Fill in the Blank Space

Rice Gallery Celebrates Its 10th Anniversary

Forget oil paint. Art at the Rice Gallery generally is done in a less-expected medium. Like hay.

Gentle Rise by Michael Shaughnessy.

That was Michael Shaughnessy’s requirement for his January 1996 installation, An Caoin Ardaigh (The Gentle Rise), the first installation specifically created for the Rice Gallery. And he didn’t want just any hay, but a particular kind with stalks long enough for weaving. To pull it off, the gallery staff had to track down the right sort of hay with the help of a Houston feed store. Gallery director Kim Davenport remembers the incongruous beauty of a truck laden with fragrant hay driving through downtown Houston to get to campus.

Shaughnessy required more than hay. He needed people to help him construct the giant arching shape of woven hay that was to fill the gallery. The gallery staff hung posters asking for volunteers, but Shaughnessy wound up with just half a dozen helpers. As they started to work with the massive mounds of hay, though, people walking by the gallery stopped to ask what was going on, and a lot of them stayed to help. Davenport fondly recalls the scene at the gallery late one night, when about 60 people sat quietly weaving hay. Gaelic music was playing, and the room was heavy with grassy perfume. “That was when we learned what a great community-based thing this was going to be,” Davenport says.

The experience also taught her that there could be unexpected downsides as well. Work on An Caoin Ardaigh almost came to a halt after graduate students in nearby windowless computer labs started to get allergy attacks from the hay dust that was being sucked into the air-conditioning system. The staff, working with a university safety officer, solved the problem with huge fans that sucked particulates out of the building.

“It was a great feeling the first time something was made specifically for this space,” Davenport says. The Shaughnessy woven hay installation not only helped define the process for future installations but also set the tone for the diversity of artistic media seen in subsequent exhibitions. “The materials of installation often are bizarre and specific to an artist’s work,” Davenport explains. The list reads like the world’s most challenging scavenger hunt: umbrellas, panels of grass, giant balloons, Halloween masks, Gilligan’s Island and Land of the Lost reruns, 7,000 pounds of cardboard, seven tons of sand, video projectors, kiddie pools, bottle crates, bamboo, hay, Fresnel lenses, and thousands of tiny kites, pushpins, drinking straws, and. . . .

Superabundant Atmosphere by Jacob Hashimoto.

In the 10 years since Shaughnessy’s hay arch filled the gallery, Davenport has curated 40 more installations, and under her directorship, Rice Gallery has become one of the most interesting installation venues in the country. It also is celebrated among artists as a great place to show.

William Camfield, the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor Emeritus of Art History, hired Davenport for the director’s position. Camfield, who spent 33 years at Rice, explains the gallery’s history. In the late 1960s, John O’Neil, a painter and founding chair of the art department, “took the foyer space, shoved the desks aside, and made room to install artwork.”

O’Neil was still at Rice when Sewall Hall was being built to house the art department and gallery. Camfield and O’Neil went by to check out the construction site when it was just a big hole in the ground. “We discovered that they had not thought about reinforcing the floor,” Camfield says. He and O’Neil were told that the gallery wouldn’t be able to exhibit sculpture or have more than 40 or 50 people in the space. In addition, neither the planned drop-ceiling nor plaster-covered concrete walls were conducive to hanging paintings. Camfield and O’Neil were left to contemplate an art gallery that couldn’t exhibit paintings or sculptures and couldn’t accommodate a crowd for an exhibition opening.

Unwilling to let matters stand, the two finagled a meeting with the architects to propose several changes, including an open ceiling, track lighting, gypsum board walls, and a reinforced floor. The architects agreed to the alterations, and Rice can thank the two professors for their quick thinking in making the gallery a practical and aesthetically pleasing space.

The Sewell Hall Art Gallery, as it was then called, was run by faculty who were given course relief to organize exhibitions. Although, according to Camfield, there were some nice shows, there never was enough time or funding to fulfill the gallery’s potential, and the space simply limped along for 10 years or so. At last, however, the department received enough funding to hire an actual director, though the salary was minimal, and three directors passed through in a short period of time.

“By the early ’90s,” Camfield says, “the situation had become discouraging.” The faculty tried to get more money for the director’s position, and when none was forthcoming, they reluctantly voted to discontinue the gallery. But there were second thoughts, and one last appeal for funds succeeded. “We got a little more salary from the university,” Camfield says, “and then we found Kim, who was the curator of contemporary art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. She took the gamble that we could turn the gallery into something significant.”

