Artists Talk To Each Other: Jacques & Cody in Conversation
Jacques Louis-Vidal and Cody Ledvina chatted over the phone on Sunday, September 13 in anticipation of the upcoming Jacques Louis-Vidal exhibition “Plot Tweest” (which Cody did not know about) and basketball, mostly. They had never met before, but Jacques and Cody found a lot of common ground. They are both artists from Houston who help run art-related nonprofits. Cody will be featured this year at Untitled Houston in the Nature of Things booth (#N22), while Jacques will be in the Jardin Artist Market booth (#M3). The phone call has been transcribed and edited for brevity and clarity.
Cody Ledvina:
I kept tabs on Know More Games, so it's cool to finally meet you.
Jacques Louis-Vidal:
Yeah, I started Know More Games with an artist named Miles Huston, who's from Massachusetts, and an artist named Brian Faucette who is from North Carolina. And that ended in 2014 or 2015. And Brian graduated to become a director at Night Gallery in LA. And Miles and I graduated to still being artists and losers.
CL:
Where are y'all at now?
JLV:
I live in Brooklyn—in Cobble Hill / Carroll Gardens border, not far from downtown. I co-founded a space called KAJE in Brooklyn. It’s an experimental art space. It's a nonprofit.
CL:
Oh, was that a nightmare, getting all that together, the nonprofit stuff?
JLV:
No, I wouldn't say it was a nightmare. It wasn't so bad. We got some volunteer lawyers for the arts to help us out with it. So, cost-wise it wasn't a nightmare.
And then I would say actually making it function and making it function well is a little bit of a nightmare.
CL:
Y’all are doing programming year-round or…?
JLV:
Yeah, year-round.
JLV:
You work at the Orange Show?
CL:
Yeah. You said you grew up in Houston?
JLV:
I grew up in Houston. I grew up in the Heights, like on 18th Street and Columbia. And my parents were friends with a lot of artists in Houston. My godparents were both artists: Charles Rutynowski and Suzanne Manns.
CL:
Oh yeah, Suzanne is a printmaker, right?
JLV:
Yeah, Printmaker. And their friends were like my extended godparents, like Dick Wray. And even Mel Chin was around a little bit when I was a kid. My parents liked to party, so there would be parties at our house with a bunch of artists. And I was like very self-serious as a child about art. I would open up my room and be like, I'd like to invite everyone in the party to come see my work in my room now. It was very performative.
JLV (cont.):
It’s sort of a family business a little bit, being an artist.
When I was 13 or 14, I would ride my bike past The Art Guys studio all the time. And I knew about them because of all those adults that I was around. At a certain point— I think I was 14—I just went over and asked if I could work for them. And I worked for them one day every weekend for 6 or 7 months when they were working on the suit makes the man thing [SUITS: The Clothes Make the Man]. I don't even remember what I really did— I think I was like, what are they going to do with like a teenager? They just had me polishing things.
JLV (cont.):
They gave me lunch and hung out and told me stories. It was really amazing. I thought I was like the luckiest person in the world to be there. A few summers later, I helped Jack [Massing] renovate his house that he bought on the corner of Studewood and maybe 16th or 17th Street. It was a weekend job, and he would take me to lunch and give me life advice. And then I went to art school, and I didn't come back to Houston much at all, really. Anyhow, that's my connection to Jack, at least, who I know now runs the Orange Show.
CL:
He's still doing that. It's similar to his approach as an executive director—it is really personal. Believe it or not, this is actually his first job, which is insane to say and to think about. He wasn’t an administrator, but he has been an incredible fundraiser and turned into an administrator. I mean, it's insane the things that he's able to do and go out and source and the amount of energy it takes. It's exhausting, to be honest. But it's really cool to see.
JLV:
He has so much charisma and he's such a good communicator. And that alone is a really big part of it.
CL:
He's not going to do it for the rest of his life, but it's really interesting from my point of view to see an organization that has a $2 million budget and is run by an artist. And the decisions that he makes are pretty impressive for a sizable nonprofit, and we've got some responsibilities, especially to the community. And it's a grown-up place. So, to see this dummy run it and run it well is— no, I’m joking—he is incredibly talented and capable. And I don't think he even realizes he is that good.
