Susie Kalil

Roger Winter has always been preoccupied with 'recording reality in all its strangeness,' in the words of biographer and art historian Susie Kalil. His works partake of wide-ranging influences: childhood memories of gospel hymns blaring from a loudspeaker atop the 'Holy Roller' church near his home; strange totems composed of crows, foxes, angels, and old family photographs; rusted cars resting among chest-high weeds; faces reflected in the windows of a New York City bus. According to his siblings, he has been an artist since he was 'pre-verbal,' and in a career spanning eight decades, he has continually reinvented himself, breaching the boundaries of one stylistic convention after another - never content to allow the expression of his vision to be constrained to a single vocabulary. In this definitive retrospective of Winter's life and art, Kalil explores not only the myriad influences of the artist and his dizzying stylistic journey but also allows Winter's work to pose important questions: Why do some people become artists and others don't? What gives artists their unique modes of perception and expression? Where is the line of separation between what is seen and what is represented? Between the maker and what is made? The Art of Roger Winter: Fire and Ice offers an in-depth portrait of one of today's most important American painters. Critics, collectors, scholars, students, and art lovers will glean deep insights from this study in contrasts.

Born in Bryan, Texas, and raised in Houston, Dorothy Hood won a scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1930s, then worked as a model in New York to earn money for classes at the Art Students League. On a whim, she drove a roadster to Mexico City with friends in 1941 and ended up staying for more than twenty years. Hood was front and center at the cultural, political, and social crossroads of Mexico and Latin America during a period of intense creative ferment. She developed close friendships with the exiled European intelligentsia and Latin American surrealists: artists, composers, poets, playwrights, and revolutionary writers. She married the Bolivian composer Jos. Mar.a Velasco Maidana, and together they traveled all over the world. Once back in Houston, Hood produced epic paintings that evoked the psychic void of space: large-scale works evoking primordial seas, volcanic explosions, and the cosmos contained within the mind. The Color of Being / El Color del Ser establishes a vital connection among Texas, Latin America, New York, and Europe. It celebrates this important Modernist painter whose oeuvre is integral to the ongoing dialogue of abstraction by artists of the postwar period.

Presenting the unique vision of an American original . . . Alexandre Hogue, a renowned artist whose career spanned from the 1920s to his death in 1994, inherited the view of an America that imagined itself as filled with limitless potential for improvement, that considered high art and great ideas accessible to ordinary working people, and that saw no reason for an intellectual chasm between a learned elite and the masses. He always viewed himself as a radical, yet his passion stemmed from a deeply conservative idea: that art, culture, and nature should form a central force in the life of every human being. His well-known Dust Bowl series labeled him as a regionalist painter, but Hogue never accepted that identity. His work reveals the spirit of Texas and the Southwest as he experienced it for nearly a century. In his later years Hogue worked in forms of crisply rendered nonobjective and calligraphic one-liner paintings. Bringing to light new information regarding the Erosion and Oil Industry series, this book gives special attention to lesser known, post-1945 works, in addition to the awe-inspiring Moon Shot and final Big Bend series. Each series—from the hauntingly beautiful Taos landscapes and prophetic canvases of a dust-covered Southwest to his depictions of the fierce geological phenomena of the Big Bend—serves as a paean to the awesomeness of nature. Houston-based curator and critic Susie Kalil grew close to Hogue from 1986 to 1994, a time during which she interviewed him, considered his oeuvre with him, and came to share his vision of the nature and purposes of art. In Alexandre Hogue she reveals Hogue as he presented himself and his work to her. Collections with Alexandre Hogue's paintings: Musee National D'Art Moderne, Pompidou, Paris DallasMuseum of Art Museum of Fine Arts, Houston The GilcreaseMuseum, Tulsa The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa University of Tulsa Tulsa Performing ArtsCenter Smithsonian Institution (NationalMuseum of American Art), Washington, DC OklahomaMuseum of Art, Okla City The SheldonMuseum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln PhoenixArt Museum University of Arizona, Tucson Art Museum of SouthTexas, Corpus Christi Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, Tx. StarkMuseum, Orange, Tx Southern MethodistUniversity, Dallas SpringfieldArt Museum, Springfield, Missouri WeatherspoonArt Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro The Federal Reserve Bank, Dallas The Williams Companies, Tulsa