Jaye Anderton, left, and Kim Davenport.

It would be a challenge. “The mandate for me,” Davenport explains, “was to do something completely different and not replicate what was being done by any other arts institution in town. There are some really specific reasons why I decided to focus on installation.” Two of those reasons were budget and storage space. The gallery’s annual budget for shows was spartan, as gallery manager Jaye Anderton frankly informed Davenport—only around $10,000. And while the gallery did have a small collection of works, there wasn’t room to maintain, add to, or store it.

“But we had this beautiful exhibition space,” says Davenport, “and no other art institution in the city focused solely on installations. I ultimately decided I wanted to do one thing well.” An installation program worked out financially, too, because there wasn’t enough in the budget to bring in exhibitions. “It costs less for an artist to do something new,” Davenport says, “than to borrow a work.” Loan fees, crating, insurance, and shipping are expensive when you are dealing with preexisting work.

By concentrating on installations, she also could draw Rice art students into the life of the gallery. “Students could see something coming into form,” she says. “They could see the process of making art and realize that a work of art isn’t just delivered.”

Davenport always is scouting artists by visiting studios, alternative spaces, galleries, and international art events like the Venice Biennale. She invites artists she is considering to come for a site visit and submit a proposal. If the proposal is approved, the exhibition is scheduled, and the artist is brought in to execute the work with the help of the gallery preparator and student assistants. The gallery covers the artist’s travel costs, materials, and expenses, but Davenport is committed to giving artists an honorarium as well. “I think there is this assumption that artists are asked to do things for free,” Davenport says. “You wouldn’t call a plumber and ask him to fix your toilet for free.”

The year after the gallery opened was a turning point. Houston philanthropists Louisa Stude Sarofim and Isabel Brown Wilson signed on to help with fundraising. They organized and co-chaired a patrons group that now covers the bulk of the exhibition costs. The university still handles employee salaries, and according to Anderton, the university has increased the exhibition budget to $55,000. “Endowment income has gone up to $15,000,” Anderton says, “and now we also raise close to $150,000 for exhibitions from individuals, foundations, and the city.”

Anderton has worked with the gallery for 22 years and is delighted with its progress. “When Kim came on board, it was just the two of us and a part-time preparator that we shared with the Department of Art History. Now we have a full-time preparator and a curatorial assistant, and we are about to add two more positions. One will be in outreach, and one will be in education.”

According to Davenport, Anderton has been essential to the gallery’s success. “Without Jaye, this never could have happened.” Originally hired as a financial administrator for the gallery, Anderton now is the gallery manager. She still deals with finances, but, Davenport says, “She has a really great eye, and I really regard her opinion. She has turned out to be an extraordinary party planner, and she has jumped into every aspect of the installation process. Essentially, every five weeks we are producing another Broadway show.”

True, False, and Slightly Better by Phoebe Washburn.

Those shows are varied, to say the least. They have given young artists their first big break as well as brought the work of well-established artists to Houston. They also have involved the Houston community at large, as well as Rice students. Consider a few of Rice Gallery’s “Greatest Hits.”

Phoebe Washburn’s installation True, False, and Slightly Better was a jaw-dropping project that filled the gallery with a swirling vortex created out of 7,000 pounds of cardboard. Washburn was fresh out of graduate school, and the Rice Gallery exhibition was her second solo show. Rice proved to be a wonderful learning experience, especially in terms of logistics. How do you ship 7,000 pounds of cardboard? The Rice Gallery staff knows. “Kim and Jaye were complete, calm professionals who also were supportive and excited,” Washburn says. “It was a good balance. If I hadn’t had that experience, I wouldn’t have been able to shift scale that early. Because of the enormous scale of that project, I’m sure it helped me get other opportunities.”

She is working on a collaborative installation with Stephen Hendee, another Rice Gallery alum, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. “My experience at Rice was an amazing one,” Washburn adds.“Whenever I meet people who do installations, I tell them they need to exhibit there.”

