifty years of Rock Romano's work gathered together is discovering how many times he has reinvented himself while remaining unmistakably the same artist. The early works are rooted in observation. In Herschel Rolls a Seven (1977), Romano is still working directly from life. The subject sits quietly in a chair, absorbed in thought, rendered with loose but recognizable features. The drawing is expressive and economical, but the artist remains engaged with the visible world. Yet even here, clues to the future are already present. Color begins to separate itself from description. Marks become increasingly independent. The artist seems less interested in recording appearances than in capturing energy and presence. Three decades later, figures still appear in works such as Lonesome Mows, but something has changed. The mower, the tropical vegetation, the sunlight, and the rhythm of the composition carry equal weight. Reality has become filtered through sensation and memory. The painting no longer functions simply as a description of a person or place. It has become an experience. The world slowly breaks apart and gets reassembled. The visible world remains present, but it no longer obeys the old rules. Color begins to take on a life of its own. Structure becomes increasingly important. Observation gives way to interpretation. By the time we arrive at paintings such as Buddha in the Mosh Pit and CC Ryder, Romano has crossed into entirely different territory. The paintings explode with circles, symbols, pathways, architectural fragments, visual rhythms, and repeated forms. At first glance they appear completely abstract. Yet the longer one looks, the more evidence of the visible world emerges. Buildings, roads, landscapes, shrines, and fragments of memory rise briefly to the surface before disappearing again. The works on display are many and almost become dizzying after a while. Romano's paintings all acrylic, take cues from both the psychedelic and abstract schools of art. This color palette reminds of Peter Max or John von Hamersveld, bright colors often falling on the same side of the color spectrum but complementing each other, nonetheless. His form however is a pure abstraction, Abby Koenig, Thursday August 8, 2013, Houston Press* Listening to Romano describe these paintings is revealing. "There are not very many people in my paintings," he explains. "There's dwellings and houses and buildings. You see signs of civilization." The paintings are not abstractions detached from reality. They are realities layered on top of one another. One image becomes several images. One memory becomes many memories. One painting becomes multiple paintings simultaneously. For many viewers, the connection to music seems obvious, but that is only part of the story. Romano himself occasionally embraces the comparison. "I paint swirls and dots, circles and images that overlap and grow out of each other, contrasting colors that repeat and harmonize like flowers growing wild or cool improvised notes in a piece of music." Yet over years of conversations with Rock, I have come to believe that explanation only gets us part of the way there. The assumption is that the paintings grew out of the music. In reality, painting never stopped, but music occupied the public stage. While attending the University of St. Thomas during the Dominique de Menil years, Romano found himself in one of the most remarkable artistic environments imaginable. The way he tells it, conversations that would seem impossible today were simply part of everyday life. He recalls talking with René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and other artists who passed through Dominique's orbit, sometimes as casually as sharing lunch on the quadrangle between classes. Rock was easy to talk to. He has always had great empathy. Rock was already drawing, painting, sketching, and making watercolors while simultaneously building a life in music. "I was a musician, and I was a visual artist. I did sketches and watercolors all the time," Romano told me. "But what are you going to do? We signed a record deal with MCA, so I went for the rock and roll and the girls." The music career simply became visible first. Yet the more Romano speaks about painting, the less music seems to be the subject. Again and again, he returns to another word. Harmony. "Every painting I do is about harmony," he says. "It's about balancing colors, about finding that little spot in the blue field where if I put a red dot, it's gonna go ping and you're gonna go, 'Wow.'" Standing in front of the newer works, it becomes clear that harmony, not music, is the deeper thread connecting five decades of painting. Without formal allegiance to any particular movement, Romano has gradually arrived in territory art historians would recognize as Lyrical Abstraction. Like Kandinsky before him, he trusts color, rhythm, gesture, and composition to carry emotional meaning. Like Miró, he populates his canvases with circles, symbols, and invented forms that drift between dream and memory. The comparison is useful, but only to a point. Unlike many abstract painters, Romano never completely abandons the visible world. Roads become pathways. Buildings become symbols. Landscapes dissolve into patterns before re-emerging elsewhere in the composition. The paintings hover between observation and invention, memory and imagination. Self-taught after his years at St. Thomas, Romano appears to have followed this path largely through practice rather than theory. There is little evidence that he set out to become an abstract painter. Instead, abstraction seems to have emerged naturally from decades of looking, painting, revising, and simplifying. Looking across the decades, one does not see abrupt stylistic changes or fashionable reinventions. One sees a painter slowly removing unnecessary information until harmony itself becomes the subject. Viewed in that light, works such as Babylon Jam and Black Holes and Rolling Stones are not departures from the earlier paintings. They are their own logical destination. In January 2026 the Five Points Museum of Contemporary Art in Victoria mounted a retrospective exhibition featuring approximately seventy works spanning nearly fifty years of production. For Romano, the experience was both humbling and surprising. "Getting to see my work in a gallery is really cool," he said during the exhibition. "But this is mind-blowing to me to see my stuff on the walls of a museum." Standing among paintings created over half a century, Romano appeared less interested in looking backward than continuing the next painting. "I don't consider myself a real thoughtful artist as my art goes," he says. "I just paint. I make marks and I try to connect them somehow." That statement sounds deceptively simple until one walks through the exhibition. The paintings reveal an artist who has spent decades connecting things. Color to color. Memory to memory. Observation to imagination. Order to chaos. One painting to the next. Perhaps no statement better summarizes his approach than the one he offers visitors encountering the work for the first time. "I invite you to create anything you want out of what you see. You will always be right." It is a generous statement, but it is also one that takes a lifetime to earn. We’ll come back to that shortly. Earlier in life, Romano was the young artist sitting in classrooms and on quadrangles, absorbing ideas from painters, musicians, architects, and thinkers whose names would eventually become part of art history. Later he became the musician on stage, performing before audiences throughout Texas and beyond. The public knew him as Rock Romano the entertainer. (14 images Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen) ROCKIT LIKE QUIXOTE, Cover & Redbud Poster Weather Piece, 1987, acrylic on board, 22 x 26 in. Black Corvette, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 30 in. ROCKIT LIKE QUIXOTE, Cover & Redbud Poster 1/15 Visual artist Roger "Rock" Romano rides across the landscape of his canvas, mighty brush in hand, bringing chaos to heel before his inevitable harmony. For most Texans who know Roger "Rock" Romano, the introduction usually comes through music. That makes sense. Music has been part of his life for more than seventy years. But outside the chaos of rock’n roll, he brings rounded serenity into his life backstage Romano the painter continued working largely out of sight. Canvas by canvas. Drawing by drawing. Year after year. As an artist myself, I recognize something in that journey. At some point, usually without announcement, the student becomes the teacher. The change is rarely visible from the outside. There is no ceremony. No diploma arrives in the mail. One day an artist simply realizes that the search for approval has been replaced by trust in their own voice. Standing in the galleries of the Five Points Museum, surrounded by work spanning nearly half a century, I could see that transition clearly. The young man who once sought answers from the artists around him had become something else. Not a master in the academic sense. Something more useful. A guide. When Romano tells viewers they are free to discover their own meanings within the paintings, he is not surrendering authority. He shares what experience has taught him. Art is not a puzzle with a single solution. It is a conversation. The artist begins it. The viewer completes it. Decades earlier, while I was operating DM Allison Gallery on Colquitt Street, I received a call from a conservator at the Menil Collection attempting to identify a drawing made on a paper napkin. The provenance had been lost. When shown the image, Romano immediately recognized it as his own. I have always liked that story. Not because of the napkin. Because it reminds me that artists leave traces of themselves everywhere. Sometimes on museum walls. Sometimes on a scrap of paper that somehow survives long enough to come back home. Standing in Victoria, surrounded by fifty years of paintings, I suspect Romano experienced a similar moment. Not a retrospective of styles. Not a museum exhibition. A reflection. The accumulated evidence of a life spent paying attention. Thirteen years separate the two studio photographs reproduced in this article. The rooms are different. The paintings are different. The artist is older. Yet the essential picture remains unchanged. Brushes wait in jars. Fresh canvases lean against walls. New paintings are underway. Rock Romano continues to paint and perform music, while the medium changes. The studios change. The paintings evolve. The search for harmony remains. Perhaps no statement better summarizes his approach than the one he offers visitors encountering his work for the first time: "I invite you to create anything you want out of what you see. You will always be right." At this point the artist is not only assumed the confidence it takes to start giving advice, but I can imagine that he has experienced that moment when looking at his work in the carefully curated hands of Maurice Roberts at the Five Points Museum, he sees a reflection of his soul like a fingerprint, “I am Rock Romano the painter.” Congratulations young man. OPENING: Redbud Arts Center is pleased to present a solo exhibition titled "This is That" by Houston artist and musician Rock Romano, opening Saturday, June 6, 2026, with a reception from 6–9 PM. The exhibition invites viewers into a vibrant and improvisational visual world filled with swirling forms, layered imagery, rhythmic color, and spontaneous mark-making. *Rock Romano at d.m. allison Full of Color and Light, Abby Koenig, Thursday August 8, 2013, Houston Press

Using the information posted on the ARM Station website, users can start their campains here with recomended strategies and techniques Crowdfunding portal Click the ARTS target to start your Crowd or Circle Funding Campaign! Here we are to tell you how it works. This is a virtual group, we don't have to pay for a building, bills, staff. A good and wise friend talked me out of doing that. It's an online Internet station. And remember, a lot of the usual sources we came to depend on probably aren't going to be as available anymore. That's another reason why we think this is really important. When you visit the crowdfunding portal on our website, you have two options. You can either join an existing effort you see in your inbox, or start your own. If you decide to start something yourself, great! You don’t need our permission, but if you let us know, we can help amplify it, especially if it lines up with one of our goals. You might want to put a roof on a hospital, buy a bus for the elderly, or help an artist with medical expenses, we just ask that you get the ball rolling first and invite a few friends from your own email list. A lot of folks on our list already know each other, so small sparks can turn into something bigger fast. We recommend starting with Spot Fund, it’s the easiest on-ramp and where our portal will take you. We’ll keep an eye out, and if you flag your project for us, we’ll take a look. Just like anyone else would be asking, “Is this something we want to get behind?” We can’t send cries for help every day, we try to limit ARM Crowdfunding campaigns to about twice a month, but if you start something worthwhile, we’re all ears. Whether you’re raising funds for time to heal, a new roof, a book project, or something else entirely, this is the most democratic tool we've ever seen. Start something. Or join something you believe in. Just don’t sit this one out. Thanks, Arts Rescue Mission

