Down in the Dirt: The Graphic Art of Terry Allen
Open now through June 2022
The exhibition provides an unparalleled opportunity to span a complete chronological
and conceptual range of Allen's artistic persona. His graphic art in the collection
of the Museum of Texas Tech robustly demonstrates relationships among his narratives,
music, sculptures, installations, and performance art. These graphics are among his
most publically accessible works of art.
Reasons and Reasoning
Terry Allen is an artist dedicated to independence, creative dexterity, mistrust of
authority, and wariness of hierarchy.Born in Kansas in 1943, Allen was raised in Lubbock,
Texas. He assisted his father, a semi-professional baseball manager/player and impresario,
to present music and wrestling events in West Texas. His mother, a pianist, handed
down to her son a penchant for playing the keyboard. Allen left West Texas soon after
high school and moved to southern California, enrolling in Chouinard Art Institute
(BFA 1966). He exhibited regularly in Los Angeles and taught at California State University
(1971-1979) in Fresno. He moved from southern California to Santa Fe, New Mexico in
1987.
Allen has suggested that growing up in West Texas under the tutelage of his impresario
father and ivory tickling mother provided early momentum for his narrative adventures.
The artistic and musical consequences of this impetus are a fulcrum of border landscapes,
southern frontera temperaments, and class conflicts. Allen fuses norteand sur. He
embraces some forty years of an untidy amalgam of love, tears, violence, kindness,
exploitation, food, language, sabotage, revenge, and, all too often, indifference.
It is a heterotopia: known in Mexico as la frontera del norte, or simply el norte,
and in the U.S. as the Southwest. It is a place of margins and exposed nerve endings.
Museum of Texas Tech University
-
Address
3301 4th Street, Lubbock, TX 79415 -
Phone
806.742.2490 -
Email
museum.texastech@ttu.edu