K E N L I T T L E W E S T T E X A S T R I A N G L E

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W E S T T E X A S T R I A N G L E2 0 1 4 e x h i b i t i o n d a t e s

The Grace MuseumAbilene, Texas

May 8 through August 9, 2014

The Old Jail Art CenterAlbany, Texas

June 7 through September 7, 2014

Ellen Noël Art Museum of the Permian BasinOdessa, Texas

June 10 through September 2, 2014

Museum of the SouthwestMidland, Texas

June 13 through August 24, 2014

San Angelo Museum of Fine ArtsSan Angelo, Texas

July 10 through September 7, 2014

Cover: Black and White Longhorn. 2007. Mixed media. 48 x 32 x 36 inches.

T h e W e s t T e x a s T r i a n g l eThe West Texas Triangle, established in 2006, is a collaboration of five nationally accredited fine art museums all located centrally between El Paso and Dallas, Texas. The consortium includes the Grace Museum in Abilene; the Old Jail Art Center in Albany; the Museum of the Southwest in Midland; the Ellen Noël Art Museum in Odessa; and the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in San Angelo. Collectively, the West Texas Triangle produces an annual exhibition of the work of a single sculptor with a Texas connection. The ‘Triangle’ meets bi-monthly, rotating each meeting’s location among the institutions to share resources, ideas and plan the annual exhibition. A team of curatorial staff, museum directors, education and marketing staff jointly choose each artist. Featured artists have included Danville Chadbourne (2013), Catherine Lee (2012), George Tobolosky (2011), Sherry Owens (2010), James Surls (2009), Joe Barrington (2008), and Jesús Moroles (2007). This year, the West Texas Triangle is excited to present the work of Ken Little.

Born in Canyon, Texas, Ken Little is a graduate of the first Bachelor of Fine Arts class offered at Texas Tech University in 1970. He went on to earn a Masters of Fine Arts at the University of Utah in 1972. Since 1972 he has held tenured positions at major universities, including The University of Montana at Missoula and The University of Oklahoma in Norman. He has been a professor of Art in Sculpture at The University of Texas at San Antonio since 1988.

Ken Little is a nationally recognized artist who has been granted two Visual Arts Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts. For over 20 years, he has maintained a working studio and Rrose Amarillo, an alternative exhibition space in downtown San Antonio. His work in various media has been shown extensively both nationally and internationally. In South Texas he has exhibited at such venues as ArtPace, Finesilver Gallery, The Southwest School of Art and Craft, and the Blue Star Art Space where he was a board member from 1989 to 1995. He currently serves on the Board of Directors at ArtPace, San Antonio.

Throughout the Summer of 2014, selections of Little’s work will be on view at each of the West Texas Triangle museums. Visitors are encouraged to travel to all five venues to experience the depth of Little’s work as well as the vast cultural heritage of our region.

— Rebecca Bridges, Registrar, The Grace Museum

a r t i s t s t a t e m e n tAs early as I can remember, I knew that I wanted to be an artist. That has remained consistent in my life from hand painting china with my grandmother when I was six years old to now, at sixty seven, as I fabricate lifesize suits and larger than life body parts from $1 bills. My idea of what an artist is and what they do has evolved a lot. When I was a kid I wanted to animate for Walt Disney. As a young man, I wanted to emulate the western artists like Charlie Russell. In college, I learned of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Conceptual, Process, and Minimal art. Now I guess it's post-Postmodernism? I think that I have taken something from all these experiences as well as life and the more popular culture.

I've lived on the high flat plains of West Texas and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I've lived in the mountains of Missoula, Montana and in the San Francisco Bay area. Since 1988, I have been living in downtown San Antonio, Texas. The future holds spending time with my wife Cathy on the Kona coast of the big island of Hawaii.

