SEPTEMBER 16, 2022 – APRIL 2, 2023 TERRELL JAMES: One Eye Sees, The Other Feels exhibition generously supported by THE CRAMPTON TRUST established by Katharine Crampton Cochrane
Terrell James: One Eye Sees, The Other Feels Mobile Museum of Art 4850 Museum Drive, Mobile, AL 36608 mobilemuseumofart.com © 2022 Mobile Museum of Art All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. ISBN: 978-1-893174-25-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022915299 Published in conjunction with the exhibition Terrell James: One Eye Sees, The Other Feels at the Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL September 16, 2022–April 2, 2023 Designer: Phillip Collier Design Studio Printer: Pel Hughes Editor: Sheryl Conkelton Documentation images of paintings taken by Thomas DuBrock Artist portrait by Wolf MacLean TERRELL JAMES: One Eye Sees, The Other Feels COVER Retinue, 2017 Acrylic and oil on canvas 78 x 105 x 2 in.
TERRELL JAMES: One Eye Sees, The Other Feels The Rooms Around Him, 2021 Oil on linen 64 x 77 in x 2 1/4 in.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS 2022 One Eye Sees, the Other Feels, Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL 2021 Second Sight, Cadogan Contemporary, London Painting from Here, Barry Whistler, Dallas Terrain, Cadogan Contemporary, Hampshire, UK Between Land and Water, Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR Circle of Intimates, Jason McCoy, New York Bright Shores, Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston 2020 Break in to Enter, Jason McCoy, Inc., New York 2019 Rinsing the Eye, Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston Fable, Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR 2018 Postulates, Cadogan Contemporary, London 2017 Sotol View, Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas 2016 Hover, Texas Artist of the Year Exhibition, Art League, Houston Remembering the Poison Tree, Cadogan Contemporary, London Heretics, Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR 2014 Divided Sight, Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas, TX Four Decades, Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR 2013 Maritime Forest, Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston, TX 2012 Troupe: New Paintings, Froelick Gallery, Portland, OR Armstrong, Cameron. Painting From Here. F.K. Hamilton S.A., 2021. Buhmann, Stephanie and Ann Dumas. Terrell James: Threshold. London: Cadogan Books, 2021. Della Monica, Lauren P. Painted Landscapes. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Books, 2013. de Lima Greene, Alison. Texas: 150 Works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000. (De Lima Greene is the author of this brochure’s essay.) Jun, Chen. New Territories of Ink Art. The 9th International Ink Art Biennale of Shenzhen and the 8th Shenzhen Forum for Ink Painting. Vol 2. Shenzhen, China: Shenzhen Art Institute, 2016. Paglia, Michael and Jim Edwards. Texas Abstract. Albuquerque: Fresco Books, 2014. Weaver, Suzanne and Lana Meador. Texas Women: A New History of Abstract Art. San Antonio: San Antonio Museum of Art, 2020. Buhmann, Stephanie. “Place and Transition in The Work of Terrell James.” Terrell James: Hover. Houston: Art League, 2016. de Lima Greene, Alison. “Intimate Immensity.” Terrell James: Field Studies. Houston: Bo Joseph, March 2010. (De Lima Greene is the author of this brochure’s essay.) James, Terrell. “On Walter Hopps.” The Brooklyn Rail. July 14, 2017. Heno-Coe, Gilles. “Terrell James: On the Brink.” Rinsing the Eye. Houston: Hiram Butler Gallery, 2020. Petry, Michael. “The Abstraction of the Physical into the Poetic.” Terrell James: Remembering the Poison Tree. London: Cadogan Contemporary, 2016. SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS Miller, Briana. “Spring Arts Guide.” The Oregonian. March 25, 2021. Petty, Kathleen. “San Antonio Museum of Art Presents the First Major Exhibition of Texas Women Abstract Artists.” San Antonio Magazine, February 6, 2020. Glenzer, Molly. “Artist owner’s collaborative nature permeates high-concept Transart Foundation building.” Houston Chronicle, September 7, 2018. Glentzer, Molly. “Poetic Vision of Terrell James.” Houston Chronicle, October 28, 2016. Middendorf, Paul. “Working Boundaries: An Interview with Terrell James.” Free Press Houston, September 19, 2016. Speer, Richard. “Terrell James’ exhibit, ‘Four Decades’.” Visual Art Source (Portland, OR), July 12, 2014. CATALOGUE ESSAYS SELECTED REVIEWS Casa Lamm Cultural Center, Mexico City Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Driendl Family Collection, Vienna Edward Albee Foundation and private collection, New York Fundacion Vergel, Cuernavaca, Mexico, and New York Menil Collection, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Museum of Sewanee: The University of the South, Sewanee, TN Museum of Texas Tech University, Artist Printmaker Research Collection, Lubbock, TX Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, OR Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Rice University Print Collection, Houston Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA Transart Foundation, Houston University of St. Thomas, Houston The Barrett Collection, Dallas The National Gallery, Washington, DC The Watermill Collection, Water Mill, NY Whitney Museum of American Art, New York MUSEUM AND FOUNDATION COLLECTIONS 2
3 Terrell James (b.1955) is an artist living and working in Houston, Texas, with a long distinguished career, the last ten years of which are summarized here.
