Julian Schnabel is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been a proponent of independent arthouse cinema. Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award-nominated role, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was nominated for four Academy Awards. For the latter, he won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director and the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as receiving nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director and the César Award for Best Director.
Derek Boshier is an English artist, among the first proponents of British pop art. He works in various media including painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. In the 1970s he shifted from painting to photography, film, video, assemblage, and installations, but he returned to painting by the end of the decade. Addressing the question of what shapes his work, Boshier once stated "Most important is life itself, my sources tend to be current events, personal events, social and political situations, and a sense of place and places". His work uses popular culture and the mixing of high and low culture to confront government, revolution, sex, technology and war with subversive dark humor.
Norman Bluhm, was an American painter classified as an abstract expressionist, and as an action painter.
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is a not-for-profit institution in the Museum District, Houston, Texas, founded in 1948, dedicated to presenting contemporary art to the public.
Mel Chin is a conceptual visual artist. Motivated largely by political, cultural, and social circumstances, Chin works in a variety of art media to calculate meaning in modern life. Chin places art in landscapes, in public spaces, and in gallery and museum exhibitions, but his work is not limited to specific venues. Chin once stated: “Making objects and marks is also about making possibilities, making choices—and that is one of the last freedoms we have. To provide that is one of the functions of art.”
Dan Christensen, was an American abstract painter He is best known for paintings that relate to Lyrical Abstraction, Color field painting, and Abstract expressionism.
Blaffer Art Museum is a non-collecting contemporary art museum located in the Arts District of the University of Houston campus. Housed in the university’s Fine Arts Building, it is part of the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts. It was founded in 1973 and has won several awards, including the Coming Up Taller Award as part of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. The museum presents focus and major monographic and group exhibitions of national and international contemporary artists as well as artwork by University of Houston School of Art students.
Walter "Chico" Hopps was an American museum director, gallerist, and curator of contemporary art. Hopps helped bring Los Angeles post-war artists to prominence during the 1960s, and later went on to redefine practices of curatorial installation internationally. He is known for contributing decisively to “the emergence of the museum as a place to show new art.”
The Station Museum of Contemporary Art was a private museum owned and run by James and Ann Harithas devoted to contemporary art located at 1502 Alabama Street in the Third Ward of Houston, Texas, United States. Started in 2001, the museum's goal has been as a resource that deepened and broadened public awareness of the cultural, political, economic, and personal dimensions of art." The Station Museum of Contemporary Art is currently on hiatus from public exhibitions and programming until further notice. The museum has been an activist institution supporting civil society issues as well as artists who have engaged in social, political, aesthetic, economic, and/or spiritual content and expressions.
The Houston Alternative Art chronology was originally compiled by Caroline Huber and The Art Guys for the exhibition catalogue No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston, which was published by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) to accompany the group show of the same name. The exhibition was on view at CAMH from May 9-October 4, 2009. No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston was co-curated by Toby Kamps and Meredith Goldsmith and featured projects by twenty-one Houston artists using the city as inspiration, material, and site. This chronology documents Houston's alternative art scene.
James W. Jack Boynton was an American artist.
James C. Pomeroy was an American artist whose practice spanned a variety of media including performance art, sound art, photography, installation art, sculpture, and video art.
Richard Wray was an American abstract expressionist painter whose work had an influence on the art scene in Houston, Texas. After an art career spanning over 50 years, he died at age 77 of liver disease. His work continues to be showcased by art institutions and organizations across Houston, including the Deborah Colton Gallery, and is listed on the official website for the National Gallery of Art.
Paul Schimmel is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles. Schimmel served as the chief curator of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), from 1990 until 2012, where he organized numerous exhibitions. From 2013 through 2017, he was a vice president and partner with the art gallery Hauser & Wirth and co-founder of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles. In late February 2017, Schimmel departed from the Hauser & Wirth enterprise, including Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles, with no public comment on his behalf.
Terrell James is an American artist who makes abstract paintings, prints and sculptures. She is best known for large scale work with paint on stretched fabric, and for parallel small scale explorations such as the Field Studies series, ongoing since 1997. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Kermit Oliver is an American painter who studied and worked in Houston before moving to Waco, Texas. His work reflects his Texas heritage and his interests in mythology, religion, and history. Oliver combines “contemporary and classical elements, resulting in a style he calls symbolic realism.” His paintings create “strange, lushly illustrated worlds populated by people and animals realistically drawn but placed in surreal juxtaposition.”
Bert Long Jr. (1940–2013) was a chef, painter, photographer, sculptor, and a founder of Project Row Houses.
Jesse Lott was an American visual artist known for his wire and wood sculptures, papier mâché figures, and collages made from found materials within a style he called "urban frontier art".
James Harithas was an American museum curator, director, and founder.
Ann O'Connor Williams Harithas was an American philanthropist, museum founder, curator and artist.