Load Your Docs & Images Build Your Community Archive, Or Just Sign Up! Contribute to the Your Community Archive The Arts Rescue Mission Archive is open source, community-driven, and always growing. Our goal is to preserve the history, voices, and legacies of artists while also sharing knowledge that helps our community thrive. We can’t do this alone—we need your eyes, ears, and ideas to keep the record alive. How You Can Contribute Submit Ideas & Suggestions When you sign in, you can leave comments with tips, stories, or recommendations. If there’s an artist, event, or organization we should take a closer look at, let us know. You are part of our research team. Share Images, Articles & Links Upload photographs, clippings, event programs, or studio materials you think belong in our collection. You can also send us links to exhibitions, performances, or archives worth documenting. Upload Files Directly Our portal allows you to upload up to 10 files at a time, including video, audio, images, documents, or archival records. Every piece of information helps us build a fuller picture of our community’s cultural story. Recognition for Your Contribution We review every submission, and if we add it to the archive, you will be credited in our online publications and the books we produce. You can also choose to be listed publicly as a contributor to the archive. Be Part of the Mission Your input doesn’t stop with documentation. We welcome your ideas on how we can best serve aging and at-risk artists. If you’d like to get involved more directly, you can volunteer with one of our four programs: Restore – Rehabilitation and emergency assistance for artists in crisis Shelter – Protecting and preserving an artist’s body of work Provide – Supporting artists with opportunities for a book project or “Second Act” Preserve – Archiving, documenting, and publishing the history of Texas and beyond Why It Matters By contributing to the ARM Community Archive, you’re helping us safeguard the legacy of artists while creating a living resource for future generations. Together, we can aid artists, preserve history, and expand opportunities for our creative community. This is where you can join us and start receiving The Mission News Weekly , or add to our Arts Rescue Mission Community archive of more than 50,000+ images and documents colleted from the Houston area & Texas. These are intended for community use. You can upload your images and documents on this page, see posted galleries of docs & images here , and easily download images and documents posted on the website where you see them. We're working on posting new docs & image galleries 24/7, so please be patient. Thanks! Add items to our archive. It's Open Source. Your input will appear on line as soon as we check them out get them posted on our community archive page. You can also send us images here and links you want us to investigate. You are our eyes and ears so please help the community with health tips, opportunities to grow, or what we need to add to our agenda to Aid Aging Artists. If you just want to sign up to get our emails, this is the place to do it! Thanks From All of Us! First name* Last name Email* Phone Yes, please add me to your email list for ways I can help & events Please tell us something about what you would like us to take a look at here. Let us know how we can help, and what part you'd like to play in our effort to aid our artists. If you'd like to volunteer for one of our 4 programs to RESTORE, SHELTER, PROVIDE, or PRESERVE, let us know here. Thanks! Please send us a link to something we should look at or information, pictures, & articles for our community archive archive here. We will take a look and let you know if we use it, and give you credit for your help in our publications online and books we produce. If there's something you think we should see, or document we should have for our community archive, please upload up to 10 video, image, audio, document or archive files here. Upload Files Please let us know if you want to be listed as a contributor to our community archive. Star rating Submit

The ARMON Awards honor artist across disciplines who continue to uplift challenge and Inspire even in the face of adversity. Reserve your seat or table at the special event to support the Arts Rescue Mission in its ongoing work providing direct Aid, visibility, and resources to artists in crisis. ARMON Award History The Armon Awards Dinner Benefiting "Shelter" Next Occasion April of 2026 Each year in the spring artist Rescue Mission presents awards for best of the Arts. Nominations for performing and visual arts come from our Statewide advisory Council with final selections being made by our Board of Governors. And yes there's a category for literary achievement as well. The happen live on stage are presented by noted benefactors in the Arts, and fellow artists. Our blueprint for this event is the Oscars. A date certain for this event will be set and announce sometime before the first of the year. Hope you can make it! ARMON Awards Event venue. The doors open at 630, photo booth at the door set against against the famous backdrop of OMA New York/Jason Long X ATRIUM. We'll send you a shot, or you can send us your and and we'll put it in the mix for next years poster. Let us know your favorite artist for next years poster. This years poster celebrates the memories of friends and artists that still make it happen in Houston since ARM's first event in 1994 at Houston's CAMH for the artists in Sarajevo. The funds ARM raises through it's ARMOND Awards is for subsidizing "SHELTER" (housing and storage for artists.) On these evenings we give awards to outstanding artists covering the entire spectrum of The Creative Arts. This year we are honoring several chefs, musicians, songwriters, and Sub Stack authors, as well as co-founder Gertrude Barnstone. How do we decide? Who gets these funds? Nominations. Will come from the ARM e-mail list And suggestions we get when we send out to our social media. We will gather the top three nominations. For housing and shelter, and send them back to the list for a vote. Please join our e-list and make your voice heard. E-mail us at. artsrescue2025@gmail.com If you want to join the ARM list. Master Chef Soren Pedersen will start serving up his magic after we get settled and meet some of Houston's most recognized artists. We'll have posters this year to sign for your friends, trade and collect, maybe take home some autographs....... maybe Soren will sign one for you. Please Scroll Down For Our ZOOM event Each year Arts Rescue Mission selects a visual artist for a virtual exhibition. Please click the ARM icon for a preview As we finish our taste award presentations a little after 9:00 and the tables are being cleared we will shift gears, turn the volume up and get ready to cut a rug with the live performance part of the evening featuring Truly Lynn and her band. Sadly, all good things must come to and end as we head out to our free parking South and West of the atrium. At 8:30 about the time that desserts are being served we are going to start the A R M O N award presentations as we all join together, (6,000 invitations sent out) via ZOOM to celebrate this year's celebrity song writer, musicians, critics, and a presentation honoring Artist Gertrude Barnstone co-founder of Artist Rescue Mission Trudy Lynn began professional singing career began in the mid-1960s, when she sang with the guitarist Albert Collins and then later, Clarence Green. Use of her stage name of Trudy Lynn was in place when she performed with the Rhythmaires in the late 1960s. Her early work was in the rhythm and blues genre, and she once opened for Ike & Tina Turner. In the 1970s, Lynn expanded her performing base from clubs in Houston, to regional work and then overseas. Lynn's recording career did not start until 1989, when Ichiban Records released the first of five albums she recorded for them. Her debut, Trudy Sings the Blues, included her cover version of "Ball 'n' Chain". It reached No. 76 in the US Billboard R&B albums chart. The following year, Come to Mama also peaked at No. 76 in the same chart.[8] A mixture of southern soul and blues, her early albums were produced by Buzz Amato. Her 1999 release, U Don't Know What Time It Is, issued by Ruf Records, was short of double entendre in the lyrics, which had been a trademark up to that time. The album included keyboards input from Lucky Peterson, with Bernard Allison on guitar. Her live album, Blues Power: Trudy's Blues (2004), had guitar work by Carl Weathersby. One of her most recent outputs was I'm Still Here, released in May 2006. It was recorded with the Calvin Owens Blues Orchestra. I'm Still Here was nominated for a Blues Music Award in 2007 in the 'Best Soul Blues Album' category. Lynn herself was nominated as 'Best Soul Blues Artist'. In 2014, Lynn was nominated for a Blues Music Award in the 'Koko Taylor Award (Traditional Blues Female)' category. Her album, Royal Oaks Blues Cafe, reached number one in the Billboard Top Blues Albums Chart in September 2014. Suggested Menu ARMON Awards Dinner, POST building, Thursday May 29, 2025 Starter: Pan Seared Crab Cake On Spiced Aioli, Fennel Fronds Salad And House Lemon Marmalade 2nd Course: Chilled Artichoke - Saffron Bisque With Smoky Shrimp, Jalapeno Creme Fraicheand Crispy Leeks 3rd Course: Slow Roasted - Cid er Brined Pork Belly On Creamed Corn, Pick led Cucumber And Grain Mustard 4th Course: Pepper Crusted Fil et Mignon On Blue Cheese Grits with Wild Mushroom - Calvados Compote And Horseradish Crisp 5th Course: Toasted Chili - Ginger - Dark Chocolate Bread P udding With Sweet Cream, House Kum quat Jam and Sweet Basil Other Seasonal Events

Sign in and post documents for Goggle and artworks for gifting and exchange to family and friends Research Exchange for The Creative Arts / Art Placement & Gifting Health & Opportunities Health & Wellness Over 50 Art Placement & Gifting Research Residency Opportunities NON-PROFITS ACCEPTING DONATED ART FOR PLACEMENT IN INSTITUTIONS PUBLIC & PRIVATE (NOT FOR RESALE) General Advise 09-01-2025: If you're an individual donor looking to gift specific artworks: Museum Exchange is the most efficient gateway—it ensures placement with institutions seeking your kind of piece. If you're based in a specific city or want to support your local region: Consider contacting local museums like ICA Boston, Cleveland Museum of Art, or Crocker Art Museum—they all accept donations, though policies vary. If your goal is advancing artist visibility or supporting youth art creation: Organizations like Artists for Humanity or Creative Capital offer impactful paths—through commissioned art or funded projects meant for institutional engagement. 