The Guess Lawson Collection

Before delving further into the quadruplet of frameworks around which the show arranges itself (Purpose, Lilith, Two Worlds and The Architecture of Culture, the latter from which this exhibition borrows its title), let us linger for a moment further on John and Melanie’s ethos – their “thesis” – as devotees to contemporary art. Their story as collectors, but also as individuals, revolves around a central axis of advocacy and, thus, both their collection and their relationship with visual culture more broadly, are a means of investigating the interplays between art and activism. Exemplified best by their keen and ceaseless involvement with the Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC), the pair is invested in staging encounters with artworks that remind those who encounter it of their inexorable value and, from there, allow them to feel their potential crackle palpably at their fingertips like a sorcerer’s spell.

John and Melanie address the engagement of art as a tool of advocacy further through their commitment to bringing it straight to their community. They have accomplished this by inverting the spatial dynamics in which we most often come to face with what we might call “art.” Through HMAAC’s commissioning murals all over the city by artists like Reginald Adams and Shawn Artis, art is now embedded into the landscape against which individuals draft their interior lives. Passersby who are on their way to cross off items on their grocery list, or to sit next to their grandmother in church, or head to their night shift, can all experience a moment of joy and enchantment without ever having to walk through the doors of a traditional gallery or museum.  

Being residents of Houston and having been indelibly shaped by Baltimore, two localities that birthed some of our nation’s most fervent freedom dreams, John and Melanie are no strangers to the process of what it takes to not only ignite a sense of empowerment but shift it into the realm of the tangible or, in other words, transform the electricity of inspiration into concrete action. This transformation is exemplified first through the framework Purpose, which features artworks by artists like Charisse Perlina Weston, Jonathan Carroll, Romeo C. Robinson, and Sanah Brown-Bowers, among others. In a recent conversation with John, his voice gathered gravity as he trenchantly explained “you have to face a question, then answer it.” As articulated in James 2:14 (a slice of scripture that his multigenerational family has long held as a cardinal point of guidance), one must not only dream, hope, and hold faith, but also take steps towards the actualization of the reveries they hold at the inner sanctum of their hearts. Likewise, across this portion of the exhibition, visitors will find a grouping of artworks that indeed serve as sites for imagination wherein they can contemplate towards the inspired action they must take to turn their “potential” into unstoppable inertia and, thus, make the fulfillment of their purpose an inevitability. 

Across an arrangement of works featuring feminine figures by artists like Giana De Dier, Elizabeth Catlett, Joyce Scott, and Alonzo Williams and spanning from painting to photography to sculpture, Lilith unsettles one of Christianity’s founding cosmologies: The Garden of Eden. For context, the traditional telling of this mythology involves Eve succumbing to temptation whereas Adam remains strong willed. Such a narrative arrangement has often been interpreted to further indictments around women’s lack of good judgement and thus deployed to justify patriarchal positionings of masculinity as a vehicle necessary to sublimate the ostensibly dangerous and indulgent whims of feminine figures. What is often left out of the story is Eve’s raison d’etre in the garden in the first place. So the normative retelling goes, Lilith was banished from the Garden after refusing to submit to Adam and God created Eve to replace her. Lilith’s obstinance stemmed from her belief that God formed her from the same clay used to make Adam and they were thus equals and she is often regarded as a cautionary tale for those who wish to embody a kind of recalcitrance in the face of male authority. 

If the classic tale of Adam and Eve is one that reifies the so-called “nature” of gender roles, this framework, by emphasizing Lilith, seeks to draw attention to a reality in which women are not punished for the revolt against ideologies that conscript them to a binaristic mode of somatic, emotional, and metaphysical labor and, instead, are celebrated for asserting their will. That being said, the works coalesced here do not deny the fact that women are so often punished, still (as Lilith was) for embodying modes of freedom that exceed what is conventionally expected of them. Through a sustained gaze back into the eyes of each subject presented here, visitors may glean and be emotionally penetrated by this dual sense of both the triumph of transcendence and the melancholic grief that indexes as sacred what is so often sacrificed at a woman’s own expense in order to nurture the world into a terrain that can hold the peaks and valleys of all life – human and otherwise. As Melanie shared, time spent with these artworks, in particular, connects visitors to the core thread of the collection’s philosophy: “As a woman, when I see that gaze of those women in all of those works, that is when I feel we really tie art to activism.  You cannot look at those images and not be compelled to do something.” 

Through an intergenerational trifecta of artists – Hughie Lee Smith, Violette Bule, and Kaima Marie Akarue – Two Worlds seeks to illuminate “the complex and often contradictory realities within urban environments… where wealth and poverty exist side by side.” This grouping functions as a call to which visitors can respond once they exit the Gensler offices and are re-enmeshed with its surroundings wherein they are prompted to think more deeply about the teeming built environment that surrounds the exhibition’s site as a signifier of the social inequities that can so often fly under the radar unless we labor to look and inquire more closely. 

Finally, The Architecture of Culture is a celebration of abstraction and conceptual art, and a refusal of the commonly held belief that these forms require formal study to be “understood.” The offerings of legends like Richard Mayhew, John Biggers, Betye Saar, Radcliffe Bailey, and Whitfield Lovell as well as celebrated artists like David McGee and Danny Simmons coalesce here to form a glorious portrait of the tremulous complexity of interior life. That is, in their visual indeterminacy relative to the aforementioned frameworks, viewers are invited to conjure a sharper awareness of their own latent hopes, ambient anxieties, and meditate upon the richness of their own beings most broadly speaking.