In Conversation with John Guess, Jr., and Melanie Lawson
By Xavier Nicholas
Retired tenured Associate Professor of English at Tuskegee University,
Xavier:
John, can you give me some context about how you became passionate about art and culture.
John: When I was in high school, the mother of my girlfriend at the time collected sailor mugs, tons of them. She also collected what I would call the first fine art that I became familiar with. Her name is Nilta Norton. She introduced me to one of the foremost portrait artists of color here in Houston. His name is Edsel Kramer. In her house, there were these Edsel Kramer paintings. In fact, the first fine art that I ever received was a gift from her. It was a small Edsel Kramer portrait.
When I went to college in the late sixties, I was exposed to more art. I attended Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate in Baltimore and as a graduate student in Washington, DC and Bologna, Italy. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, a number of very special graduate students there with me were in art history, Leslie King-Hammond and Lowery Sims, Raymond Dobard and David Boxer. Leslie became the Dean of the Maryland Institute College of Art. Lowery became the first Black curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Raymond became the Dean of the Howard University Art Department. David Boxer became the Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica.
The Creative Writing Program was one of the foremost in the country, and in addition to this mix of art historians was added poets Gil Scott Heron and Arthur Pfister. Gil was performing with Brian Jackson and the Midnight Band, and one glorious night they had me accompany them for a gig at Crampton Auditorium at Howard University. It was my first on stage appearance, and I played the tambourine. To say that Johns Hopkins was a Black cultural mecca amongst American colleges and universities would be an understatement. That period produced undergraduates who became doctors AND band leaders, dentists who played with Noel Pointer, and guys like me, who while working on the first Congressional Black Caucus staff and the staff of Cong. Parren J. Mitchell, held parties at the Kennedy Center for the Houston Grand Opera cast of Tremonsiha, and while working at Chase Manhattan Bank, became Road Manager for Baba Olatunji.
The Baltimore Museum of Art is adjacent to the campus, so we could walk to it. The back street of Johns Hopkins, Cold Spring Lane, is the front street of Morgan State University, and the Student Center and the now James Lewis Museum introduced me to works by master artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Richard Mayhew, and Paul Keene, whose son was a classmate at Johns Hopkins. While reading James Porter’s Modern Negro Art educated me, being able to SEE works at Morgan made art history real to me.
After I got out of college, art was never away from me. I began buying art, and I was with people who bought art. I think everybody goes through a period where you’re buying art and there’s a kind of turn at a certain point when you say, “How am I defining myself with these purchases of this art from people who are communicating certain things about us and the world?” When you’re buying art, you’re saying, “Hey, that looks good. Hey, that’s a great name. Oh, that’s really something.” But at a certain point, you sit down and say, “What am I doing here? Is it just decorative? Or am I putting this on my walls to feed me in a certain kind of way?” When you turn that corner, I think the art is talking directly to you and not just accenting the furniture or the room out of the decorative part of it. That’s when you start to define your collection. For me, that happened in the 1990s, when I came back to Houston my hometown where I was born and raised, from the East Coast and Baltimore where I grew up as an adult.
Melanie: When John and I first met, he was very much involved with the arts created here in Houston, and I was very intimidated by that. But he kept saying, “You are one of us. You are already bitten by the bug. You just don’t know it yet.” About 10 years before I met John, I had gone to Venice, Italy, and the first thing I became interested in was glass. When you walk into the square at Venice and you see all these glass shops everywhere and all this extraordinary blown glass, I was just overwhelmed. It was so electric and so colorful and so beautiful. I said, “Oh my God, I’ve got to have some of this.” So, I started off there, and when I later met John, I talked to him about how much I liked glass. He said, “You know, there’s this whole art glass movement here in the United States, and there are some black people that deal with glass work as well.” John knew of a glass dealer in Washington, D.C., Maurine Littleton, and she represented an African American artist named Thurman Staton. He had a show coming up, and John called and arranged for us to go up and meet him. As soon as I looked at his work, I was hooked. So, I kind of went in two different directions. Personally, I was always interested in glass, but I was also interested in African American art. I didn’t know a lot about it, but the first couple of artists that I collected were the African American artists John Biggers and Kermit Oliver. John said that there’s a lot more African American art out there, and I said, “Well, how do you find out about it?” He told me to read all these books that he had …
John: She used to call me a snob because I read the books. Then one day, she became a snob.