1. Materials for the Arts (MFTA) / Friends of MFTA (nonprofit creative reuse) Collects materials (arts supplies) from individuals and businesses, then redistributes them to over 4,000 organizations (like schools and arts nonprofits)—not necessarily fine art, but creative resources. Materials for the Arts New York City Government 2. Dia Art Foundation (nonprofit arts foundation) Though primarily a funder and presenter of major art projects, Dia has donated artworks to its affiliate institutions, such as the Menil Collection in Houston—demonstrating a model of redistributing art without resale. DIAART.ORG Your ideas will appear on line as soon as we check them out. Leave your ideas or suggestions in the comments section when you sign in. You can also send us images there and links you want us to investigate. You are our eyes and ears so please help the community with health tips, opportunities to grow, or what we need to our agenda to Aid Aging Artists. The lock box? We oversee our research with respect and care. Your ideas, and input to our continual investigation with images, documents, & stories are invaluable! Be a Community Researcher: Contact us by clicking on the lock box FOR-PROFIT ACCEPTING DONATED ART FOR PLACEMENT IN INSTITUTIONS PUBLIC & PRIVATE (NOT FOR RESALE) 1. Museum Exchange A digital, for-profit donation‐matching platform (founded 2020) that connects donors with museums, hospitals, and universities across North America. Handles cataloguing, appraisals, logistics, donation paperwork, and charges a flat fee per successful donation. In 2024, it facilitated the placement of 551 artworks. Museum Exchange 2. Fine Art Donations A private, fee-based service founded by J. Gold Fine Art (Douglas & Jeffrey Gold) and curator Clanci Jo Conover. Donors list artwork via consignment; upon institutional acceptance, the firm charges 10% of appraised value (≤ $100k) or 5% (>) and ensures the work remains in the institution for at least ten years. Fine Art Donations 3. The Fine Art Group An international, for-profit art advisory firm offering philanthropic strategy services. Helps donors convert passion assets (e.g., artworks) into charitable impact, guiding donations to museums or donor-advised funds rather than placing directly—but central to the gifting process. The Fine Art Group 4. Scott Stover Inc. (formerly Global Art Development) A philanthropy advisory consultancy based in Los Angeles, offering strategic planning for art collectors, foundations, and cultural institutions. Although not purely donation-focused, assists with long-term placement strategies and institutional relationships. Scott Stover 5. Powell Fine Art Advisory A private advisory firm whose philanthropic services include guiding art donations to museums or institutions, negotiating loans, handling logistics, and aligning with clients’ values and legacy goals. Powell Fine Art Advisory 6. Art Asset Management Group (AAMG) While primarily an appraisal and collection management firm, AAMG supports art legacy planning, including advising on donations, creating documentation for charitable contributions, and facilitating informed institutional placement. Art Asset Management Group 7. Katharine T. Carter & Associates An artist-advisory consultancy (since 1985) that arranges rent-free museum and nonprofit exhibition placements for its clients' works. Though focused on exhibition rather than donation, it places art in institutions and does not take sales commissions. https://ktcassoc.com/ 8. Myriad ART (via Myriad USA) Consults on cross-border art donations, steering donors through legal, cultural, and tax challenges of gifting works to institutions overseas—especially useful for international placement. Myriad USA 9. Art Consulting Services (AFP art Consulting) Offers services for acquisition, divestment, and maintenance of artworks and estates for private and corporate clients. While not explicitly a donation‐only advisor, their expertise encompasses estate planning and potential placement strategy. afpartconsulting.com 10. Fine Art Advisory via Private Donor/Philanthropic Teams Although not standalone consultants—organizations like Fidelity Charitable’s Private Donor Group provide personalized philanthropic guidance, including the conversion of art assets into charitable contributions through donor-advised funds. These services support strategic art donation execution. Fidelity Charitable NP Trust For-Profit Consultants Accepting Artwork from Individual Artists Next Steps for Artists Visit the respective websites to learn submission procedures or to express interest in commissions. Prepare a strong portfolio emphasizing themes suited to commercial or institutional environments. Clarify whether placements are temporary (i.e., leased) or permanent and understand how artist contracts/compensation work. Reach out directly to inquire about upcoming projects or open calls—many firms work closely with interior designers, architects, and brand teams. 1. Turning Art A commercial art advisory service offering curated artwork placements in hospitality, healthcare, offices, institutions, and real estate. Artists can submit art via their artist portal and participate in client installations. turningart.com 2. Curate Art Group Specializes in commercial, healthcare, and hospitality environments. They commission site-specific work—murals, sculptures, print installations—and manage production, sourcing, and framing. Individual artists may engage through their commissions program. Curate Art Group 3. Noyes Art Designs Focused on healthcare, corporate, senior living, and environmental graphics, this firm offers original artwork commissions, mural installations, framing, and project management. They work closely with creators to place art in therapeutic and work settings. Noyes Art 2018 4. Arco Gallery (Art Consulting) Art consulting boutique that curates for hotels, offices, residential and nonprofit spaces. They manage artist collaborations, commission custom work, oversee logistics, and install pieces for impactful storytelling environments. Arco Gallery 5. Artelier (Hotel Art Consultants) International consultancy dedicated to hotel environments. They deliver custom art commissions, lobby features, thematic wall art, and full project management—from concept to installation—including framing and logistics. Artelier 6. KP Studio (Global Art Consultancy) Amsterdam-based studio providing bespoke art solutions across corporate, hospitality, healthcare, restaurant, and marine spaces. Collaborates closely with designers to commission artists and strategically place artworks in diverse global settings. kimberlypoppe.com 7. Kevin Barry Fine Art (Hospitality Art Consultants) Specializes in supplying artwork to major hotel brands (like Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt). Artists may be engaged to provide bespoke artworks or collections that shape ambiance and brand identity in hotel environments. KBAA 8. Contemporary Art Society Consultancy Although operating under a broader nonprofit mission, they offer consultancy services as a business unit that custom-designs public art commissions, collection strategies, and cultural overlays for corporate clients, developers, hospitals, and universities, often through fee-based engagements. Wikipedia

Please Consider Joining The Mission Commission! MISSION COMMISSION Perks: The Mission News (weekly online e-cast & articles) 50% off merchandise 50% off event tickets & event tables Discounts on our published books Private tours of museum archives Private tours of public and private collections Vote on the Mission Council ARMON AWARDS Your choice of a mug set, T-Shirt, or tote bag with artwork by one of your favorite Texas visual artists. As a Mission Council member you not only get to suggest the honorees each year for "best of" you'll get to suggest the categories, vote for your favorite, and even suggest artists for our mugs, T-shirts, and book bags. Take this thing over and make it yours! We are all about community. It's subscribers that give us the time to oversee all aspects of our mission programs. "RESTORE " to health "SHELTER " the art and artists "PROVIDE " BOOKS & opportunities later in a career "PRESERVE " history, the key to everything we want to do Please Subscribe @ $10 a Month and Join the Mission Commission As you may already know, we got our 501c3 status the third week of January 2025 and are really just starting out. You can't imagine how excited we are to get input, suggestions, and yes criticism. We can only get better with your suggestions. You can email us or leave comments in the sign up page. (yes you can sign in more than once, and leave comments there as often as you'd like) The only thing more valuable to a non-profit organization than ardent supporters are their ardent critics. Thanks again for being in touch! The ARM Team artsrescue2025@gmail.com

Click Icon Above to Enter ARM Circle Funding Gateway Get Started Circle or Crowdfunding Using Retired Email Lists For Community Benefit RETIRED EMAIL LISTS: One of the most overlooked assets in community-based crowdfunding is the collection of retired email lists particularly those from arts organizations, galleries, theaters, restaurants, car mechanics, or any local business’ that developed a following. These lists are now in the hands of those that, while no longer actively engaged in their trade, have developed good feelings and trust from those on their list. Haven’t you ever missed a restaurant when it closed? A dry cleaner? A movie theater? Those entities still care about their former patrons that made them a success long after they close-up shop, and vice versa. By reactivating these lists they can tap into a rich pool of individuals who have a history of service and a demonstrated interest in their happiness. It’s easy to get the ball rolling to do any good deed you can think of if this is your starting point. Crowd Source Funding doesn’t have to start from scratch. In fact, it’s often more successful when it doesn’t. When you tap into an existing list—even one that hasn’t been used in years, you’re working with people who already understand what it means to show up for something or someone. And the reach of those lists often goes far beyond a single town or zip code. Friends from college now living in another state, snowbirds who once supported your cause and now split their time between coasts, or former patrons who’ve moved but still feel a sense of loyalty. These people may not be local anymore, but they still care. A compelling, human-centered crowdfunding message, especially one sent from a familiar or once-trusted name, can cross geography and time to reawaken old networks in powerful new ways. Crowd funded campaigns benefit from this kind of targeted outreach because they allow people to act quickly on causes they care about. When these former patrons receive a well-framed request, especially one that tells them their support can directly help an artist recover from illness, complete a project, or stay housed, it’s often enough to rekindle a sense of responsibility and pride. These lists can be used not just for one-time appeals, but for sustained engagement: updates, thank you notes, and even invitations to share the campaign with their own networks. In the right hands, a retired list isn’t outdated, it’s gold. JOIN US OR START YOUR OWN CAMPAIGN: The Arts Rescue Mission list originates from a retired email list of a commercial fine art gallery in Houston, Texas. If your list is still active and you’d like to crowdfund or even allow one of your subscribers to crowdfund we suggest a simple way to distinguish between your usual business and your philanthropic interests. Use an emoji at the beginning of your subject line. This not only signals to your regular business subscribers that the message may not be directly for them, but it also lets everyone know of your goodwill and your desire, every once in a while, to give back to those who have supported your enterprise over the years. Red Heart = Emergency fundraising call Use this when you're raising money for an artist in crisis. Urgent, universal, and instantly recognizable. Green Heart = Voting and making a suggestions on who gets the money from the ARMON Awards Night, and the Halloween theme October costume party benefiting our PRESERVE dance. Who decides? You do. Yellow Heart = Voting Results for our spring fundraising with ARMON Awards in the Spring & October Dinner & A Dance benefiting our PROVIDE program. Who decides? You do Blue Heart = When when asking for ideas or help in supporting the artist b eyond just money—emotional, logistical, or creative aid a General question for our group. Purple Heart = Who is having an exhibition, concert or performance, send the news down the line of 2741 subscribers. Especially if they're going to have some good food or good booze. WE KNOW IT'S A LOT TO TAKE IN: “But think about it — when you send out an email, you can mark it with an emoji to show it’s outside the normal routine. Your friends and clients will know right away whether to skip it or take a look, just by glancing at the emoji. The ARM email list is officially retired, but we still use the emoji system to keep subscribers in the loop. We’re not running a business anymore, yet every now and then we like to highlight something we enjoy and want to share with you.” You could also use this same system to conduct a voluntary opinion poll, share the results with your subscribers, ask for their ideas, and celebrate their generosity—all without interrupting your normal business correspondence and relationships. It might even be a good idea to have clients see your reaching out to do some good in the world. Never know they might want to join in. This is the system we use. Join us, or start your own. We hope this idea spreads and becomes as common as carrying an umbrella when it rains.