JLV:
I know what you mean. And I’m sure it's him who is calling himself a dummy in that situation. It’s so funny, but what I remember as a teenager is that Jack has vision, and the projects that The Art Guys did were … There's a link that has got to be made one day between The Art Guys and The Yes Men…
In terms of art that's about a growing neoliberalism and corporate culture. But the art that touches on those things is not about that. I feel like every single one of those projects would have been like starting a business. It makes sense to me that he would be a good leader of an organization.
CL:
Yeah. And the back-end of that process isn't just some pastels in a box somewhere. It's like spreadsheets and shit.
JLV:
Exactly.
CL:
You're still making things and still have an active practice yourself?
JLV:
Oh yeah, definitely. I think that's why we're talking. I’m going to have a show in Houston at Jardin of work that I've made over the last couple years.
CL:
Right. Yeah, cool. I kept myself in the dark a little bit about what all this is, just because I didn't want to do too much prep.
JLV:
Me too.
CL:
So wait, when is that show?
JLV:
That's going to be during Untitled.
CL:
Oh, it's the exact same time. Are you coming in for it at all, or no?
JLV:
Oh yeah, I'm going to be there the whole time.
CL:
Come on! All right!
JLV:
I've never had a show in Houston. I'm excited.
CL:
You know Café Brasil?
JLV:
I mean, it was the only place that would give us alcohol when I was in high school, so that's why we went there.
CL:
This is recorded, right? Yeah? That's great, okay, cool. Well, I'm now fully filled in. I'm very excited. This will be cool. Okay, so—
JLV:
Yeah. I've organized art spaces, but all throughout I've been keeping a very active studio practice the whole time and showing the whole time. And I have a pretty holistic approach, because of the way I was raised that art really is a little bit of a life practice. I think because of my parents' politics and stuff, I was also raised around the idea of organizing things, too. It’s all blended in there together.
I go to my studio every day and I work on art and I work on the space that I co-founded, and I work on other organizations and I'm on the board of a lot of organizations. And not to be just tying everything together, but with The Art Guys, I think that their approach was very inspiring to me, to be this artist that is a whole world, a world-building artist, you know, that's something that I definitely held on to.
CL:
And you have a proper studio that you go to? The only reason I ask, I'm always fascinated by it because I've grown into the idea that mine has to stay in the house next to the. I can't separate it for some reason. I don't know if it's a pressure thing, but I have fully cemented in my mind that for the rest of my life it needs to be in the house.
JLV:
I'm sitting right now in my office in my place that's “dad's room” a little bit. But no, I have a proper studio that's near the space I co-founded, and I use the 15-minute walk to the studio as an exorcising of my dad responsibilities so I can go and be an artist in my studio.
CL:
Yeah, I suppose that's not something I have to contend with, but that may play a role if more of that happens.
JLV:
For me, that's definitely a part of it. How old are you?
CL:
Well, just 42 and feeling like 65. I play basketball twice a week and these kids beat the ever-loving shit out of me. I'm tall, 6'4, so—
JLV:
Oh, I'd like to see that.
CL:
Yeah, they just jump on my back. I've got knee braces. The whole thing is—It's rough. And one of the guys on the team records the game.
JLV:
You're like Kurt Rambis out there.
CL:
Yeah, right, with those glasses. When I grew up, that would have been early '90s, he was still playing. And I remember thinking, God, I've never seen an older looking guy than that. And he was probably in his late 20’s or 30’s!
JLV:
I feel like that's how Jokic looks now to little kids. They're like, what is going on?
CL:
What is it? Yeah. Like, weird body.
JLV:
He's like 35 years old, but he looks like a giant.
CL:
Basketball for me, I know it's cliché, but because there's so much overlap and there's historically been overlap with art and basketball... weirdly so many artists I know have an affinity for basketball. And it's so cool to be able to speak to that and the history of it. I don't know what the tie-in is, but it just feels that way.
JLV:
Well, I think the tie-in is Houston. That was such a big year for me when I was 10 years old. I'm 44. I remember my parents took me to Steak and Ale, which was this Tavern steakhouse chain in Houston. And we went to have dinner there—salad bar, fake books on the wall, dark lighting. They had the Rockets-Knicks Finals Game 7 on. And we were sitting there eating sirloin and watching Game 7 happen, and then all of a sudden, the news cut to the O.J. chase. I remember watching this and being like, what's going on?
