Terry Allen

It was 1963 in Lubbock, Texas. Coming of age in the twilight/dawn of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, Terry Allen and his friends generated a rite that echoed a pioneer Texas pastime, the ranch dance, when folks would travel long distances to gather and dance to a fiddle band. “A dozen carloads of us would head out to the cotton fields, loaded down with bootleg beer and whiskey,” the artist recalls. “We’d park in a perfect circle with the headlights aimed in, tune all the car radios to the same station and dance in the dirt. At 10 p.m. or so, we’d tune in ‘The Wolfman’ on XERF out of Del Rio with its massive transmitter in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila and drink and raise the dust to that....” 

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...

Cult heroes: Terry Allen – country music outlaw and renaissance man. The Texas-born artist’s work is found in the Museum of Modern Art and he’s creating a sculpture from Nashville legend Guy Clark’s ashes, but his reissued 1970s concept album might be his greatest work of art...

Terry Allen, painter, sculptor, writer and musician, was once asked his definition of art. He thought a moment and replied, "To get out of town."

Artist and outlaw country crooner Terry Allen's "playing La Jolla for all it's worth" was installed mid September 2015...

It's at L.A. Louver that Allen now is showing the latest, fully developed version of "Ghost Ship Rodez: The Momo Chronicles," the project about the French playwright and theater revolutionary Artaud that so impressed Byrne three years ago.

Terry Allen is the first comprehensive retrospective of this prolific artist's work... 

Allen offered up a group of possibly over 100 sketchbook studies of which owner Johnson managed to highlight 16 staggered behind 7 realized bronze sculptures classically placed atop old school styled art pedestals made by partner Jim Martin.

Terry Allen is an exceptionally gifted artist whose original voice expresses complex ideas. His legendary story-telling ability is the key to his creative productivity, and the underlying narratives give form to drawn images in the series of sketchbook studies and the cast bronze sculptures on exhibit.