For more than three decades, Jim Pirtle has transformed notsuoH into one of Houston’s most extraordinary living works of art, a labyrinth of memory, friendship, performance, improvisation, and creative endurance. How The Houston Underground Survived to Become History. notsuoH at 30 Years. Pirtle, Topchy, Hixon, and Lowe Remember 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 .... U s u a l l y Vol. 2, No. 4, p. 1 May 5, 2026 How The Houston Underground Survived to Become History. Notsuoh at 30 Years. Pirtle, Topchy, Hixon, and Lowe Remember.(some) of Their Journey d. m. allison, The Mission News, May 23, 2026 (word count 5,569 - image 68) Everything has a beginning and a source, a circumstance, an environment, a chain of events linking back to earlier roots. History is a thread made from these connections. I have often told people that Collision, Gershon’s book, starts with “God made sand and man made the Alamo,” then somehow winds its way all the way to the Fire Show and James Surls. So, I pulled that thread, and this article ended up becoming much longer than I expected. A LOT LONGER. I never learn…. Every city has things that occur culturally during its formative years. If you ever drove around Dallas before GPS and wondered who in the hell designed the highway system, the answer might very well be cows. The old trails from ranches to rail yards and slaughterhouses eventually hardened into roads, then highways. Those early patterns echoed forward through time whether anyone planned them or not. More recently, Dallas organized its own art fair and, frankly, one reason Dallas succeeded is that it treated the fair itself as an institution-building mechanism rather than simply a rentable convention product. Houston’s fairs have too often felt temporary, almost parachuted in from somewhere else, instead of emerging organically from Houston’s own cultural DNA. Dallas has long been collector-based. Houston, by contrast, has always been artist-based. A great deal of that cultural DNA was incubated in the mid-1980s around Commerce Street Warehouse, where factions formed, splintered, and evolved into organizations and movements that would permanently shape the city’s creative identity — DiverseWorks, the Art Car movement, The Orange Show, and eventually one of Houston’s most original and enduring cultural landmarks: notsuoH at 314 Main Street. For more than three decades, Jim Pirtle has transformed notsuoH into one of Houston’s most extraordinary living works of art — a labyrinth of memory, friendship, performance, improvisation, and creative endurance. The performance art they were doing first at the Commerce Street warehouse, Zocalo, and then notsuoH, is in the tradition of classic Dada. I looked it up just to make sure. Emerging in Zurich during World War I, Dada rejected conventional ideas of art and embraced absurdity, improvisation, found objects, and a healthy distrust of polite society. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp transformed ordinary objects into works of art, while others used performance, satire, and public spectacle to blur the boundary between everyday life and artistic expression. In much the same spirit, the Commerce Street artists turned cast-off materials, outrageous costumes, modified automobiles, and even their own public behavior into creative acts. Their art was irreverent, collaborative, and often hilariously resourceful, proving that imagination can flourish even when money is scarce. (1.) To start the story, I was invited recently to join a group organized by Richard Tomcala that has been meeting on Thursdays at La Tapatia to plan a photography exhibition commemorating America’s 250th anniversary. Knowing several of the participants from my years around the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, nicknamed the “Garage Mahal,” including former assistant director Alicia Duplan, Richard Tomcala, Ken Walkins, and Daniel Jircik, I suspected it might turn out to be less a celebration than a protest, and the discussion around the lunch table would prove me right. After we settled in around what soon became a crowded table, one of the last people through the door arrived pushing a wheelchair occupied by a much older gentleman. It was not until halfway through lunch that I realized the man seated at the end of the table, wearing a camel-hair sport coat, white shirt, and slacks, dressed like any real-estate broker or urban businessman, was Jim Pirtle. I hardly recognized him out of context. Then I remembered that Jim had recently posted on Facebook about fixing breakfast for his father, the very gentleman seated beside him, now ninety-five years old. Our mutual friend Deborah Grotefeldt had been delighted in 2022 when she thought she spotted Jim hitchhiking down I-10 with a group of mannequins as some sort of roadside art performance. I saw it too. He fooled both of us. What he was actually doing was stopping at various locations with four mannequins, dressing them up on the roadside, putting on one of his vintage dresses, and taking photographs. The episode harkens back to the early days at the Commerce Street Artists Warehouse. After moving out of a corner of Nestor Topchy’s studio into his own space, Jim began painting directly on polyester shirts, tags and all, at Nestor’s suggestion. He found the bright 1970s spandex colors irresistible and soon started wearing the shirts to gallery openings attended by the core Commerce Street group. Eventually the shirts gave way to the wacky dresses that became one of his signatures. “It got to be normal,” Jim recalled. “Everyone just expected I’d be wearing a dress. When I didn’t, everyone would ask me what was wrong.” Another ritual developed among the Commerce Street regulars, Jim Pirtle, Rick Lowe, Nestor Topchy, Mariana Lemesoff, Dan Havel, Sharon Wilcutts, and possibly James Bettison, also known as Betty Jamison, would head out for the evening in Nestor’s “chop-shop chariot.” And of course, George Hixson was around for almost all of it, camera usually nearby. Somebody had to document the chaos. Otherwise, half these stories would sound completely made up. Not just another participant. The archivist. Hixon was the visual memory system of the entire tribe. “We didn’t have any money,” Jim said, “so we’d all pile into the ’72 Mercury Marquis station wagon. Topchy had cut the top off for easy entry, since he had welded the doors shut during one of the car’s many modifications. We’d go foraging at gallery openings for the free wine, and then to some of our usual haunts, sometimes if they got fancy, Bill Sadler’s Café Noche, more usually semi-dives like Shanghai Reds, where we could load up on free hors d’oeuvres if we paid for a glass of wine.” They were gaming the system in the way only starving artists can. It must have been tremendous fun, and wouldn’t you have loved to run into the Commerce Street gang out on a Saturday night? Sadly, this was just after my own time hanging out at Bill’s Noche. I can see the lineage now, from the crucible of creative madness that unfolded in the rear performance area of Commerce Street to later works such as The Art Guys walking the length of Little York Road in 2013. The Art Guys understood that publicity was not separate from art; it was part of the medium. They used newspapers, television, billboards, and public spectacles as materials in much the same way another artist might use paint or bronze. Everyone at Commerce Street seemed to be collaborating with everyone else in the late 1980s, though some partnerships became especially enduring. Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth formalized and named their collaboration almost immediately in the mid-1980s, becoming one of Houston’s best-known artistic duos. Nestor Topchy and Jim Pirtle collaborated constantly and often spontaneously, while Rick Lowe and Topchy remained roommates for years after the warehouse days. Pirtle and Topchy as well as artists Lowe, Massing and Galbreth, were creating original cultural content in much the same way that James Harithas helped shape the identity of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the way James and Ann Harithas helped launch the Art Car movement, and the way Marilyn Oshman recognized something extraordinary in produce hauler Jeff McKissack during the late 1970s. It is one thing to step into the role of director at a major museum in Houston, Dallas, or Fort Worth; it is another thing entirely to recognize the cultural moment you are living in and build something from scratch. That was Houston. The 1980s were the Wild West. The various groups eventually splintered from the early Commerce Street Warehouse days surrounding Jim Pirtle, Nestor Topchy, and George Hixson. Striking out on their own, Jack Massing and Michael Galbreth created The Art Guys, artists performing without a net, so to speak, and without the protection of a permanent institution behind them. Of all the people I have mentioned, I would say Jack Massing has consistently had a creative hand in helping others ever since I have known him. By the late 2000s and early 2010s, Jack seemed instinctively to understand what I was trying to do at Nau-haus on 11th Street, and later at D. M. Allison Gallery on Colquitt. He brought over flat files that became furniture for our main gallery space, and he organized memorable projects with groups such as Negativland, the American experimental music collective founded in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1970s by Mark Hosler, David Wills, Peter Conheim, and Jon Leidecker. Their photo essay Death Sentences was absolutely staggering. The group entered automobiles involved in fatal accidents and documented the contents left behind inside the glove compartments, trunks, and seat cushions: notes, receipts, photographs, fragments of ordinary life that suddenly became haunting evidence of a final day. The black-and-white photographs, combined with scans of the recovered objects, transformed twisted wreckage into deeply human narratives. Wow. Somehow Jack also knew I had a bass guitar and could use a few extra dollars. He bought the bass for his stepson, along with a bicycle equipped with a headlamp that I had originally purchased for riding around the Heights after Hurricane Ike knocked out Houston’s electricity in 2008 for weeks. The neighborhoods turned almost communal during that time: people gathered on porches for improvised cookouts, Coleman stoves appeared in front yards, and families sat outside late into the night because of the heat and the lack of ice. Seeing Jack now helping lead what I consider one of Houston’s most important cultural institutions, and watching it move confidently into a second generation after Marilyn Oshman, is nothing short of remarkable. Jack’s ability to collaborate has never been in question. Today, twenty-seven boxes of Art Guys ephemera reside within University of Houston Special Collections under the care of Christian Kelleher. From afar, when the torch passed to Jack and Pete Gershon joined him, I suspected another important Houston collaboration was forming. Later, when Cody Ledvina came aboard as archivist for The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, the possibilities seemed enormous. They