0.35 Richard stout, b. 1934  (Page 2/4)

I got a job selling books at Foley’s, downtown. I had a bicycle so I went everywhere for the first six to eight months on a bicycle. Lowell Collins—thanks to Ruth Uhler at the Houston Museum—hired me that next summer, the summer of ’58, to start teaching at the Museum school, which I did with increasing numbers of classes so I was able to retire from selling books by the next year, the spring of ’59.

Galleries and shows

I had my first show in Houston at the Cushman Gallery—I believe it was on Whitney Street. I was with it briefly and was in a group show there, then I moved to Kathryn Swenson’s New Arts Gallery a little bit later, and had a show with Kathryn in 1959. The gallery had an address on Brazos…it was the swellest gallery in Texas by far. It was a coach house for a mansion that had been destroyed, with architectural offices below. On the extension of the coach house were the drawing rooms—big rooms above with a sloped ceiling and north-facing windows. Next to that was their—Bailey and Kathryn Swenson’s—residential tower: a living room and dine-in kitchen on the first floor; bedroom and bath on the second floor; then a roof garden [accessed] by a circular staircase.

It was a wonderful place to have shows. Guy Johnson showed there, Jack Boynton, Jim Love, Walter Kuhlman, a lot of Jermayne MacAgy’s California people showed there; it was a branch for a while of the Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York that showed lots of Pre-Columbian. I guess one of her last exhibitions at that gallery was a Dorothy Hood drawing show, maybe 1960 or ’61. I left the gallery in ’61.

The relationship between Kathryn Swenson and Jermayne MacAgy was interesting in that Kathryn—who had been involved with the Contemporary Arts Museum before—finally found a visual mentor that separated her from the crowd. There was at this time (the late 50s) some considerable anger between some of my friends—the Mears, the Gadbois, the Marsters—and a number of people who were supporters of Jermayne MacAgy who referred to the older group as being “burlappers.” That’s because they would cover the walls in the institution amateurishly—this was all put down, of course—so they could hang up pictures and not make holes in the walls. We’ve always forgot that the Contemporary Arts Museum was a very successful volunteer organization and had extraordinarily good and successful exhibitions in the beginning with catalogs, and then when John and Dominique de Menil hired Jermayne MacAgy—a brilliant woman—a lot of people felt cut out, even though MacAgy would hire various artists and board members to do exhibitions. The older group felt cut out, so they were very antagonistic towards Jermayne MacAgy and everything she did. This made it a little difficult for me in the beginning, only because I didn’t know how to sort of like step on these two quaking boats. One of the things that characterizes my entire time in Houston is that I have never been part of a clique.