Art
On With the Shows
After a decade in the doldrums and a four-month face lift, Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum reopens with a new mandate—and a new attitude.
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Just as important to the CAM’s new image is a two-tiered urban minipark at the busy Montrose and Bissonet intersection, a collaboration between Stern and Philadelphia landscape architect Laurie Olin. Trees, seating, a gently bubbling fountain, and slick new signage (gone are the huge banners that used to flap over the facade like cheesy Going Out of Business Sale signs) entice passersby. “We’re saying to the public, ‘We want you as an audience,’” says Mayo. “We’re not in business to make it difficult for you to look at art. We’re in business to get you in the door.”
Once in the door, visitors will find a clearly identifiable information desk—a first at the CAM—but the single large upstairs gallery remains unchanged. The difference is in the basement, once home to the museum’s offices and the dungeonlike Perspectives Gallery, to which so many local artists were consigned over the years: The offices have moved to a refurbished house down the street, and the gallery has tripled in size, allowing it to take full advantage of two basement-level slits of natural lighting. A new elevator, a public lounge, and a self-service Starbucks should likewise help provide Texas artists with a vastly more attractive forum for what is often their major-museum debut.
Upstairs or downstairs, the new CAM promises a more user-friendly experience. “I was raised as a purist,” Mayo admits. “You put up white walls, hung pictures on them, and used as little labeling as possible. We were like high priests guarding the cult, deliberately making this art too obscure to understand.” Her conversion came in 1988, during the furor over Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs and Andres Serrano’s photo of a crucifix in a jar of urine. “I realized then that we were truly estranged from the broad public,” she says. “Either the public was dumb or we weren’t doing a good job of sharing what we know—and I don’t believe the public is dumb.” Mayo acted on her determination to change even before the CAM temporarily shut down for its redo, hiring local artists and art historians to roam the floor and make themselves available to the curious or bewildered. And when a Serrano retrospective came to the CAM in 1995, Mayo approached the local clergy before the opening, showing them exhibition catalogs and explaining the whats and whys of the artist’s irreverent oeuvre. Thanks to the advance work, the show came and went in Houston without protest. “We have to frame good reasons for showing controversial work,” says Mayo, “and then respect the people who disagree with us.”
But all those good intentions will do little for the new CAM if it can’t fulfill its primary mission, which is to define art’s cutting edge—locally, nationally, and internationally—with sufficient authority to avoid sliding into provincial irrelevance. That may seem a difficult challenge given the CAM’s bantamweight budget (about $1.5 million annually) and dimensions. With 11,500 square feet of gallery space in its new incarnation, it doesn’t exactly measure up to the SFMOMA’s 50,000 square feet, not to mention its additional 175,000 square feet lavished on a library, theater, conservation lab, and soaring atrium lobby with a celebrated periscopelike skylight. And right now, Fort Worth’s museum plan calls for 75,000 square feet of gallery space along with 125,000 square feet committed to offices, a restaurant, a theater, a party pavilion, and so on. The measuring tape, however, doesn’t tell the whole tale. Most of the space at these megamuseums is gobbled up by permanent collections that may have significant holes (the hope being that local acquisitors will fill them in with bequests). The CAM, by contrast, doesn’t have a permanent collection, and its board has decided not to pursue one. “Frankly, we don’t have the community of major collectors here to do what they’ve done in Chicago and San Francisco,” says veteran board member Sissy Kempner. “What we want are more shows that we originate, with good catalogs.”
That unflinching focus plays to the CAM’s strength: the 7,500-square-foot upper gallery (now named the Brown Foundation Gallery), which is still as large as any single space in the nation devoted to temporary exhibitions of contemporary art and has an uninterrupted flow adaptable to almost anything an artist could aspire to put under a roof. Without the enormous expense of seeking and maintaining a permanent collection, the CAM can devote the bulk of its resources to mounting and seeking state-of-the-art fare for that space. And the staff is up to the challenge. Mayo has a fine eye and the catholicity of taste to avoid getting stuck on her own preferences, a problem endemic to previous CAM directors. Senior curator Dana Friis-Hansen also knows the local turf (he was on the first board of DiverseWorks) and, with five years in Tokyo under his belt, is regarded as an expert in the contemporary art of the Far East, a region that has the cognoscenti as excited as Germany did in the eighties. The new regime has already offered some notable shows in the past year, including a full upstairs presentation for Derek Boshier, one of Houston’s most-powerful narrative painters during the eighties, as well as introducing hot imports like Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and Los Angeles painter Lari Pittman.
The danger is that even the CAM’s best efforts will be swamped by the new leviathans, reinforcing the notion, so successfully challenged by Houston artists in the past two decades, that Texas remains a cultural colony of the two coasts. But so far there is no evidence that bigger is better. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which ten years ago inaugurated the new era with its exquisite Arata Isozaki—designed California Plaza building, has drawn local ire for originating only three major one-person retrospectives of L.A.-area artists. Aided by the deep pockets of its Bass-led board, the new Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth may well become the most formidable of the giants, finally revealing the eye-popping collection it has squirreled away over the years. It should also provide a suitable local showcase for the Fort Worth—organized shows that have begun to tour internationally with a frequency the CAM board can only sigh over. But the last major showing of Texas art the Fort Worth Modern offered was “Texas/Between Two Worlds”—organized and toured by the CAM during the doldrums of the early nineties.
Small and plucky, the refitted CAM remains the Texas institution most capable of cruising into the deep waters now dominated by dreadnoughts like the SFMOMA and firing the shots necessary to preserve Texas’ hard-won artistic independence. It isn’t putting too sharp an edge on that still-proud stainless steel prow to suggest that whether the CAM stays afloat or sinks will in substantial measure determine the international status of Texas culture some distance into the next century.
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