In 1914, the Swiss artist Paul Klee sketched an abbreviated figure with a mask-like visage—one eye open, one eye shut—and inscribed on the top margin “Ein Auge welches sieht, das andere, welches fühlt” [One Eye Sees, The Other Feels].1 More than a century later, Terrell James embraced Klee’s title for this survey of her work, indicating the dual nature of her practice as she describes specific sites—both near and far—and navigates the more intangible zones of exchange where memory, intuition and identity reside. This exhibition concentrates on paintings and works on paper created by James over a five-year span between 2017 and 2022; however, selected early works, including Companion (1997) and Trees (2004), demonstrate the foundation of her compositional methods, as she laid down amorphous fields of color to establish a middleground, which she then punctuated with linear elements that move through and across space. The complementary titles (arrived at after paintings are completed) reflect another binary that can be discerned throughout James’s work, as she balances her deep dives into nature with the physical presence of those close to her. Indeed, James can be said to depict unstable territories, creating a “liquid space . . . volatile, fluctuating and protean, like the living things that constitute it.”2 Sotol View (2007) and Seto Inland Sea (2021) demonstrate the breadth of James’s engagement with the living landscape. Measuring twenty-one feet across, Sotol View assumes the scale of a mural, reflecting the vast spaces of West Texas and Mexico where Big Bend National Park meets the Chihuahuan Desert. This is a landscape in which changes in weather, light and atmosphere can be seen across many miles, and these mercurial elements are constantly at play against the obdurate presence of the Chisos Mountains. While sere, the desert is home to myriad forms of plant life, and the observant eye can discern both animal tracks and the shadows of birds passing overhead. Human history is a part of this landscape as well, with pictographs and archeological remains testifying to local habitation stretching across 10,000 years. All of these factors are distilled in James’s nuanced palette, in which atmospheric perspective is captured by translucent layers of warm yellows, blossoming mauves and incidents of ocher and green; by her skittering calligraphy, which traces the existence of various flora Terrell James: One Eye Sees, The Other Feels and fauna as well as rocky outcroppings; and by her taut command of the all-encompassing panoramic vista that engulfs the viewer. In contrast, the more intimately scaled Seto Inland Sea records a very different form of close looking, based on recollections of a jellyfish James discovered floating off the coast of Japan. The overall palette is dominated by the turquoise tones of Seto’s waters, and the domed profile of the jellyfish crowns the composition. Yet, Seto Inland Sea is also very much the product of James’s meditative and improvisational studio practice grounded in a confident knowledge of her materials. Working on a sheet laid out flat on a table, James takes advantage of the semi-absorbent nature of stone paper, which holds color while offering a degree of resistance, so that every movement of her hand is recorded as she manipulates the liquid pigments as they flow and pool. At times, James contrasts transparency with opacity, allowing layers of underpainting to create the illusion of depth; at times scattered passages of collage and impasto establish an insistent surface. Two other works on stone paper from 2019 further illuminate the laboratory nature of James’s studio. Over the years she has collected many rocks, including meteor fragments and samples of petrified wood among other found objects that she has integrated into her pictorial alphabet. Drawn from this archive, Rocks I is essentially a still-life composition, with jittering lines and a minimal application of pigment giving dimensionality and weight to these shards of the earth’s crust. Conversely, Rupture demonstrates a more tactile engagement with her immediate environment. James created the ground layer by laying the paper on the floor of her studio and scraping black gesso across the sheet to capture the woodgrain of her recycled floorboards. This then became the foil for additional strata as James elaborated upon the composition, emphasizing the push and pull between warm and cool tones, as well as drawn and painted lines. The viewer’s eye is challenged by this wealth of information, but is also misdirected, as the disruptive white passages summon up the original tone of the nowobscured paper support. Rebellion (2021) is one of James’s few paintings to have a fixed horizon line bisecting the composition and, like many of the stone paper drawings, it is closely worked with an exceptional graphic energy. James created it while engaged on Terrain, a 100-foot-long drawing 1 O.K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989), 61. 2 Fréderique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènas and Axelle Grégroire, Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 187–88. 4