Artists like Hank Williams, Bob Wills, Thelonius Monk, Buddy Holly, and David Byrne have been as influential on me as Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, and H.C. Westermann, Rudy Autio, William Wiley, Robert Arneson, and Jim Nutt are some of my close influences. John Buck, Donald Lipski, Terry Allen, Luis Jimenez, Nancy Rubins, Hiroki Morinoue, Pat Schuchard, Cathy Cunningham-Little, Deborah Butterfield, and Robert Brady are some of my great contemporaries.

My work, over the years, reflects a need to invent and evolve. I like to move through things and onto others and then come back through again in a new way. I was a ceramic sculptor for about ten years. In about 1980, I made the transition to using a number of media making sculpture, installations, and performances. My work has almost always been figurative in one way or another. Readings over the years have run the gamut from the literal autobiographical to more universal ruminations on themes from the world of ideas.

I work with my hands and my head. Really, I guess, in a sort of antique way. I usually don’t know where I am going or exactly what I am going to make until I establish some sort of dialog between my process or materials and my ideas or subject matter. I can't really say that one comes before the other. In fact, when things are working best, I am really transported somewhere else doing something that I could never have imagined or planned.

During my career as an artist, I have made lots of different things out of different materials with different processes. I have made ceramic furniture, tools and life-sized figures. I have worked through ceramics and mixed media to installations, performance, and objects made from all kinds of stuff. There have been bears made of shoes and boots, deer made of roadmaps, automobiles from dictionary pages, houses from Bible pages and charcoal briquettes. There have been suits and dresses sewn from $1 bills, masks in bronze, hands in neon, ladders made into buildings, and cast iron feet.

This set of exhibitions, The West Texas Triangle, has been a logistical challenge for all of us, but I want to express my gratitude to all the participants for this extraordinary opportunity to show the breadth of what I do. Thank you!

I've been lucky. I've shown my work at some great places. I've met some amazing people, some of who are my good friends. I’ve had some terrific students, forty two years of them. Many of them have gone on to be important artists and almost all of them are friends, too. The friends, that is really the best part.

— K e n L i t t l e , 2 0 1 4

K i nKen Little, raised in the Texas panhandle, where wordlessness is born listening to the wind, tends to pin language and image together in ways that let the word disappear into the image. It is a sly maneuver — the chosen single-syllable words often read simultaneously as verbs and nouns, multiplying meaning while maintaining a simplicity that allows for the disappearance. Case in point is the large charcoal drawing, Fly, which features an image of an airplane nose up, tail down with eye-holes on top of the fuselage near the nose, giving it a fish-like presence. The tail of the plane, as much fin as flap, only emphasizes this. This hybrid being bears no evidence of ears, but clearly listens as it hangs on the wall. We will know what it’s been hearing when the walls start talking. It is more the noun “fly” than the verb — it is stationary, stuck as it were, to paper.

An armature shaped like a pair of pants is covered with one dollar bills glued to its surface. The horizontal stripes of dollar bills form leg-wrapping stacks like bricks, suggesting the sturdiness of pillars, the legs of Atlas, or in this instance, Oz, the invisible one that is said to possess power and clairvoyance and may grant heart felt wishes. These pants, 8.5 feet tall, float footless above the floor, towering and suggesting a number of interpretations, all having to do with making you realize your position when you choose to trust various invisible entities — a case of the clothes having no emperor. Other works in this series, besides examining the relative value of sixteen square inches of art supplies (the area of a dollar bill), take on other images that human beings sometimes invest in to their peril: Gown, Father, Cross.

The bronze heads — Hare, Gorilla, Deer, Wolf, Bear, etc. appear as in a wax museum of images derived from Ken’s drawings. Silent, hollow, expressionless — yet they have a kind of leering assumption — an awareness, perhaps, that they will be here after we are not. Their presentation on elegant, but seriously sturdy welded steel tables only emphasizes their status as severed heads and reminds us once more that we are made of more perishable stuff.

Ken’s neon works, also derivative of his simple drawing style, bring the images nearly to evaporation. These lines are made of trapped gas, while the welded support structure, transformer and wiring rig, though materially more present, fade in the shadows behind the bright light.