were. They are. The three horsemen of Houston’s creative cavalry arrived quietly, but they are likely to remain a major force in the city’s cultural life for years to come. Now back to my narrative. As we left the restaurant, I shook Jim’s father’s hand and told Jim that we needed to get together and talk about Deborah and her husband, Virgil Grotefeldt, and the Houston art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Deborah, a great admirer of Jim’s madcap approach to art, would certainly have enjoyed the reunion. At that moment I had no idea that May would mark the thirtieth anniversary of Notsuoh, nor how completely astonished I would be during my first visit to Jim’s menagerie in more than twenty years. I did not yet know how extraordinary the place had become, or how dramatically the city had grown up around it over the last three decades. Virgil Grotefeldt, a house painter by trade, had once hired both Jim and Nestor to help him with jobs. As Jim remembered it, Virgil taught them an important lesson that stayed with them long after the paint had dried. Several artists including Michael Galbreth would remark later, “He really taught us a lot, you never forgot how to clean a brush.” (2.) So when I heard that Jim was hosting a series of events beginning on Wednesday the 6th, with additional programs planned for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I decided to arrive early on opening night in hopes of catching him for a few quiet moments before he became too busy to reminisce. I drove down Travis Street to the only public parking lot near notsuoH, paid the now-standard $19 parking fee, and as soon as I stepped away from my car I was struck by how much Houston had changed around Market Square Park since I was last a regular at La Carafe in the early-1980s. I am not sure what affected me more in that moment. As I walked along the serpentine water feature on Preston Avenue and turned the corner onto Main Street, I found myself staring at a world I had once known intimately, now completely transformed. The half-empty buildings, rough bars, and slightly dangerous charm of downtown Houston had been urbanized, landscaped, and carefully choreographed into something far more civilized. Much of that transformation began with the arrival of the METRO-Rail Red Line in 2004. The original 7.5-mile starter line connected downtown to the Texas Medical Center and what is now NRG Stadium. The construction years could not have been easy for businesses along Main Street, including Jim Pirtle’s improbable kingdom. Yet Notsuoh endured. Today the district resembles a carefully maintained Disneyland for grownups. You can even bring the kids. Standing there on Main Street, I was about to enter its most eccentric headquarters. Passing beneath the red arbor at the entrance, I realized that visitors do not simply walk into notsuoH. They cross a threshold into a deliberately improvised environment where sculpture, taxidermy, painting, music, and conversation merge into what Jim has aptly called a “social sculpture.” I paused to photograph a vaguely unsettling Twilight Zone child mannequin in the front window, part of an installation by Heather L. Johnson. Inside, a large woman in what might best be described as a New Orleans-style costume greeted me with a clipboard. For a moment I feared there might be a cover charge, an alarming possibility given that I had already surrendered nineteen dollars to the parking gods. She asked whether I wanted to sign in. “Not really,” I said. “I’m looking for Jim Pirtle. Is he around?” “I saw him earlier,” she said, “but not in the last hour or so. He could be upstairs.” He was not upstairs. He was standing directly behind me. I turned, and I am certain we were both thinking the same thing. “Is that you?” Except for a brief handshake at lunch a couple of weeks earlier, we had not really seen one another in more than twenty years. After an enthusiastic guy hug, we walked with our arms over each other’s shoulders like two soldiers returning from an unnamed war. Jim led me to the back of the first floor where the main bar is located. Although bartenders were tending to guests and preparations for the evening were well underway, he devoted more than an hour to guiding me through the labyrinth he has been constructing for the past three decades. Progress at Notsuoh occurs at a pace entirely different from the outside world. “Do you want something to drink? Beer? Water?” “Water would be great.” “Perrier good for you?” “Sure.” Jim circled behind the bar, looked in the upright cooler, then searched beneath the counter. His bartender said, “We don’t have any Perrier.” “We don’t have any?” Jim, incredulous, but patient. “How about a Topo Chico?” “Perfect.” “You sure have a lot of moving parts around here,” I said. Jim smiled as he watched me undergo what can only be described as a gob smacked moment of realization over the scale of what he had accomplished. He motioned for me to follow him toward the front of the building. Jim walked ahead and I trailed behind. About fifteen minutes later we had covered perhaps sixty feet. Progress was slow because every few steps he stopped to point out another artwork or tell another story. Along the way we passed pieces by Dan Havel, Sharon Wilcutts, Nestor Topchy, and Rick Lowe, along with a taxidermied baboon and ostrich, mannequins, and countless fragments of Houston’s artistic history assembled into a living collage. Nothing seemed accidental, yet nothing felt entirely planned. The effect was less like a designed interior than an organism growing according to its own eccentric logic. Jim paused before a series of softly blurry, erotic photographs by Dan Havel and Sharon Wilcutts, made from partially damaged sheets of oversized photographic paper they had discovered in an abandoned building, perhaps even in notsuoH itself during the first night Jim received the keys, before he had officially signed the lease in 1996. According to several accounts, when Jim and his friends first entered the former Clark’s House of Easy Credit, it appeared as if someone had simply stood up and walked away. Cigarette butts still rested in ashtrays. Merchandise remained on shelves. Upstairs, offices and storerooms were filled with abandoned objects: musical instruments, a saxophone, a sousaphone, snow skis, and hundreds of boxes of unworn 1970s platform shoes. It was another genuine Twilight Zone moment. Rod Serling covered a lot of ground. Everyone associated with the business seemed to have vanished. So, Poof. Instant art performance. As George Hixson later recalled, after the initial astonishment and hilarity subsided, the group went back downstairs and reenacted their own entry into the building as if they were staging a break-in. I think George might have the pictures somewhere. Hope he finds them. Hixon among other things was the group’s photographer, and documenter for all occasions. They sure needed him. If a tree falls in the forest ...... George would snare the image. Nestor Topchy: “George was the guy that photographed everything, looked like Bruce Willis and was always ready to blow something up.” George recalled in our interview of one such occasion. "We all piled in the Nesters car and went to HPD's supply depot. As we went in and before anyone could stop him Jim Pirtle walked up to the counter and asked for some black powder, then offered, "We're going to make a bomb" and of course we got thrown right out the door. "We ended up at Carter Country, you know the gun supply on Katy Freeway, and this time Nestor did the talking and did not elaborate about what the black powder was for. So we got back to Commerce Street, and I filled a paper bag with the black powder, a nichrome wire detonator and we put that inside a balloon full of paint. We put that balloon with the bag of gunpowder inside another balloon of paint, and put that inside yet another balloon of paint, and left it by the toilet with a wire leading out of the building and around the corner where we were crouching down beneath the window of the bathroom. You know three, two, one, kablooey! It blew the window out of the building. It was a lot bigger bomb than we thought. We went back in, and the toilet was completely destroyed, bathroom completely decorated with smoldering paint, burning embers floating in the air and little fires all over the walls; water spewing from what was left of the commode." (4.) "Did you get a picture of that?" "Yeah" "I bet everybody in the building was pretty happy with you guys, and no toilet" "Nah, they were fine, in fact we left it way for at least a week.” Hixon added, “Do you remember Jim in diapers?" “Sort of, but I never saw the performances in person” Hixson went on to recall a couple more stories in Houston and New York about Jim Pirtle in diapers, baby bonnet, baby carriage, eating mayonnaise until he hurled. I know I heard about it back in the day. That's the kind of story, before there was social media, which overcame a lack of technology and wires. You just heard about it, that's it. James Bettison dressed as Betty Jameson, I suppose here as the mommy, in full drag, with Pirtle in diapers performed both at Houston's legendary Record Exchange one evening and then again when Nestor arranged performances at New York's Pace University. Topchy costumed as the human flea and Pirtle's singing brat were the finale. Jim sang in his bonnet, and ate mayonnaise, smearing it all over his face until he regurgitated. Pace security had enough and the whole lot of them were escorted off campus. Well, after all it was the finale. As our tour continued into the late afternoon, Jim pointed out an early circular cutout by Nestor Topchy that foreshadowed the spherical forms he would later exhibit at Hiram Butler Gallery. On the north wall hung an early painting by Rick Lowe from a particularly dark series addressing slavery and lynching. Jim smiled at the contrast. “Rick was doing these paintings based on slavery and lynching,” he said, “ya know, and then he’d pop out of the studio all smiles. Cheerful by nature, you know how he is, always bright and funny.” Rick Lowe is another artist who helped create original cultural content specific to Houston itself. From everything I have read and heard over the years, Rick was both independent and quietly influential during the early Commerce Street Warehouse period before going on to co-found Project Row Houses. Like The Art Guys, this was not simply an exhibition program or a borrowed institutional model imported from New York or Los Angeles. It was something rooted directly in Houston’s neighborhoods, history, labor, and social reality. It gave the city a particular cultural character that could not easily exist anywhere else. I became more involved with Rick while exhibiting the work of Jesse Lott at my gallery on Colquitt. At the time, crews were still tearing apart the interior of the building and hanging sheetrock while we prepared the space. Rick and Jesse walked in during the middle of the construction. Rick looked over at Jesse and joked, “Pick something up, Jesse, make it look like you’re working.” I happened to have my camera in hand and snapped several photographs right then and there. (68 images Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen) Surpantine Water Feature, On the Way to notsuoH Opening Night - 30 Year Celabration, May 6 Turning the Corner On To Main St Rick and Jesse, PRH Community Center, 2013 Surpantine Water Feature, On the Way to notsuoH Opening Night - 30 Year Celabration, May 6 1/68 For more than three decades, Jim Pirtle has transformed notsuoH into one of Houston’s most extraordinary living works of art, a labyrinth of memory, friendship, performance, improvisation, and creative endurance. The performance art they were doing first at the Commerce Street warehouse, Zocalo, and then notsuoH, is in the tradition of classic Dada. I looked it up just to make sure. The funny thing was that Rick actually did start working. Almost instinctively, he picked up a taping spatula and a mud tray and began floating one of the walls as though he had been on the job site all morning. That came from the old days. Rick, Nestor Topchy, and sometimes even Jim Pirtle had all worked under the older Houston artist Virgil Grotfeldt, where they learned practical trades alongside art making: how to clean brushes properly, tape a wall, float sheetrock, and build things with their hands. Back in the early 1980s we used to call Virgil “Slick.” He was so good at finishing drywall that he barely needed to sand afterward. That work ethic carried over into Houston’s art culture itself. These artists were not operating from polished institutions or large budgets. They built spaces, repaired walls, hauled lumber, improvised exhibitions, and created communities almost simultaneously. In hindsight, that mixture of physical labor, collaboration, improvisation, and imagination may be one of the defining characteristics of Houston’s alternative art scene during that era. In my interview with Lowe he filled me more details about their wine, and food runs on Thursday and Friday nights at the establishments that George Hixson would see in the local paper. Hixson was working at a local paper and would have the necessary gallery and restaurant listings with free food and hors d'oeuvres getting customers in on Thursday and Friday nights. By this point the pieces were beginning to fall into place. notsuoH was not simply a bar or an eccentric environment. It was a map of relationships stretching back to the Commerce Street Artists Warehouse of the late 1980s, where many of these artists were developing their voices long before they became central figures in Houston’s cultural history. As we sat down outside and joined other people sitting at the café tables I recounted a story of returning home from some exhibition in Japan or California, I don’t remember, but all in all pretty full of myself, setting out from my new bungalow on 14th St. near Studewood. I was in the mood to celebrate a little, heading east on Washington avenue towards La Carafe when this car with the top chopped off went airborne in front of me close enough for me to recognize Nestor Topchy at the wheel, head and left arm out of the car to catch some dangerous night air, right arm stretched back to reach the wheel, and Rick Lowe sitting dangerously on the seat and back of the flying car pointing forward, apparently navigating. Nestor told me later Rick was the navigator. Of course he was. They were running the pylons underneath the freeway at enough speed to become airborne momentarily across the avenue. My thought then as it is now, I wish I could have been in the car with them. I had become the old establishment guy. I had money by my own hand, a new house, a new car, and signing autographs a thousand miles from home. They were a generation younger living life to its fullest if it didn’t kill them. I really wanted to be in that car so I could do it all again. In interviewing Jim, Nestor, and George for this piece, I got the feeling they too thought of this time in their lives as their best years. So, this was the one time I caught their act live. My mind wandered back to the moment with Jim. Our conversation turned to some politics and also using AI to help do our taxes, probably a lot like our dads would talk about how they were doing their taxes with that new fangled computer thing back in the day. Pirtle was proud to mention that his daughter Martha was taking over Dean's House of Credit Clothing next door starting this month and they just gotten through signing the papers to make the end of this block a family business. "I'm going to challenge you" Jim was being courteous and realizing I was having problems with my balance after getting really sick the week before, but I was game, and he was going to lead me on a tour. Remember, he has all kinds of people pouring into his place and he was kind enough to take the time to give me the Royal guided tour. So back inside we went and up the stairs to the second floor, stopping momentarily on the first floor to appreciate a young buxom woman having her chest painted, a stuffed giraffe, some more works by contemporary artists Earl Staley, and Mary Hayslip and a Statue of David. Up the stairs we went, passing by a more intimate, rough-hewn bar in an enclave. All I could remember from the good old days was that there was a selection of some hundreds of shoes on the second floor and that used to be an outstanding feature there but not now. The shoes were there, but most memorably three rooms, one was a domed room that amplified one's voice about 10 fold with a German artists experimenting with films in the round. Jim pulled me close in the center of the room, "Say Something," he grinned. "Something" Woah! God like authority suddenly reverberated around us. "Mary had a little lamb," boomed and mingled with the 3D video projected on us and the curved walls of the dome designed to not only amplify sound, but to project video in an unbroken horizon of reality. It was working. Another room, full blown recording studio going on, more stuffed animals along the way. Maybe Jim had stumbled at some point on to a taxidermist that was going out of business. (during Covid Jim got some extra money, Hixon, and Topchy both found taxidermied animals for Jim’s menagerie) Jim led me through a doorway onto a small brick-walled patio and pointed out one of notsuoH’s most personal features: a striking 16-by-18-foot mural commissioned as a tribute to his dear friend Michael Galbreth, with whom he played chess in this very courtyard for more than twenty-one years. The mural, painted by Houston artists Mel Eason and August Lewis of Joy Brush Signs, was conceived by Jim Pirtle as one artist’s homage to another. The surrounding walls are adorned with Viking shields created by Houston sculptor Dean Ruck, adding to the courtyard’s theatrical atmosphere. Painted in bold red, black, and white, the mural is organized like a giant playing card. At its center, two mannequin hands reach toward one another in a gesture reminiscent of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, but instead of exchanging life, they pass chess pieces, an elegant metaphor for friendship, strategy, and the quiet rituals that shape both our lives and the Houston art community around them. Then Jim led me up to the third floor by way of a spiral staircase in a glass enclosure created by artist Dean Scranton. Here's where our story comes full circle to the lunch at La Tapatia, the exhibition they were planning that afternoon is going to be in the room billed as the notsuoH white walled Gallery room. "Take a look. This is the gallery where we can have, you know, like regular shows, like a gallery with lighting and everything" uh yeah. The room had a dozen chairs gathering in matching groups of dissimilarity, a Queen Anne couch, several other pieces of furniture along with a stuffed full sized Spanish Toro Bravo. This is the room that the “American 250” exhibition will premiere June 4th, and open June 6th featuring photographers and installation artists Richard Tomcala, George Hixon, Ken Walkins, Daniel Jircik and others. Pirtle seems to be in collaboration with his building, featuring, supporting, promoting, artists and talent as they come in the door. The building itself has become his partner not unlike Gilbert and George, or The Art Guys, collaboration itself could become an artistic medium and that the artists’ public identities could be integral to the artwork. In this case Jim created an alternative identity for the House of Easy Credit and has been bouncing ideas off the old structure for 30 years. For anyone interested in Houston’s art and cultural history, this block is sacred ground. Long before Houston became an international city, this square was where farmers, merchants, politicians, and ordinary citizens gathered. It remains one of the few places downtown where the layers of Houston’s past are still palpable. Originally called Congress Square on the 1836 plan laid out by surveyors Gail Borden Jr. and Moses Lapham, the block was intended to house the capital of the Republic of Texas. That never happened, and the site instead evolved into Houston’s commercial and civic heart. For nearly a century it housed successive market buildings and city halls before becoming the public park we know today. (4.) Jim disappeared to go get an extension cord or some such thing while I sat on the Queen Anne couch with Robert Boyd, discussing various ailments and new medicine recent miracle cures, actor Jeremy Renner and his miraculous recovery from running over himself with his own snow plow during a family gathering for the holidays. Our optimistic conclusion was that we might be the first generation that could live, if not forever quite a bit longer than our parents -- if someone doesn't blow up the world first. I found Jim sitting at a table and the only area of the building that is sort of free and clear of objects on the third floor. I have not experienced it but I believe this is the performance area. I sat down to say goodbye and thanked him for the wonderful tour during such a busy moment and the kickoff of his 4-day celebration of 30 years at his location at 314 Main Street. No sooner than I sat down than someone reminding me of Houston arts matron Jackie Harris, or Susan Venus both active characters back in the day as well as now presented Jim with a celebration Rice Krispies and marshmallow Duchamp style urinal which was starting to sag and drip on the floor. With all the patience in the world Jim got up and gave this woman a big hug and thanked her for the wonderful gift before sprinting off to get something to clean up the mess. When he returned and the place was starting to crowd-up with visitors, a bevy of women started lining up to kiss Jim congratulations, coming up to the third floor by the dozens. Pirtle rolled his eyes just enough to say goodbye. notsuoH is more than a bar, gallery, or performance space. It is the enduring monument to a generation of artists who understood that art was not something confined to a frame or placed on a pedestal. It was a way of inhabiting the world, with humor, audacity, and enough imagination to turn an old downtown building into one of Houston’s most extraordinary works of art. (1.) Dada: Art and Anti-Art,1964, artist and filmmaker Hans Richter (2.) Nestor Topchy interview, May 8, 2026, 9 p.m. (3.) George Hixon interview, May 16, 2026, 1 p.m. (4.) Rick Lowe interview, May 18, 6 p.m. (5.) Jim Pirtle meeting and photos May 6, 6:30 PM, and phone interview May 15, 2026 “Meet Artist Nestor Topchy, the Mad Genius Hidden in Houston Heights,” By Molly Glentzer - August 8, 2023, and interviews with George Hickson, Nestor Topchy, And Jim Pirtle. Last week’s 30th Anniversary fest kicked off with a market by Mithic Media, whose events have become a new Notsuoh favorite over the past year. Photography by RARA

