A Clean, Well-Lighted Place:
an homage to Dave Hickey
April 10 - May 31, 2025
April 10 - May 31, 2025
Exhibition Text
When Dave Hickey opened his gallery, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in 1967, at 2300 Rio Grande in Austin, TX, the Fine Art scene in Texas could have been described as rural, outsider, or emergent, at best. After only about four and a half years of existence, first in an old house on 23rd and Rio Grande, then residing at 600 West 12th St., Hickey had arguably changed the contemporary art scene in Texas. All of a sudden, Texas artists were being included in New York’s Whitney Biennial (at the time, the Whitney Annual), due to Hickey’s influence. Hickey had changed the understanding of art within Texas as well by providing an intelligent platform and community for talented, emerging artists, many of whom still have strong careers to this day (Jim Franklin, George Green, Luis Jiménez, Jim Roche, Terry Allen, Peter Plagens, David Reed, among others). David Reed recalled to me “I did have my first show at ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place.’ Drove to Austin with paintings on top of my Volkswagen and slept on the floor of the gallery.” As Hickey claimed later, in his essay “Dealing”, he was a twenty-six-year-old showing twenty-six-year-old artists, selling to twenty-six-year-olds, or a bit older.
And I thought, well that’d be swell, to pay homage to an a) important arts writer with an authentic voice, b) a gallerist who also had a gallery in a house and c) was also a Texan, although he couldn’t wait to see Texas in the rearview mirror every time he managed to get out. And hey, maybe I could include some of the artists he showed, some of the artists he knew, and some that he didn’t ever know and put them under my house gallery roof, all in the spirit of Dave.
I learned about Dave Hickey probably the way most people do, by reading an essay out of his famed Air Guitar when I was about twenty years old. I remember it was “The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market,” which starts with “In the beginning was the Car, and the Car was with Art, and the Car was Art.” It seemed for me, as a student of Art History, that that was where the rupture took place. There became pre-Dave and post-Dave. He changed many people’s lives, and he certainly changed mine.
In regard to the artists in this exhibition, Jim Franklin, Terry Allen and Vera Simons all showed at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place; David Quadrini and Bale Creek Allen both had long friendships with Hickey and had galleries of their own in Texas. Ada Friedman’s father and uncle, the legendary Kinky Friedman, were roommates with Hickey during his time in Austin in the late 1960’s. Sam Linguist’s unusual ceramic sculptures carry on Hickey’s sentiment of the “great Texas tradition of weird enterprises”, Anne Herbert’s abstractions are almost not paintings, in that they just seem to have happened, Candice C Chu and Ellen Khansefid speak to a language of desire, Mia Ardito elevates the vernacular with her bejeweled fountain, and Andrew Moeller to the paradigm shift that happens through painstaking endurance of boredom. And of course, with Allen “Big Al” Bartell, the Car was Art.
Dave Hickey never considered himself a writer, but rather an essayist. I don’t think he ever really considered himself a gallerist either, except for a brief stint before he even turned thirty. He wrote essays about surfing, Disney Land, the Carpenters, car culture, gambling, all while freely associating these things towards visual art. He reminds us that good Art is not made in a white-walled vacuum, and culture is spawned in underground communities of desire, be it jazz music or abstract painting, that reemerge above ground and are traded in parallel to capital in this mercantile democracy.
And I wanted it all to be one-part tomfoolery and two-parts high seriousness, just, as I think Dave would have liked. Dave Hickey passed away on November 12, 2021, at the age of eighty in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At the memorial, a number of close friends brought him his favorite coffee, a five-shot Starbucks venti latte, and poured it onto his grave. Rest in peace, Dave!
- Tessa Granowski
When Dave Hickey opened his gallery, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, in 1967, at 2300 Rio Grande in Austin, TX, the Fine Art scene in Texas could have been described as rural, outsider, or emergent, at best. After only about four and a half years of existence, first in an old house on 23rd and Rio Grande, then residing at 600 West 12th St., Hickey had arguably changed the contemporary art scene in Texas. All of a sudden, Texas artists were being included in New York’s Whitney Biennial (at the time, the Whitney Annual), due to Hickey’s influence. Hickey had changed the understanding of art within Texas as well by providing an intelligent platform and community for talented, emerging artists, many of whom still have strong careers to this day (Jim Franklin, George Green, Luis Jiménez, Jim Roche, Terry Allen, Peter Plagens, David Reed, among others). David Reed recalled to me “I did have my first show at ‘A Clean Well-Lighted Place.’ Drove to Austin with paintings on top of my Volkswagen and slept on the floor of the gallery.” As Hickey claimed later, in his essay “Dealing”, he was a twenty-six-year-old showing twenty-six-year-old artists, selling to twenty-six-year-olds, or a bit older.
And I thought, well that’d be swell, to pay homage to an a) important arts writer with an authentic voice, b) a gallerist who also had a gallery in a house and c) was also a Texan, although he couldn’t wait to see Texas in the rearview mirror every time he managed to get out. And hey, maybe I could include some of the artists he showed, some of the artists he knew, and some that he didn’t ever know and put them under my house gallery roof, all in the spirit of Dave.
I learned about Dave Hickey probably the way most people do, by reading an essay out of his famed Air Guitar when I was about twenty years old. I remember it was “The Birth of the Big, Beautiful Art Market,” which starts with “In the beginning was the Car, and the Car was with Art, and the Car was Art.” It seemed for me, as a student of Art History, that that was where the rupture took place. There became pre-Dave and post-Dave. He changed many people’s lives, and he certainly changed mine.
In regard to the artists in this exhibition, Jim Franklin, Terry Allen and Vera Simons all showed at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place; David Quadrini and Bale Creek Allen both had long friendships with Hickey and had galleries of their own in Texas. Ada Friedman’s father and uncle, the legendary Kinky Friedman, were roommates with Hickey during his time in Austin in the late 1960’s. Sam Linguist’s unusual ceramic sculptures carry on Hickey’s sentiment of the “great Texas tradition of weird enterprises”, Anne Herbert’s abstractions are almost not paintings, in that they just seem to have happened, Candice C Chu and Ellen Khansefid speak to a language of desire, Mia Ardito elevates the vernacular with her bejeweled fountain, and Andrew Moeller to the paradigm shift that happens through painstaking endurance of boredom. And of course, with Allen “Big Al” Bartell, the Car was Art.
Dave Hickey never considered himself a writer, but rather an essayist. I don’t think he ever really considered himself a gallerist either, except for a brief stint before he even turned thirty. He wrote essays about surfing, Disney Land, the Carpenters, car culture, gambling, all while freely associating these things towards visual art. He reminds us that good Art is not made in a white-walled vacuum, and culture is spawned in underground communities of desire, be it jazz music or abstract painting, that reemerge above ground and are traded in parallel to capital in this mercantile democracy.
And I wanted it all to be one-part tomfoolery and two-parts high seriousness, just, as I think Dave would have liked. Dave Hickey passed away on November 12, 2021, at the age of eighty in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At the memorial, a number of close friends brought him his favorite coffee, a five-shot Starbucks venti latte, and poured it onto his grave. Rest in peace, Dave!
- Tessa Granowski