The animals made of taxidermy models covered with shoes, belts, holsters and other discarded leather items (which have spawned cast bronze versions with empty space where the model used to be) come across as Arcimboldo-esque gestural sculptures which mock their supposed function as hunter’s trophies, while simultaneously turning their knowing grins on art collectors, some of whom can be as predatory as hunters. The titles for these (as do the titles of the bronze heads) tend to diverge from the word-play strategies previously alluded to, bearing only descriptive information: Black & White Longhorn, Blue Belt Buck, just to name a couple, but once again, one is tempted to wonder in the face of these mute beasts, as in some country song, what if walls could talk?

— Hills Snyder; artist, writer and Senior Lecturer; University of Texas, San Antonio.

Top: Neon ladder from Ford. 1993. Mixed media. 106 x 72 x 64 inches.

Bottom: Gown. 2003. Dollar bills and steel. 72 x 32 x 23 inches.

T h e G r a c e M u s e u m

The Grace Museum maintains a unique position among West Texas attractions, building connections through new experiences in art, science and history within the evolving Texas story through exhibitions, programs and collections. Housed in a historically significant former hotel building, The Grace Museum is recognized as an asset for its cultural heritage as well as its educational opportunities. The art collection of more than 1,500 works is composed of paintings, fine art prints, artist's books, sculpture, photographs and works on paper. The permanent collection features works by such artists as Ansel Adams, Edward Eisenlohr, Charles T. Bowling, Peter Hurd, Thomas Hart Benton, David Bates, Robert Rauschenberg, Vernon Fisher, Melissa Miller, James Surls, Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder among others. Art exhibitions focused on historic and contemporary American art and artists with Texas connections as well as exhibitions of fine art photography are presented annually. The Children’s Museum serves as a discovery-based learning center for children and families and the history gallery is dedicated to exhibitions of historically significant objects that tell the story of the evolving cultural and social history of Abilene and West Texas between 1880 and 1950. The history gallery also presents changing exhibitions of artifacts curated from The Grace Museum history collection. Accredited by the American Association of Museums, the Grace Museum is dear to the people of Abilene and is respected throughout the state for its outstanding exhibitions and programs.

San Antonio-based artist Ken Little is a nationally recognized artist who makes Texans proud. Never provincial and always philosophical, he reminds us that we can embrace our sense of humor and a sense of place without a smidgeon of shame. For over forty years, this native son has worked with bronze, found objects, clay, ink, paper, and neon to create sculptures, assemblages, prints, drawings, installations and performance pieces that, although inspired by a variety of artists and aesthetics, retain Little’s personalized dialogue with contemporary culture.

Summer 2014 at The Grace Museum will feature a group of exhibitions under the heading, Home on the Range, Where the Prairie Meets the Plains in Central West Texas, curated to celebrate the art and history of the area circa 1880-1940. Ken Little's exhibition at The Grace Museum will be a celebration of the ongoing evolution of accomplished Texas based artists whose work reaches far beyond the state line. A series of the artist's 1980 bronze animal masks will be exhibited at The Grace Museum. “I think of these as masks or helmets rather than animal heads. The distinction is that they incorporate the prominent features of the animal’s appearance or anatomy, but they have been simplified, stylized, and animated,” Little says of the series. He cites historical influences found in carved wooden Indian masks from the Northwest Coast of the United States, African figurative totems, Mexican folk art masks, Japanese Haniwa Tomb sculpture, Looney Tunes and Walt Disney animated characters. The juxtaposition of Little’s Doe, Bear, Hare, Horned Toad and Wolf masks with a couple of steer and buffalo head mounts on loan in adjacent galleries will, no doubt, add to the conversation.

— Judy Tedford Deaton, Chief Curator

Hare. 1987. Bronze, edition of 10. 23 x 22 x 16 inches.

Bear. 1987. Bronze, edition of 10.12 x 13 x 15 inches.

Horned Toad. 1987. Bronze, edition of 10.12 x 17 x 16 inches.

