News

Lubbock ain’t never gonna be cool. Not going to happen. The conservative, inelegant, sand-scrubbed little city marooned in the flat and formidable vastness of the Great South Plains won’t ever be overrun with hipster cachet a la Marfa. The art mob will not flock. The cognoscenti will not congregate.

That being said, the ongoing paradox of the place is how much art, specifically music, can arise from such humble and inauspicious origins. From Bob Wills and Buddy Holly back in the day to the Dixie Chicks’ Natalie Maines and singer-songwriter-fiddler Amanda Shires today, the Texas Panhandle has been an unlikely wellspring of ferocious creativity...

In 1962 Terry Allen left Lubbock to pursue what he couldn’t imagine ever happening in his hometown: a life as an artist. More than fifty years later, the sculptor, painter, playwright, and musician behind Juarez and Lubbock (On Everything) is ready for a return...

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce the up-coming release (March 2017) of “the Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life”, edited by Gallery Artist Sharon Louden...

48 page fully illustrated exhibition catalogue on the occasion of "James Buss: in the poem's four corners" at Holly Johnson Gallery from September 10 - November 12, 2016. The catalogue includes an essay by John Zotos, a Dallas based writer and essayist

Available at the gallery and on Blurb.

Houston artist David Aylsworth is well-known within Texas art circles for his stunning abstract paintings celebrating his facility with the brush, sophisticated understanding of color, and harmonious spatial relationships between form and shape...

Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming solo exhibition by Dallas based artist Douglas Leon Cartmel. The exhibition titled WHITE NOISE marks the artist's solo debut at the gallery and features a selection of new paintings that will include white noise paintings, seascapes and abstractions... 

Bare of rhetorical gestures, the colors and shapes of this installation speak the language of minimalism. Ana Esteve Llorens says that, rather than a choice, minimalism is a trait of her character, her natural way of being in the world. Some shapes and colors could be described as recognizable objects --a yellow arrow or the fragment of an ornamental scroll (the two green pieces). They all are, however, simply geometry -- yellow triangles, blue squares and rectangles, green sections of a circle--, single entities made out of the coming together of shape and color. When associated with geometric abstractions, color is freed from its usual descriptive role and becomes a noun, as it were, instead of an adjective. The deceptive fact that we need a sequence of two words to express the notion “yellow triangle” results from the inherent linearity of natural languages. Free from that limitation, the languages of visual art are able to represent that which is simultaneous in simultaneous ways...

Some might claim that art has no purpose or say that art has no real value, but these are delusional ideas. In moments of emotional turmoil, art can speak to an individual in an immeasurable way. People desire to view or possess this experience, which gives  the images power. Art can be just entertaining, but great art also informs, nudges people towards ideas or big questions, and helps heal or transcend this world’s problems if only for a moment...

Johnson’s paintings and works on paper combine and explore dynamic opposites: expansiveness and compression, darkness and light. Johnson’s intuitive use of color evokes the contemporary urban, digital and natural landscape, and skews the vocabulary of abstraction into a hybrid techno-language...

Christopher French creates minimalist abstractions infused with memory, light and a degree of perception that extends beyond sight. His radiant geometries reference a landscape of light and shadows in precise compositions. Layering pigment in thin veils, French crisscrosses shafts of color as they traverse the image field in crystalline tonalities...