Melanie: Once I started reading the books and we would go to different exhibits like the Black Arts Fine Show, we got to know all the artists and dealers, and then it just becomes an addiction. That’s very much what it is. You walk into a room, and you just get faint because you are so overwhelmed with some of the artwork. You just become a person who thinks about art all the time. It really does become all-consuming.
John: Once we started collecting art together, we sat down and decided on the direction of the collection. Once you decide to go in a certain direction, that’s when you’re defining your collection. You’re defining as you collect. We started off thinking glass, African American, and contemporary.
Melanie: John, although a visual person, is much more analytical and methodical than I am. I am much more visual. I see a piece, and I think, “Ah, I love this artist. I want more.” John tends to say, “How does this fit in the larger collection that we already have?” What you find is, as a collector, you may start off being interested in one form of art, and it morphs and then you change. You go down different roads. So, in the beginning, everything I liked was figurative, and it was the kind of artwork that I recognized growing up. As we advanced in our collecting, I became interested in more abstract pieces and more contemporary pieces. You move away from just the old masters and start going into a younger, edgier group. It’s been a process of constant growing.
John: I think one of the points that Mel makes is key: the art always speaks to you first. That’s the cardinal rule. I always tell the story that I got into glass because of Thurman Statom. I was on a sleeper train going from Baltimore to Florida, and when the train stopped in Washington, D.C., I read an article in The Washington Post that had a picture of this guy Thurman Statom. It was a review of his work at a gallery in Georgetown. He was described as a glass Robert Rauschenberg, and being from Texas I just had to stop and take a look. So I jumped off the train and ran down and took a cab to Georgetown to see this gallery, The Littleton Gallery, where this guy was showing. That’s how I began collecting glass. So, I think Mel’s point is well-taken: the art itself does hit you, and you are visual about it. But then, for example, as you expand your collection some definition naturally occurs. Our glass, for instance, can be defined as Second Generation studio glass, meaning its by artists who followed Dale Chihuly, who by the way was taught by Harvey Littleton, Maurine’s father.
Melanie: There was a point at which if I saw something that I liked and it was by an artist I was interested in, we would buy it. We would sell off a kidney or something to be able to get it. John knew all about this, and had been using layaway to buy significant pieces before we met. We’re more selective now. As John always says, “There’s always more good art.” Still, we have had some missteps. We were talking with a dealer on the phone, and she called back and told us she had a Kehinde Wiley piece that had been slightly damaged. There was a small tear, and that was the reason for her offering us a price cut. So, we slept on it, and that piece was gone by the time we called back. Then, sometimes, there are big pieces that we wished we had gone ahead and bitten the bullet and gotten them because, although it was pricey then, it’s two or three times pricier now. For example, having grown up around John Biggers, my regret is that I didn’t buy more of his work.
John: We have a 1950’s Biggers that came to us, and we were going over the numbers trying to decide if we could buy it. We had been buying other things at the time, and we were a little thin. But Mel was like, “We have to get it,” and I said, “OK, let’s go run some numbers again.” And we got it. It is one of her favorites. So, I’m at Michael Rosenfeld’s gallery in New York when the Biggers Collection comes in …
Melanie: We were very good friends with Hazel Biggers, John Biggers’s wife. After he died in 2001, it never occurred to me to say, “Mrs. Biggers, do you have some pieces you might want to sell?” John had previously arranged for us to visit Hughie Lee Smith’s widow through Leslie King Hammond and we not only bought multiple pieces of art, but John asked for books from their library, and we got them. But with Mrs. Biggers, I was just not thinking.
John: So, I’m sitting up at Michael Rosenfeld’s gallery as the crates of the Biggers Estate come in, and I’m talking to Michael about the pricing on them. I call Mel up, and I said, “There’s good news and there’s bad news.” She said, “OK, what’s the good news?” and I said, “That 1950s Biggers that we got is worth four times what we paid for it.” She said, “What’s the bad news?” and I said, “We’re not getting anymore.”
Melanie: There are regrets like that, things that you wished you had done. But then some other artist comes along, and you’re in love again. You’re in love with a new artist that you hadn’t even thought about. One of the things that John has not talked about is that it’s interesting collecting as a couple as opposed to as individuals. What we have discovered over the years is that we can walk into a gallery, and he’ll go one way and I’ll go in another direction. Then I’ll say to the gallery owner, “He’s going to like this piece, this piece, and this piece,” and he’ll say, “I know Mel is going to like this and this and this.” And most of the time, we are very similar in terms of what we like.