The Old Jail Art Center opened in 1980 with four small galleries that once served as the first permanent jail built in Shackelford County, Texas (1878). The museum's core collection has grown from the private collections of four Albany natives and now numbers over 2,200 works of art. The largest area of the permanent collection comprises modern drawings, paintings, prints, and sculpture by such well-known Americans as John Marin, Charles Demuth, Alexander Calder, and European artists Amedeo Modigliani, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In addition, the collection contains a sizable number of works by contemporary Texas artists; smaller regional collections of the Fort Worth Circle (1945-1955) and Taos Modernists (1945-1979); an impressive Asian Art Collection, principally ancient Chinese art; and an equally stellar Pre-Columbian Collection. Currently, the OJAC actively collects and showcases the work of emerging Texas artists with temporary exhibitions related to the permanent collection.

Outdoor works of various media are installed in the sculpture courtyard and throughout the museum’s grounds. The museum’s Sallie Reynolds Matthews Room, which honors the author of the acclaimed pioneer chronicle Interwoven, presents a view of the area’s ranching heritage in a setting that recalls the headquarters of the Matthews family’s historic Lambshead Ranch. The museum also contains the Green Research Library with a collection of fine art books, and the Robert E. Nail Archives, a regional history archive. The Old Jail Art Center’s overall aim is to serve as an educational and cultural center focused on the visual arts through collections, exhibitions, programs, and regional history resources.

An accredited museum, the OJAC is free and open to the public Tuesday - Saturday 10 am - 5 pm; Sundays 2 - 5 pm; closed Mondays and major holidays.

O l d J a i l A r t C e n t e r

Often, what remains tells a tale. So it is with the work of Ken Little. Discarded shoes, bodiless garments, animal masks and figures all suggest the existence of former selves. Little utilizes these “shells” to create works that, on first appearance, seem to appeal to our sense of humor. Upon further consideration and contemplation, notions of loss, nostalgia, death, voids and emptiness begin to supplant the humor.

In less skilled hands, the layers of content might be lost due to awkward execution or heavy-handed humor. Little’s peculiarly scaled and beautifully crafted objects allow subtly disguised meanings to be gradually revealed.

— Patrick Kelly, Curator of Exhibitions

Lookout! 2011. Cast iron masks, steel frame, and lighting. 8 x 10 x 4 feet.

The Ellen Noël Art Museum of the Permian Basin has served over 5 million visitors in the West Texas region in the last 29 years. Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums and an Affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, nearly all programs and events are offered free. With 22,120 square feet of gallery space, classrooms and collection area, the museum is known for its George and Milly Rhodus Sculpture and Sensory Garden for the visually and physically impaired visitors.

The museum hosts several exhibits every year and offers fine arts and art education to the residents of 20 counties and 33 school districts. FINEARTS EXPRESS includes: Story Time, a story and art activity for preschoolers; Adventures in Art, creative art and art appreciation classes for ages 6-12; and, Summer Art Camp, teaching art techniques and art appreciation. In collaboration with Ector County Independent School District, over 5,000 students from 3rd and 4th grades tour the galleries and participate in hands-on art activities meeting the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards.

It is the first art museum in Texas to open a 3-D printing lab to develop tactile kits to aid visually impaired visitors. The 3-D printing lab currently engages children, teen, adults through creative workshops. With active Internship programs with University of Texas and Texas Tech University, the Ellen Noël Art Museum also offers a unique Executive Certificate Program jointly with the University of Texas of the Permian Basin in Cultural Leadership & Diplomacy, in addition to 3D Design lab-time for UTPB students.

E l l e n N o ë l A r t M u s e u m o f t h e P e r m i a n B a s i n

Ken Little is an artist of active change whose sculptures explore a multitude of contrasting ideas. The symbolic meanings of his work clash with each other, setting into motion a cycle of reinvention that bombards the viewer with a multitude of possible meanings. Little’s guiding aesthetic is an act of constant questioning, one that redefines his sculptures in their entirety, from the smallest individual object to the very essence of their subject. The piece which is exhibited at the Ellen Noël Art Museum’s Sensory Garden was originally from a series of seven pairs of mask/feet completed during Little’s residency at the Arts Industry program of the J.M. Kohler Art Center at the Kohler cast iron foundry in Kohler, Wisconsin. The work was conceived through a process of meditation and dreaming. It is a reflection of how the world’s history is made up of many different personal histories which interlock and overlap around the world. The imagery of feet is used because it is symbolic of how we travel around the earth making our own personal histories.