CL:
They did not come back to the game too, if I remember correctly.
JLV:
They did not come back.
CL:
They were on that one soap for like 6 hours after that. That was a devastating moment.
JLV:
And I cried and made my dad take me out to the car so I could listen to the radio and hear the end of the game. Again, I was 10 years old. I had no friends at school. I was being bullied like crazy. My life was miserable. The only thing I had in the entire world was the Rockets. And when they won, I swear to God, I had like a psychotic breakdown. I was like, I am the luckiest human being on Earth. I was like, I did this. I created this.
CL:
Well, yeah, one of those games I was on the couch in a very particular way, and I think we went on like a 6-0 run, and I was thinking that it was me creating that by the way I was sitting on this couch, which was a really unfortunate position. But I stayed that way, and we won. I can't remember which game it was. I was convinced that it was me, or I at least had something to do with it.
JLV:
Well, I think it was— I think actually we're both wrong, but it was us together. You and me.
CL:
Finally, that's what brought us together. That's what this is about. Yeah, so I guess I can do my story— I grew up in Houston. I grew up Southwest Side and then moved out to the West Side. Mom and Dad were not art people at all. I mean, fully encouraged it, but absolutely not.
I don't know how I got so interested in art, but I was, and I went off to a small liberal arts school here in Houston called St. Thomas, where they historically had a really robust art history program—Dominique de Menil funded it. It was full of really incredible art historians. But I think there was a moment in the '80s or '90s where they had to decide if it was going to be more of a liberal-arts / art history-forward school or more of a Catholic university. And I think they went the Catholic way.
JLV:
I remember there was a bit of a tie-in with the Glassell School at some point, yes?
CL:
Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Because the program wasn't supported on campus anyway. It was a Band-Aid program, but it was cool.
I was very listless. I didn't really understand what I was doing, where it was going, and so it was nice to have that all-around experience, as opposed to an art school, because I learned how to actually write. That was really important.
And then I did grad school at University of Houston for Painting, right after undergrad, so I wasn't prepared to go to grad school. I was 21. But that was nice because I didn't have to get a job—they let me teach, which was insane.
One guy—I can't remember his name, he was a really good student—he made a joke early on about Shaquille O'Neal. And I said, you know what, for that smartass remark, every assignment for the rest of the semester, you have to include him in some way. And he did it. It was a Painting 101 class, so there were all kinds of things, some more descriptive or abstract, but inevitably there'd always be a Shaq or something Shaq-related. It was a cool time to experiment with teaching.
Have you ever taught?
JLV:
Yes, I teach at Pace University and at NYU.
CL:
So, as you know, I would have to understand these things in order to actually teach them, right? I was working on it as I was teaching these kids. It was a bizarre education for myself, my own studio practice, and what started to happen was it felt like I was getting far more conservative as an artist, or I was falling in love with the craft more than the ideas. And not that that's a conservative thought, but just that I was getting more into the physicalness of the making and having to articulate that, and less so in the contemplative stuff. That really did something to me. It was strange, but that was early on.
And then I started Joanna. That was just the name of that space in 2007 with my buddy Brian Rod. We were in a couple of Menil houses on the corner by the Rothko Chapel and one, the smaller one, faced St. Thomas.
JLV:
I'm trying to remember what shows I saw there, but I definitely saw shows there.
CL:
Oh, have we met, you and me?
JLV:
Possibly, but ever since I had children, I have Alzheimer's disease.
But really, I definitely checked out Joanna a few times whenever I would be around to visit my family.
CL:
Well, that's good. I'm glad you got to see it. And that was more of a social thing. Obviously, we took great care in crafting those exhibitions. But it was a party. It was getting people together in the community and having a good time, which I think is incredibly important.
I don't know if it's just our age or if we've moved on, but for some reason, I don't feel like the kids are keen on making those kinds of places anymore. I don't know, am I wrong? Do you see that still thriving up there in New York?
JLV:
I do, I'm happy to say. I feel like in New York there's always going to be somebody trying to pull something off. That's why I moved here.