that informs this incident-laden canvas. Within the larger color fields the surface is activated by interlocking tonal shifts and lines that hiss with energy. James has likened the radiant orange flare dominating the composition to Baroque representations of fallen angels. At the same time Rebellion can also be located firmly within present-day realities, capturing the spirit of the protests and demands for justice that swept across America in 2021. James has always been willing to disclose the artists who stake out territory in her imagination. She haunted the galleries of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, when Paul Cézanne’s late works were exhibited in 1978, and a number of her recent paintings have returned to this source. Rocks and Quarry (2018) can be read as a direct homage to the tonal clarity and open canvas of Cézanne’s Houses on the Hill (1900–06) at the McNay Art Museum. Retinue (2017) and A Thin River (2022) display a more complex relationship with Cézanne, and invite comparison to his renditions of the Bibémus quarry. Retinue echoes the rhythmic masses of Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897) at the Baltimore Museum of Art. However, while James borrows certain color notes from this precedent, she also breaks free, recasting Cézanne’s adamant rockface with an autographic and calligraphic grace, allowing air and light into the spaces of her composition. With A Thin River, James indirectly revisited the geological stacking of Cézanne’s quarries, and the painting has its own evolution within James’s body of work. She returned to a canvas she had begun many years earlier, passages of which can be glimpsed in the red interstices that run through the center. This in turn became the foundation of a new composition, in her words “past an occlusion towards a clearer space.” The staccato linear elements of her earlier paintings here give way to more thickly laid down passages, “like rocks tumbling down towards the viewer.”3 Among James’s latest paintings, Sounder (2022) demonstrates a new strategy of displacement. In contrast to other paintings and works on paper featured in this exhibition in which the painterly action is either massed towards the center or tautly spread overall, Sounder gives particular weight to the left and right margins. The darker tones of these vertical passages do not read as enclosures; rather, they suggest the possibility of figures occupying a larger field. In contrast, James has thinned out the central portion, erasing and lightly reworking much of this section, so that bulbous shapes give way to atmospheric effects, and passages of blue resonate powerfully. “In that cradled space I perceive a vibration, some sort of sound, and an understanding of space that is delivered intuitively,” James has commented on Sounder. “Here is the eye that feels.” Alison de Lima Greene Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston July 2022 3 This quote and subsequent comments from Terrell James were shared with the author in an email exchange, July 4, 2022. Rebellion, 2021 Oil on linen 58 in x 48 x 2 in. 5
Blades and Fins, 2021 Oil on linen 66 x 66 x 2 in. 6
Above Below, 2018 Oil on canvas 66 x 66 x 2 in. 7
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Traces, 2020 Oil on linen 12 x 24 x 1 in. 9
Herald, 2021 Oil, acrylic, ink, pencil and collage on stone paper 40 x 28 in. 10
Seto Inland Sea, 2021 Acrylic, oil wash, marker, collage and graphite on stone paper 40 x 28 in. 11
Sotol View, 2007 Oil and acrylic on canvas 84 x 252 x 2 in. 12
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Shape Ranch 5 (Town), 2022 Oil and acrylic on canvas 42 x 42 x 1 1/2 in. Three Mile Draw Revisited, 2021 Oil on linen 66 x 66 x 2 in. 15
Sounder, 2022 Oil on canvas 66 x 66 x 2 in. Puzzle, 2022 Oil on linen 64 x 77 x 2 1/4 in. 17
exhibition generously supported by THE CRAMPTON TRUST established by Katharine Crampton Cochrane Other MMofA programming is made possible by support from 4850 Museum Drive • Mobile, AL 36608 • 251.208.5200 Rocks And Quarry 2018 Oil on linen 22 x 28 x 1 in.