— Daniel Zies, Assistant Curator

Victory and Defeat. 1995. Cast iron with copper coating. 17 x 38 x 38 inches.

A nonprofit organization located in Midland, Texas, the Museum of the Southwest inspires discovery, interaction and exploration of art, science, culture and history, enriching the lives of people of all ages. Founded in 1965, the Museum is comprised of an Art Museum, a Children’s Museum, a state of the art Planetarium and an outdoor Sculpture Park. Campus hours of operation are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 2 to 5 p.m. Sundays. The campus is closed Mondays. For more information on the Museum, membership and upcoming exhibitions and events, visit MuseumSW.org, call 432.683.2882 or send an email to info@MuseumSW.org.

Looking at Ken Little’s work, one of the first things that pops out at the viewer is the seeming incongruity between the subject and the materials he is using. His work ranges from maps made out of neon to giant portraits made from dollar bills and taxidermied elk heads made out of colorful women’s shoes. I love the dichotomy of his work, and the endless range of interpretations that can be made. When thinking about how we would display his work, the specifics of our museum came up a lot. With galleries situated in a historic mansion from the 1930s, it can be sometimes tricky and incongruous to display contemporary art. Little’s sculptures bring that duality of old and new to the forefront, and can start some very interesting conversations about the intersections of art and history. We chose a selection of his shoe sculptures, made from modern materials like women’s shoes, belts, boxing gloves and bike helmets. We will be displaying them in our wood-paneled, old-world style library, which will undoubtedly turn heads and start dialogues.

— Wendy Earle, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions

T h e M u s e u m o f t h e S o u t h w e s t

Above:Red Black & White Caribou. 2007. Mixed media. 61 x 36 x 37 inches.

Right:Red Buffalo. 2007. Mixed media. 48 x 32 x 36 inches.

The San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts opened in 1985, originally located in the historic 1864 Quartermaster Building at Fort Concho National Historic Landmark. SAMFA’s present facility was opened in 1999, and the distinctive architecture has received international acclaim. The mission of the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts--through its collections, exhibitions, and programs—is to serve the general public in San Angelo, Texas, and the rural communities of the Concho Valley. SAMFA has been nationally recognized for its dedication to the community, and was presented with the National Museum Service Award in 2004.

The overall exhibit program encompasses all media, cultures and time periods, with a major exhibit annually focusing on the ceramic arts. And in 2012, SAMFA organized and hosted the first annual Salmon Sculpture Competition, a juried exhibition of outdoor sculpture. Among the Permanent Collection’s areas of concentration, the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts has established a distinguished collection of contemporary American ceramics, which has expanded to include ceramics from Europe, Canada, and Asia. Other focus areas of the collection include early and contemporary Texas art, and Spanish Colonial and Mexican religious art.

SAMFA is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. It is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Closed Monday, major holidays, and between exhibits. Admission is $2 for adults, $1 for seniors, and free for students, members of the military, and families with children.

In this world we encounter things so annoying or perverse that they make us want to cry. And then an artist like Ken Little turns it on its head and we begin to laugh. There is a famous Mary Tyler Moore segment where she attends the funeral of Chuckles the clown, and during the eulogy, she can’t resist laughing, to the chagrin of the other attendees. When she is finally encouraged to laugh, she breaks down in tears. The Almighty Dollar, hunters’ trophy heads, the automobile culture, Homeland Security, borders, and so many things we take very seriously, possess a superficiality that distorts the perception of our real condition. We can become highly amused when we see an empty suit made of dollar bills or a mounted longhorn head comprised of Western detritus. We smirk, we smile, we laugh, and then we cry—because there is a deeper truth of an eternally conflicting superficiality and perverseness that twists our values

S a n A n g e l o M u s e u m o f F i n e A r t s

values and perceptions into a funhouse-mirror contorted image. Ken Little will make you smile, will make you cry, and somehow cast you back into the perceived “real” world, amused but wiser. — Howard Taylor, Executive Director

Pledge. 2002. Dollar bills and steel. 71 x 31 x 17 inches.