Jessica Stockholder is an internationally renowned installation artist who teaches at Yale University. Davenport pursued the in-demand Stockholder for nine years until an opportunity opened up. Stockholder uses an array of junk—new and old—to create what are essentially three-dimensional paintings. Stockholder’s Rice Gallery installation Sam Ran Over Sand or Sand Ran Over Sam used, among other things, swaths of carpeting, 2-by-4s, elderly club chairs, ice chests, and a bowling ball to create a dynamic three-dimensional composition.

Superthrive, by Stephen Hendee, was an installation that people still ask about, and it remains one of the most dramatic transformations of the space. Working with white foam board and black photo tape, Hendee created a faceted environment that could have been the set for Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. The walls glowed a luminous green and were lit from behind with gel-covered fluorescent lighting. Hendee, who worked by himself for a month creating the installation says, “It was a tremendous opportunity. I was given a lot of freedom to develop something.”

The Shape of Space by Alyson Shotz.

In 2001, Rice Gallery launched its Summer Window series. Featuring installations designed to be viewed through the gallery’s window wall, the series is a way to keep the gallery active even when closed during the summer months. The Shape of Space, by Alyson Shotz, was a standout of the series. Shotz’s installation used plastic Fresnel lenses—those magnifying sheets with concentric ridges. She and a team of assistants hand cut ovals out of the center of 18,000 lenses. She stapled the ovals together into a massive 40-by-14 foot curtain that undulated and glittered like fish scales and magnified the room that lay behind it.

The Shape of Space hung in the gallery all summer long, and then the Guggenheim purchased it for its collection. The installation opened another door for Shotz: she recently completed a permanent installation at the University of Houston for the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts. This time, it’s glass beads.

The gallery also has experimented in design and architecture. Jennie King, a Rice graduate and a PhD candidate at Princeton University, came to Davenport and asked to curate a show as an independent-study project for one of her courses. She chose the award-winning designer Karim Rahshid. For his installation, Pleasurescape, Rashid painted the whole gallery a lush orange and filled the space with a grid of molded plastic furniture. The furniture’s abstract shapes created a white topographic expanse that was activated when students and other visitors draped themselves over the shapes. The gallery windows offered a view to the impromptu performances.

Bamboo Roof, the gallery’s foray into architecture, was with none other than esteemed Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who is noted for his unconventional use of materials. He has used log-like cardboard tubes to design everything from a gallery for fashion designer Issey Miyake to housing for the victims of the Kobe earthquake.

Bamboo was the material of choice for the Rice project. Ban’s design was realized through a collaboration between undergraduate students from Rice’s School of Architecture and the University of Houston’s Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture.

While Ban’s design-to-build process normally takes two years, the Rice timetable was six months, culminating in a three-week installation period. Fifty students, five architects, and two engineers worked ceaselessly to erect Ban’s undulating bamboo canopy in which sections of bamboo flooring were fastened into a flexible, open grid held aloft by clusters of poles.

Bamboo Roof by Shigeru Ban

The Ban project may have involved a team of people, but Stephen Keene’s installation Fresh Art Daily involved a mob. Keene is an artist with an egalitarian attitude toward art: he sells his paintings by the foot, with prices ranging from $1 to $15. For his show, the gallery advanced him money to produce 200 paintings on canvas. During his six-week residence, he painted from 8 am to 10 pm daily. People came to watch, and the artist painted a bench for them to sit on while they observed. “That’s when we realized,” says Davenport, “that people are fascinated by watching art being made.”

On Sunday, people could come and buy Keene’s art. The sales were self-serve: Keene used a moneybox and an honor system. The Houston Chronicle ran an article about the show after the first week. The second week, Davenport says, the show was “sold out to the walls in 40 minutes.” The third Sunday, with people lined up three hours before the gallery opened, the staff limited purchases to two per person. “The fifth and sixth weekends,” Davenport says, “we started giving out numbers. Senior citizens’ homes were bringing in buses.” At the end of the six-week show, Keene gave the gallery his paint-spattered shoes.

Those shoes are emblematic of Rice Gallery’s journey from obscure campus exhibition space to an important destination for artists and art lovers. Davenport’s rationale for transforming the gallery into an installation space may have been rooted in practical concerns, but the aesthetic results give the gallery a unique feel. For Davenport, the reason is simple. “Rice Gallery is a place of encounter,” she says. “You don’t look at installations; you are inside them, participating in and moving through the work.” They are environments where the artist, the artwork, and the viewer become one.