He paused, trying to find the simplest way to explain a process that was not simple at all. “Okay, let’s say I wanna, like, draw a triangle. I have to remember, like, all the, yeah, keys to press to, like, actually get it to, like, morph into one.” As he said this, June’s hands formed a cluster on his laptop keyboard, moving like someone playing a piano, or trying to coax a shape out of an invisible instrument. 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 .... U s u a l l y Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 1 June 08, 2026 June Poe, Orbiting d. m. allison, Mission News, June 8, 2026 (word count 1,515, 24 images) Turning onto the street toward Redbud Arts Center, the first thing I noticed was Someburger, still sitting there across the way like it had refused to participate in time, into a fifty year argument with progress. I parked across the street near C&D Hardware, another survivor of the practical city, and the neighborhood’s favorite Christmas shopping. I crossed toward Redbud, carrying that odd feeling that comes when you are about to walk into a crowd, and into your past. Through Rock Romano’s exhibition in the east gallery, into the studio beyond, full of people I had known, many for half a lifetime. There are rooms in Houston where the past does not announce itself. It just looks up from a table, smiles, and says hello. Gathered around a table of small works, were friends from high school and college. Lisa Lawrence was there, standing over a spread of red hearts and small award metals, pieces she had created in honor of our “Splendors And Sorrows, Trials And Tribulations, Persistence And Perseverance.” That phrase stayed with me, a roll call. At a certain age, those are not abstract words anymore. They are the inventory. Beside her was her tall handsome husband, and nearby, Joe Lindley, an old art classmate and great guitar player from high school. The whole thing had the feeling of a reunion nobody had planned. There we were, still making things, still showing up, still recognizing one another across a long room of years. I noticed Ken Koplan, with more big toys, as usual with political intention, an artist I had shown before. Ken spells it KOPLAN, so spell it right, that’s how we keep one another from disappearing. That was the mood I carried when I met Kelly’s son, June Poe, son of Kelly Moran One of my favorite artists, and Gil Poe, one of my favorite cutups. By then the room had already softened me up. I had walked in from Someburger and C&D Hardware, past old friends and small talismans of persistence, and into that particular Houston feeling where memory, art, and creativity all sit at the same table. Taking the whole room in, I found myself standing next to Kelly Moran. “How’s Jacob?” I asked. “He’s right there,” Kelly said. In all the commotion of the studio, with art covering the walls, tables full of prints, old friends from high school and college, with the usual opening-night drift of people moving from one conversation to the next, I had missed the obvious. Folded into the corner where my old office area used to be, pressed up against stacks of corrugated cardboard packing materials, was Kelly’s eldest. I hardly recognized him. Of course I didn’t. It had been at least fifteen years since I had last laid eyes on that artistic soul. He looked up, probably as surprised as I was. “Do you remember your drawing of a DNA cannon?” I asked. “I think you might have been like six years old. I kept it here on my desk, right about where you’re standing, for years and years. Sorry I lost it.” June looked surprised. “Oh yeah,” June said. “I remember that.” That seemed to break the ice. I shook his hand and gestured toward his art on the table. “They look good,” I said. I was trying to process the name change and this person’s new trajectory in life while trying not to act a little surprised. And that is on me. I had not kept up with Kelly for years, maybe ten years? On the table and walls around him were these bright, vibrating digital works, small but intense, like electronic minerals, woven circuitry, or little storms of pattern caught mid-formation. They had a strange handmade feeling even though they had come through code. Some looked like pixelated textiles. Some looked like maps. Some looked like old video games that had grown a nervous system. “It’s kind of something that kind of fits in your head kind of,” June said, “where you, you kind of make your own context from looking at them, as opposed to, like, going for a certain, like, uh... I mean, you can draw shapes with them, for instance, but that’s, like, actually really hard to, like...” He paused, trying to find the simplest way to explain a process that was not simple at all. “Okay, let’s say I wanna, like, draw a triangle. I have to remember, like, all the, yeah, keys to press to, like, actually get it to, like, morph into one.” As he said this, June’s hands formed a cluster on his laptop keyboard, moving like someone playing a piano, or trying to coax a shape out of an invisible instrument. “That sounds like this might be better for just jamming out,” I said. “Yeah. You know? Like, you know, the bass player plays something, then the saxophone comes in and does something off that, and then the, you know, the piano, and then you start to have fun and just jam out. “You just go, ‘Wow, we did that on purpose?’ ‘No, we’ve never done it before.’ You know? Right? It’s not a song. It’s not somebody else’s song.” That seemed to get us closer. The work did not feel composed in the usual way. It felt improvised inside a set of rules, like a visual jam session between the artist, the program, and whatever strange little accidents the system allowed to bloom. “I think it’s most similar to, like, an analog synthesizer,” June said, “where it’s like they use it a lot for, like, sound effects in a lot of old media. Right. And so they have, like, a sound diesel, basically, where they hook up a bunch of things to create, like, some sort of emergent sound, right? Try to capture some sort of sound effect.” That made sense to me. Once he said analog synthesizer, I could see the pieces differently. The colors pulsed like tones. The repeated forms seemed to hum. The patterns were not illustrations of something; they were events. Little visual frequencies. Signals being tuned. “And that, um, Pete Gershon worked with a group called Nameless Sound a lot,” I said, “and he’s the, you know, one of the ringmasters over at the Orange Show.” He wrote down Pete's name. He was listening. “ I think they would be real interested in what you’re doing here, too. Maybe having that,” I motioned at the laptop, “ you know, on a big projection, watching it grow on a screen or something, and you talk about it.” “Yeah,” June said. “I’ll just have to do some manipulation on it to reduce flashing, just make sure it’s not gonna, like, give anyone a seizure. Like, I can stare at it for hours and hours and hours, but not everybody’s able to. No, it’s very meditative, I guess.” That was the funny thing. The work looked electrically restless, full of flicker, collision, and code, but June talked about it as something meditative. And maybe that was right. There are people who meditate in silence. There are people who meditate by making dots, pulling ink, cutting metal, stitching cloth, fixing engines, or playing scales until the mind drops into the hand. June seemed to be meditating through systems, keys, collisions, patterns, and light. June was orbiting And I'm glad I got to catch a glimpse of his celestial path. “Wow,” I said. “Well, congratulations, June. Looks good. Glad you joined the ol’ art clan here. You still playing tuba?” “No, not really,” June said. “I, uh, I co, I compose music on the side, ’cause it’s fun, but, right, I haven’t been performing so much.” And then, because old memory has no manners, I went straight back to the carpool days. “And your mom would come to the studio after, you know, dropping you guys off from school, and she’d say, ‘The whole car smelled like feet.’ Ewww. She, she... Yeah. So all those hormones from those stinky boys.” “It’s true,” June said. “Yeah, we, I remember we used to carpool, every day, yeah, like at six, but, yeah.” “I’d like to have a picture of that car,” I said, “full of the instruments and the tuba and you guys and Kelly driving. That would be hilarious. Well, thanks for your time. I’ll see if I can get something written up. I don’t know.” I walked away thinking about that invisible car, packed with kids, instruments, school smells, and the future before any of us knew what shape it would take. Years later, here we were in the same studio, or close enough to it, with Kelly nearby, old friends at the tables, Rock Romano’s paintings still ringing in the next room, and June standing in the corner where my desk used to be, showing work made from code, rhythm, accident, and patience. One pattern grows out of another. Sometimes the scaffold is a program. Sometimes it is a family. Sometimes it is an old studio full of people who keep turning up, older, stranger, still making things. (24 images Click On Image To Expand To Full Screen) June Poe June Poe Generated Art Redbud Moran & Tutt Studio - 15 June Poe 1/24 He paused, trying to find the simplest way to explain a process that was not simple at all. “Okay, let’s say I wanna, like, draw a triangle. I have to remember, like, all the, yeah, keys to press to, like, actually get it to, like, morph into one.” As he said this, June’s hands formed a cluster on his laptop keyboard, moving like someone playing a piano, or trying to coax a shape out of an invisible instrumen FROM THE ARTIST: My work is a series of freeze-frames of cellular automata produced by a program I wrote. Cellular automata are processes that evolve complex spatial patterns from very simple rule sets. By changing the ruleset and collisions, patterns can be grown out of each other. One way to imagine this is to think of heat-treating metals. If the temperature changes, the pattern of crystallization changes. In the same vein I change the rules and iterations, which creates a new pattern which grows out of the original. One process forms a scaffold to grow the second out of. A delicate balance is struck between the pattern forming itself and the human manipulation forming the pattern. It is a digital process that highly resembles an analog process, and the pieces produced can ride the line between analog and digital. The digital pattern producing machine is essentially plotted and produced by the analog human, and the toggling of simple on/off rules produces pleasing organic patterns. Patterns which are pleasing for the sake of themselves. Tools used: C, GCC, Raylib, OpenMP, Linux, My Program, and a printer. No AI was used in the making of this.