Father. 2002. Dollar bills and steel. 50 x 53 x 75 inches.

e x h i b i t i o n c h e c k l i s t

The Grace Museum

1. Bear. 1987. Bronze, edition of 10. 12 x 13 x 15 inches.

2. Doe. 1987. Bronze, edition of 10. 19 x 34 x 19 inches.

3. Hare. 1987. Bronze, edition of 10. 23 x 22 x 16 inches.

4. Horned Toad. 1987. Bronze, edition of 10. 12 x 17 x 16 inches.

The Old Jail Art Center

1. Lookout! 2011. Cast iron masks, steel frame, and lighting.

8 x 10 x 4 feet.

Ellen Noël Art Museum of the Permian Basin

1. Victory and Defeat. 1995. Cast iron with copper coating.

17 x 38 x 38 inches.

Museum of the Southwest

1. Red Pig. 2003. Mixed media. 24 x 20 x 24 inches.

2. Red Black & White Caribou. 2007. Mixed media. 61 x 36 x 37 inches.

3. Black & White Lion. 2006. Mixed media. 30 x 24 x 24 inches.

4. Red Coyote. 2007. Mixed media. 19 x 13 x 14 inches.

5. Javelina. 2014. Bronze on steel table. 46 x 39 x 20 inches.

6. Red Buffalo. 2007. Mixed media. 48 x 32 x 36 inches.

San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts

1. Bear. 1988. Cast iron. 18 x 20 x 20 inches.

2. Deer. 1988. Cast iron. 35 x 20 x 24 inches.

3. Ape. 1987. Bronze. 13 x 10 x 14 inches.

4. Oz. 2003. Dollar bills and steel. 98 x 46 x 24 inches.

5. Selection of hands from Wheel of Desire. 1995. Neon on steel frame.

12 x 12 x 4 inches.

6. Victory and Defeat. 1996. Cast iron. 16 x 32 x 32 inches.

7. Portrait bust of Ken Little. Painted ceramic by James Saito

(a former student).

8. Neon ladder from Ford. 1993. Mixed media. 106 x 72 x 64 inches.

9. Bird. 2002. Dollar bills and steel. 88 x 25 x 25 inches.

10. Black and White Longhorn. 2007. Mixed media. 48 x 32 x 36 inches.

11. Black Jacket Moose. 2007. Mixed media. 48 x 47 x 35 inches.

12. Red and Turquoise Elk. 2007. Mixed media. 65 x 41 x 47 inches.

13. Pledge. 2002. Dollar bills and steel. 71 x 31 x 17 inches.

14. Gown. 2003. Dollar bills and steel. 72 x 32 x 23 inches.

15. Father. 2002. Dollar bills and steel. 50 x 53 x 75 inches.

16. Cross. 2004. Dollar bills and steel. 38 x 28 x 34 inches.

Black Jacket Moose. 2007. Mixed media. 48 x 47 x 35 inches. Red Coyote. 2007. Mixed media. 19 x 13 x 14 inches.

201 S. Second St.

Albany, Texas 76430

325.762.2269

theoldjailartcenter.org

1 Love Street

San Angelo, Texas 76903

325.653.3333

samfa.org

102 Cypress Street

Abilene, Texas 79601

325.673.4587

thegracemuseum.org

4909 East University

Odessa, Texas 79762

432.550.9696

noelartmuseum.org

1705 W. Missouri Ave.

Midland, Texas 79701

432.683.2882

MuseumSW.org

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W E S T T E X A S T R I A N G L E