I think that there is a little bit of a crisis of fundamentals. Kids these days get into art as like a subgenre, or a lifestyle, but because the way subcultures organize have changed so much, they've become so much more ephemeral. When a scene used to develop, there would be materials that would be produced, events that everyone would go to, ethics that were agreed upon... And I think that there's a little bit of a crisis of organizational skills happening among young people because they can certainly organize online, and that is where things happen. But there is a yearning for person-to-person contact. And there’s a question of how exactly do you do that? The fundamentals of organizing a community in physical spaces haven't been passed down very well, I think.
CL:
Yeah, and it was certainly much cheaper, too. I think even objectively, not just relatively.
JLV:
The material conditions have changed also, yeah.
CL:
I'm certain that it's all happening out there. 9 o'clock is now perfectly timed for when the whole world shuts down for me. And I think a lot of those things probably happen after that. My practice being quite domestic is even in scale very domestic too.
I'm getting a little bit concerned that I am going deeper and deeper into a detailed practice where I’m trying to control every single part of the surface. Which is its own torture. And something that I've done to myself.
CL (cont.):
But there are things that I respond to in the world that aren't necessarily art, or sometimes are, but are just so incredibly physically interesting to look at. Again, going back to that revelation that I had teaching, that the physicality of this stuff is where it's at for me. And where I find that, I fall into it to the point of where I can't think straight. I want to make things like that, but it requires so much. It's a meditation, but it's a meditation where you're screaming at the top of your lungs the whole time. It's really obnoxious. It's always worth it, but Jesus Christ.
JLV:
I mean, I'm not a Marxist, but I am interested in the cultural side of the Communist Revolution in Russia. Because after the Soviet Republic was developed, the cultural project that was happening was really interesting. It was very object- and making-focused.
The government would go into small communities throughout Russia, far locations, trying to bring together the whole Mother Russia nation by developing cohorts of trade schools or making schools that were for different kinds of artistry. I feel like there's a yearning for more organization of that kind in American society now. And I feel like what you're talking about a little bit is part of that.
CL:
Yeah, it's ritualistic in a way. I deal a lot with grids or in some cases, rope weaving—these things that the community can contribute to in a way because there's a system in place.
So how did that evolve in Russia? Did it work?
JLV:
It did. In Russia it developed into a part of this larger movement of Constructivism, which was this a social movement of building a number of different creative fields concurrently together. Painters would work on the backdrops for opera sets, or singers would work on being in the operas and fabric and textile design would be involved. It was the Russian version of a Bauhaus model saying, let's train our creative class in our country to give them all these skills and also train them to work together and collaborate on things as a national project. And it resulted in Constructivism, which was a huge success. It was a beautiful burgeoning movement. A lot of really great artists came out of it. A lot of great artworks came out of it. It ran into the same things that all large government cultural projects run into, which is was at a certain point, an antagonism towards what the arts actually are once they are produced, you know? I think it's a little bit inevitable because of the nature of art, but the intent was there.
The fact that it all went into what essentially ended up being a largely abstract artistic movement ended up being, for the public, a little bit of a, huh? And, in a reactionary way, they yearned for a more classical or traditionalist approach to arts again, so there was an implosion of some of those institutions that had been founded.
CL:
Do we see remnants of them now? I mean, like physical institutes, regional hubs?
JLV:
Yeah, there were these huge institutions in certain regions. There are certain regions of Russia where textiles were extant already, but then certain kinds of artisans were introduced into that mix that changed the types of textiles that were being produced for 10 or 15 years. And in other parts of the country, there would be industries being fortified around the production of, let's say, finer glassworks or steelworks or some other decorative arts design things. But they were region-by-region programs that used skills already important to these communities towards furthering the nationalist government. And that's where I part ways with it. The nationalist communism.
I’m not that interested in the greatness of Russia. I'm really just interested in the idea or what happens when you put a lot of energy into training people to make things in creative ways and work together. Because that happens rarely in the world, you know?
CL:
Yeah. Well, we both work at nonprofits, but federally-funded things are much stricter now. I'll leave it at that.
JLV:
Oh yeah, oh definitely.
CL:
Does your organization apply to federal funding at all?