Andy Crowdsource Rescue Logo Hippy Tyidye Nancy Andy 1/14 d. m. allison Rock Romano Executive Board: 2026 President: (TBD) Director: D M Allison / Founder Concept, Graphics, Web Design, Copy Writing, & Fundraising Music Director: Rock Romano Secretary / Bookings / Events / Correspondence Nancy Smith Art Director: Jon Erik Narum Treasurer / Bookkeeping / Reports (TBO) Grants, Donations, & Subscriptions: (TBD) Social Media (TBD) Technical Support:, Website, Arching & Gifting Over Watch (TBD) Research: Gifting Art / Document / Resources & Assets for Artists (TBD) Nancy Smith Jon Erik Narum Lee Abrahart Preparator We have no Location & we like it that way Board & Mission Council We'll be announcing Advisory & Board members as we make final selections Fall 2026. "Stay tuned" 100% of the funds raised Go To the projects we are involved with ARM is a grassroots outreach organization championing aging artists across the creative spectrum, with special emphasis on aging, health, the visual arts and performing arts. Through crowdfunding, awareness events, and targeted programs, we strive to Restore, Shelter, Provide, and Preserve the work and well-being of artists in need. We operate without the burden of traditional overhead. There’s no building lease, no facility maintenance. We’re a fully virtual organization, working from home offices, using personal phones, computers, and supplies to keep the mission going. Monthly subscriptions at any level receive a 50% discount on all event and table and chair reservations. This fund helps us buy time. Time to organize, respond, research, and show up for the artists we serve. MISSION COUNCIL (seeking 400 Statewide - as of June 2026) Gives recommendations about those that need our help, book projects, and recommendations for our ARMON Awards As of 06/15/2026 Mary Forbes David Miller Jim & Victoria Edwards: Mary Jenewein Steve Brudniak Ed & Magda Wilson Mat Reeves Sarah Foltz ADVISORY BOARD: (seeking 12 members - announcements fall 2026) Considers recommendations and deciding votes about those that need our help, book projects, and deciding recommendations for our ARMON Awards Jim Edwards - Art HistorianJim Edwards is a respected American art historian, curator, writer, and educator best known for his decades of work in museums, galleries, and university arts programs across Texas and the American West. A longtime professor and gallery director at Houston Christian University (formerly Houston Baptist University), . he helped build the school’s contemporary art program into a significant regional presence. Edwards earned BFA and MFA degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute and became widely recognized for major exhibitions, scholarship on modern and contemporary Southwestern art, and collaborations with institutions including the Menil Collection and the MFAH. Shearie James - Art Historian B.S. in Education from the University of Houston, where she completed graduate studies with honors. She also pursued graduate-level art history coursework at Tulane University. She continued advanced study for years at the Glassell School of Art. A longtime Houston-area educator, she taught art in multiple schools before retiring in 2007 and later continued as a substitute teacher in HISD and Judson ISD. Through her work with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, she taught museum lessons, wrote curriculum, lectured to teachers and future educators, and served on the board of Arts Partners. At this time in 2026, Shearie James is a volunteer at Methodist Hospital, San Antonio Texas in the emergency cardiac unit. Steve Brudniak is an American artist, actor, filmmaker and musician. Known for highly crafted, unusual assemblage sculpture, imbued with transcendental and unique scientific elements; his visual art career spans over four decades, with work in the permanent collections of several art museums in United States. Wikipedia Subscriptions to ARM that support our paid staff to oversee, website, funding, special events, bookkeeping, oversight for gifting & and archives, Wikipedia entries, and miscellaneous expenses. It's very important to keep these resources separate from donations to our other programs. Please sign up for a monthly donation so we can build a team around these regular small donations. We take care of all the expenses. However need your support to do the job. THESE FUNDS GO TO: 1. Initiating crowdsource funding, "Circle Funding" with our 3,000 member's list. 2. Preserving and documenting art collections and ephemerals. Research and posting our continued investigation of resources helpful to the Performing Arts, and in particular opportunities for the Visual Arts, opportunities for gifting Fine Art to institutions both public and private and connection to consultants working on projects large and small for the Plastic Arts. 3. Maintaining a Gifting area to help with downsizing collections and to ensure the values of works of art posted there. Registered visitors can post images for Giving Art. Registered visitors can post images for Giving Art but we still to assist and keep watch. 4.Maintaining an archive to preserve documents and maintain the station on the web providing users an archive to post their documents visible to a Google search missing because the documents were either not posted to the internet or published prior to the internet’s prominence in 1996. We accomplish this without the costs of an physical building. We have an on line staff of a Director (Fulltime), a Secretary for Bookings, Events, and Correspondence (Fulltime), a Treasurer for Bookkeeping and Reports (part time), a Grants Writer overseeing donations, & subscriptions, a Technical Support Director who acts as our Web Master and Archiving, as well as a Wikipedia writer to document our Visual and Performing artists' careers. •Director (Fulltime) •Secretary / Bookings / Events / Correspondence (Fulltime) •Treasurer / Bookkeeping / Reports •Grants, Donations, & Subscriptions: •Technical Support: Web Master, Arching & Gifting Over-Watch •Research: Gifting Art / Document / Resources & Assets for Artists •Project Managers: for RESTORE, SHELTER, PROVIDE, and PRESERVE programs Resume Collaborations Published Books Founder Dan M Allison: Started his career in 1980 in Houston Texas as a printmaker at Little Egypt Enterprises, collaborated with the HWCA to present a Houston TX city wide exhibition the "1984 Show" and in 1994 formed the first iteration of Art Rescue Mission with an event at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. As an artist Allison first gained international recognition in 1987 when he was awarded the Grand Prix at the 17th Biennial of Graphic Art in Ljubljana, then part of Yugoslavia, for his three-panel collagraphic triptych, Between Heaven and Earth. Selected from over 1,800 entries across 57 countries, he joined a distinguished group of past honorees that includes Joan Miró, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and David Hockney. In the years that followed, he founded Texas Collaborative Arts in Houston, focusing on the creative partnership between printer and artist, and later launched two influential gallery spaces, Nau-haus and d. m. allison gallery, dedicated to emerging and established visual artists. Since 2016, his work has turned toward archiving, digital media, and writing, with ongoing contributions to catalogs and Wikipedia as part of a broader effort to preserve and document independent art.

In her will, renowned Houston artist and civic champion Gertrude Barnstone put a directive in all capital letters, to be executed upon her death: “I INSIST ON A PARTY IN MY HOUSE WITH FOOD AND DRINK.” Barnstone wanted nothing to do with a solemn funeral or memorial service. Rather, Barnstone, who died December 24th, 2019 at the age of 94, demanded a joyous celebration of her life, a fitting tribute to a woman who channeled boundless creative energy into her signature sculpting designs and human rights advocacy. Barnstone’s family and friends will gather this week to fulfill her request, honoring the legacy of a Houstonian whose eclectic metal artwork resides in homes, parks and public spaces across the city. A dynamic, fiery creator with a sharp-left activist streak, the former Houston ISD school board member carved out a unique place in the city’s civic culture, a Depression-era native who never strayed from her roots. “She was a very free spirit, a fighter, and lived life on her own terms, hell be damned,” said Barnstone’s daughter, Lily Wells, likening her mother to “a combination of a grand dame and Blanche DuBois.” From the age of 7, when she started lessons at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, through her twilight years in Montrose, Barnstone expressed herself creatively through multiple mediums: acting, dancing, painting and, ultimately, sculpting. Her fondness for metallurgy, exhibited in bright, flowing, lyrical works, resulted in a decades-long career as one of Houston’s preeminent artists. “So many people came to Houston who became artists. And a lot of artists from Houston, even though it’s wonderful here, decided they had to go to the big city,” said Randy Tibbits, coordinator of the Houston Earlier Texas Art Group. “In that regard, she was something of a rarity.” Art alone, however, could not quench Barnstone’s passion. In the mid-1960s, angered by staunch conservative resistance to desegregation in HISD, Barnstone won a seat on the district’s school board. While her five-year tenure resulted in relatively few policy changes — she and the district’s first two black trustees, Hattie Mae White and Asberry Butler, were not in the board’s majority bloc — her activism helped pave the way for integration victories in the 1970s. “My mother was a wonderful, beautiful idealist who sought to make the world a better place,” said her son, George Barnstone. “She worked as a volunteer to improve the lives of everybody.” Gertrude Barnstone About Gertrude Barnstone by Jacob Carpenter, Houston Chronicle, January, 2019 Born in Houston in 1925 to Arthur and Gisella Levy, Gertrude displayed an uncanny proclivity for personal expression throughout her childhood. Under the tutelage of Houston’s leading artists, and with a strong push from her highly-educated mother, Levy charmed audiences in the city’s top dance and theater productions while earning acclaim for her preternatural drawing skills. Meanwhile, her father, a petroleum engineer for the former Humble Oil, instilled in his only daughter a strong sense of fairness and equality amid continued segregation in the South. Levy graduated from Rice University and briefly moved to California for her first marriage. Following a divorce, she returned to Houston and met architect Howard Barnstone, who would later gain acclaim for co-designing the Rothko Chapel. They wed in 1955 and melded into Houston’s burgeoning culture scene, as his career and her political activism gained steam. Inspired by White’s advocacy and her involvement with her children’s schools, Barnstone ran for the HISD school board in1964. In his book, “Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston, 1972-1985,” local historian Peter Gershon wrote that Barnstone’s conservative opponent “was so sure of his victory that he’d failed to campaign and spent the summer in Europe.” Barnstone prevailed in her election, pushing for integrated classrooms, free lunches for lower-income children and greater access to the arts. Opponents of racial integration sought to intimidate her, to no avail, Wells said. “We had a cross burned on our yard. People would call and threaten and say horrible things,” Wells said. “She would say, ‘God bless you,’ and hang up. I think it energized her.” Following Barnstone’s departure from the board, four HISD board candidates running on a pro-integration slate swept into office, ushering in major parts of Barnstone’s platform. The end of Barnstone’s tenure coincided in 1969 with her divorce from her husband. She promptly took over production of “Sundown’s Treehouse,” a weekly children’s show on KPRC-TV, for four years. In her final political foray, Barnstone lost a race for the Texas Senate in 1972 to John Ogg, a longtime elected official and father of current Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. While Barnstone abandoned her political aspirations, she remained an active leader in the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and multiple organizations dedicated to women’s and human rights. Barnstone in the mid-1970s turned her attention more toward her artwork, taking classes in welding to open a new avenue for expression. Following more than a decade of manufacturing skylights for Southwestern Plastics, Barnstone struck out on her own as a full-time artist, working out of her bungalow on Yupon Street. Barnstone specialized in freestanding pieces, gates, fences and railings, with much of her work landing in the homes of patrons. She worked into her 90s, persisting even after a fall in 2006 left her with only one functioning eye. While she sketched designs and welded smaller pieces. her assistant of about 30 years, Raynaldo Castro, performed heavy-duty tasks. “I tried to protect her, keep her from doing all the other stuff, but it didn’t slow her down at all,” Castro said. Barnstone is survived by her three children — George, Lily and Dora Cantwell — as well as five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Per her clear orders, there will be no funeral or memorial service. jacob.carpenter@chron.com To donate to HAF for the production of the book about Gertrude please click HERE .