John: We’ve been very lucky with that. Extremely lucky. One time, we walked into a gallery and went in different directions, but we both ended up in front of the same piece. I said, “That one I like,” and Mel said, “I like it, too.” It’s a landscape piece by William Tolliver, and it was in our bedroom for years. Or a Thurman Statom that was in a Littleton Gallery show in Washington, D.C., and it was around the corner at the back of the gallery. I saw it first, and I knew we were going to get it because I knew Mel was going to like it, too.
Melanie: I walked up to him and said, “I love the one in the back.”
John: We really do have this connection.
Melanie: Now he had to drag me along a little bit when it came to abstract art.
John: But she got there. For the longest, I had my abstracts somewhere else, in the Guess Group office or at my late Mom’s house.
Melanie: But I came around, and conceptual and abstract art became part of our purchases during the past five years. And I love it. I’ve even bought pieces at auctions, over the telephone, without John. The first time, I didn’t know how he was going to feel. I didn’t even tell him until the piece showed up at our condo. A couple of years ago I would not have picked out that piece. I just would not have picked it.
John: I love abstract art. Sam Gilliam told me one time some twenty years ago that I had too many figurative paintings, but after a certain point, it just all became art. We probably have the most pieces from David McGee, Kermit Oliver, and Hughie Lee-Smith. David McGee and Kermit Oliver are local artists. We’ve also got a number of Whitfield Lovells.
Melanie: Now this is an artist that I had to persuade John about. I really like Whitfield Lovell’s style, and John was not so much. Then we went ahead and bought one of his pieces. And that led to us buying more.
John: I’ll persuade Mel to go with something, and she’ll go with it because we agree so much. I trust her eye. And decades later we not only agree on most art but she now influences me. For instance, we don’t just have Lovell’s most recent stuff. We’ve got a big piece from his Hand series. We’ve got the smaller pieces with the card decks. We’ve got Whitfield Lovell in different stages of his work.
Melanie: I think the strength of our collection is also our glass art. One of the things this glass dealer in Washington, D.C., said to us recently that we didn’t realize is that we probably have more African American glass artists than almost anybody she’s dealt with. Now she’s white, but she has a lot of clients of every conceivable shape and size, and she said, “You all make it a point to go out and find those artists.” And it’s true, we look for those artists, and we find them. We love the thrill of discovery.
For example, even though we knew Renee Stout from her paintings, assemblages and photographs, she did a glass fellowship with Pilchuck in Seattle, and we went to Washington, D.C, to see what she had created. There were three of four pieces that we agreed on, but I was insistent on the fourth piece. And John said if I felt this strongly about it, lets get it. I’ve done the same for him on that fourth piece where we didn’t agree but one of us felt strongly about. Anyway, that Renee Stout piece ended up at an exhibit at the Afrika Museum in Amsterdam!
We had been reading about Debora Moore for a long time, and we hunted her down in Seattle and bought a couple of pieces from her show, including a fabulous piece that is hung on one of our dining room walls.
John: Debora Moore’s husband, Benjamin Moore, does some space-like things. My dad and I were always fascinated with space, and so the first piece by Benjamin Moore that Mel and I bought was a spaceship. We have a lot of pieces by artists that have something to do with space, and most of them are in glass. But our first space piece was a spaceship sculpture, a flying saucer, by Houston artist Sharon Engelstein. When I bought it, a number of collector friends suggested it was such an outlier from her regular work that perhaps I should get another piece representative of the art she creates. I got it anyway, and that piece was loaned to the Roswell Museum in New Mexico and it travelled the country. I remember opening up the Denver newspaper to the Arts Section while visiting my Dad and there was the Spaceship! These days, I’m intrigued by Christopher Blay’s concept of Afrofuturism where he has created a spaceship AND a slave ship in one piece, what he calls The SpLaVCe Ship.
But as Melanie will attest, since Sharon’s saucer I have become a fan of outlier art by Masters. We have, for instance, a Hughie Lee Smith nude created while he was a young man. There are two ways to look at this purchase, and both of them were my reasons to buy. The first is the aesthetic pleasure I get from seeing his earliest, less popular developmental work. I was a history major in college and beginnings have always stirred my interest. The second one is more calculated. Once an artist is no longer alive, there is no more new work being made. And at some point, after the market has consumed what is considered to be the “best” work, the work left, some of this outlier work, gets revalued upwards when made available.
Melanie: Once you kind of get out there and dealers know what you’re looking for and what you like, they’ll call you up, and that’s how we find some of the art. We know dealers all over the country. We still get calls.