JLV:
The first year we were incorporated as a nonprofit, KAJE applied for some federal funding, but since then we mostly rely on state funding because New York State is a utopia for arts funding. They give small organizations throughout the state annual $25,000 grants a lot. It's really great. It must sound like I'm talking about some fantasy or something in Texas, but in New York, they give money for the arts, goddamn it.
CL:
Yeah, I mean, you know, with the Orange Show, the Texas Commission on the Arts is quite generous, but that's just a long historical relationship. I don't know how it operates in other smaller organizations, but there's certainly not something set up like that in Texas, or really anywhere else that I'm aware of. I lived in London for some time, and there is a nonprofit status there, and the government does offer something through their Heritage Lottery but it’s different.
The philanthropic model here is a really interesting thing that we could have to spend a whole hour talking about, like what that does to the arts or to funding of programs in general and what that looks like. And it's all so wacky and weird. It's all stuff that I'm just now learning. I've been at the Orange Show for almost 5 years, but I'm only just now learning the ins and outs of specifically an arts nonprofit, how it operates in the city, how it operates with donors, how it operates with a board. There's a lot. It sounds really boring, but it’s super intriguing and interesting and comical and silly and stupid. I think it would be a really good film or something if someone actually really dug into how annoying it all is.
JLV:
I agree. It is its own subculture.
Ok I have to go, but all I'll say is that growing up, I was very lucky to have lots of information given to me about what being an artist is, what the life is of someone who's trying to make ideas, and struggling and in a city like Houston where like there's limited success heights that one can reach in a way, you know, all that stuff, right?
And now it's really crazy because I went to art school in Boston. I went to the Museum School, and then I went to grad school at Yale. And I met my wife at Yale. My wife comes from just the complete other side of the sociodemographic edge than me—her family is very wealthy. And so, because of that, I'm seeing the other philanthropic side of the arts.
I'm not sure what the purpose of my life is, but I'm pretty sure it's something about how I'm supposed to see every single side of what art is.
CL:
That's gorgeous. Can I adopt that, please? Can I just steal that?
JLV:
Definitely. You're in midlife too. So, you probably are like where I'm at, where you're trying to form a coherence around your life a little bit.
And that's all I can really come to—is just that all of these really beautiful things in my life, it's all from art. Really, everything. Art got me out of trouble, art saved my life, art hurts me, it's everything, you know. I've just been given a really lucky pack of Pokémon cards of life.
CL:
Yeah, it’s good to recognize it, but I think that's fantastic. And it just proves that it continues to offer new ways of seeing things and exploring things, because the way we define art does change. The things that turned me on as a younger artist, maybe don’t so much anymore, but the thing that I never thought would, does, you know? I think that thing can constantly evolve and it'll always be there. And it's really the only thing I have patience for. I mean, that, basketball, the garden, and that's about it. And my family, of course. But like, after that, fuck this.
JLV:
I think we're officially friends.
CL:
My man.
Jacques Louis-Vidal (b. 1982) is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He attended the School Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, graduating in 2004, and received his MFA from Yale in 2009. He is a co-founder of interdisciplinary art space KAJE, along with sculptor Kate Levant. He previously ran the project space Know More Games in Gowanus, alongside Brian Faucette and Miles Huston. It was located near other project spaces Primetime and 247365, which became collectively referred to as 'the Donut District,' after a nearby Dunkin Donuts. New York Times art critic Martha Schwendener wrote that it was "Spiritually somewhere between a nonprofit and a commercial space." From 2015 to 2019, he was the resident director of Lighthouse Works on Fishers Island.
Cody Ledvina (b. 1984) lives and works in Houston, Texas. He received an MA from the University College London, UK in archival studies, an MFA from the University of Houston in 2009, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas in 2006. He has exhibited locally and internationally, with his latest solo exhibition “Crawfish Ledvina” at Pablo Cardoza Gallery in Houston, TX in 2024. Ledvina’s works are inventive explorations in unconventional material, accumulating to form unusual, curious, and humorous images. Ledvina is the archivist for the Orange Show for Visionary Art in Houston and has been helping restore the Orange Show for a public reopening. In his words, Cody Ledvina is an artist archivist for artists, trained by artists, archivists, friends, and family.