Artist Bios
Gail Blank, née Gail Perrin (1940-2005) was ceramicist and printmaker living and working most of her life in New Orleans, LA. Gail Blank received a BA in Philosophy from Tulane University, where she met fellow student, Les Blank, and in 1960 they married and moved to Los Angeles. Gail starred in Les Blank’s earliest films while he studied at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. In the early 1970’s, Gail Blank separated from Les and moved to the San Fernando Valley, where she raised her two children, Harrod and Beau, and studied ceramics at Pierce College. In the 1980’s, she returned to New Orleans, remarried, and continued to make ceramics and later, printmaking, until the end of her life. Gail’s legacy is continued by her son, Harrod, who manages her estate and plans to open the Gail Perrin Blank Gallery in 2026 in Douglas, AZ, adjacent to his art car museum, Art Car World.
Gretta Johnson (b. 1985, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and events curator. Her practice is infused with the interconnectedness of nature, psychology, symbolism, patterns and language. She holds a BFA in animation from Rhode Island School of Design, has participated in numerous film festivals, published comic books, and shown paintings in exhibitions throughout the country. For the past 13 years, she has been the artist-in-chief for Grimm Artisanal Ales, producing all the artwork for the award-winning brewery, based in Brooklyn, New York. On the rooftop at Grimm, she curates a monthly performance series called Exquisite Corp.
Helen Burkhart Mayfield (1939-1997) was born in Houston and raised in Blanco, Texas. Helen attended Texas State University in San Marcos, where she met her future husband, also an artist, Martin Mayfield. They left Texas for Greenwich Village in the early 1960’s by car with a pet skunk in tow. In New York, Mayfield was an early devotee of interpretive dance at a school following in the tradition of Isadora Duncan, and it is thought that she also participated in the avant-garde Fluxus movement. New York is where she first began staging street performances, involving dance, poetry, and costume. Helen and Martin returned to Texas in the later 1960’s, where Mayfield would go on to form the first interpretive dance troupe in Austin (NOSO). The ink drawings in this exhibition are thought to be from the beginning of a psychologically troubling period, perhaps undiagnosed schizophrenia, that Mayfield entered in the 1970’s, and it was around this time that she left her husband, Martin. The drawings reflect her confident hand, a dancer’s relationship and sensitivity to the body, and a deep psychological haunting. The last twenty years of her life she spent living on the streets of Austin. She passed away too soon at the age of 58 in the county jail in 1997. Helen is survived by her daughter, Mariah. Her artwork estate is held with the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie and Fort Davis, Texas.