John: I was just recently going through some photographs from a dealer, and there it was: the one we didn’t get…
Melanie: It’s a piece by Palmer Hayden that we didn’t buy from a dealer in New York. It was one of those things that every time we went to the gallery, I kept looking at it, but we never bought it. I really wanted it, but at the time we were going in a different direction, and the money entered our decision making, especially from John’s point of view. We were kind of moving away from the Old Masters to contemporary artists. So, we don’t have a Palmer Hayden.
John: The Old Masters that we have bought, though, have really helped give the collection some resonance even as we continue to be more contemporary. And a good lesson to learn is if you value a Master’s work, try to get it. The price of the work will inevitably go up. This is a good story. Mel forever wanted a Romare Bearden, and I was like fudging, and every year the price would go up. Then the prices, for us, got exorbitant. After about three years, Melanie was giving me hell, saying, “Well, we could have had this if you would have just pulled the trigger three years ago. Now look at the prices. I want one of those Romare Beardens.” She would not budge, and while my hunt had become primarily emerging and local artists, I’m so glad she persisted. And we got lucky. I called some buddies of mine who are collectors, and one of them discovered the Bearden piece that we have. The price was so unbelievably good that I had two curators come in and confirm that it wasn’t a fake. And then we confirmed the authenticity through the gallery.
Melanie: We do think a lot about the quality of the work.
John: It must have a secondary market. I don’t mean that when you look at the piece, you’re thinking, “Oh boy, can I sell this?” In all honesty, though, that’s why people hire a curator to ensure the quality and the value of their collection. If the work is quality, at any given point in time you can sell, although we rarely do. But it’s comforting to know that if you’re ever down and out, there is a market for an asset you own.
Melanie: It’s hard for me to even bear parting with some of our pieces.
John: Well, we rarely do. But that does play a part in who and how you collect. I’ll tell you a little quirk that we have. I like big paintings, 8 x 9s, and in our Houston condo we don’t have the wall space for them. I got an 8 x 9 foot diptych painting by Mequitta Ahuja for Mel’s birthday. Since we couldn’t hang it on the walls, I had the artist do a drawing of the piece.
Melanie: It’s a wonderful piece and the diptych is even better! Mequitta Ahuja is an artist who did a CORE Fellowship here in Houston at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Glassell School. At the time she was relatively unknown. This was before she became well known in the art world and after she received several awards, her work became a part of significant individual and corporate museum collections.
John: I don’t mind buying the big ones, but they must be good enough to go to major museums. Having your pieces in major museums, in any museum, gives value to your collection. Mequitta’s piece is at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. But there is a process to get your work accepted in major museums. It goes through curatorial review.
Melanie: You show it to the curator, and then the curator passes it on to the executive director or a committee of people who determine what goes into their collection, and then they get back to you and say yes, no, maybe so.
John: I remember a conversation that we once had, and Mel wanted a piece by this certain artist. I said, “That’s fine, but not that one. We want the right one.” A lot of times, that’s the decision museums make when they accept a piece. It might not be that they don’t want Biggers, but they want the right Biggers for their collection.
Melanie: The bottom line is that you want a collection that allows different pieces to be together. At one time we had hanging a piece by William Scott, who was a contemporary, and a student, of Henry Ossawa Tanner, next to a 1960s piece by Hughie Lee-Smith, next to this rare landscape by William Tolliver. You want them all to be able to co-exist and connect to each other. And when they co-exist happily, it brings us so much joy. It is something that takes you out of your daily mundane existence and puts you on another plane. That’s why I collect. I really do love the art.
John: People wonder about how black people came to this thing of collecting art. I always make the point that although the Nilta Nortons are few, all of us, if we stop and really think about it, had parents who collected something. In my case, my Dad collected jazz records. There were also decorative paintings on the walls of our house. And every family has mementoes of their personal history, whether photographs or whatever. They might not be organized or displayed, but collected material is in every home. I think one of my proudest accomplishments at the Houston Museum of African American Culture is providing thousands of homes in our community with prints from artists who have shown at the Museum.
Behind every piece in our collection, there is a story of our personal history with that piece and that artist. We are communicating with them all the time. And through the Museum, we have opened the door for thousands of our generation and those following us to enter into that conversation with artists that brings to the fore hopes and dreams and imagination. As Melanie has said, THAT conversation is the best part of collecting art.
The Guess Lawson Collection 