James Surls
This coming Thursday, March 29, Colorado-based artist James Surls is returning to his native state to lecture at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. The program is part of two exhibitions currently on view at the museum: A New American Sculpture, 1914—1945: Lachaise, Laurent, Nadelman, and Zorach, a show featuring approximately fifty-five sculptures created by the four artists between World War I and II; and Commanding Space: Women Sculptors of Texas, a show featuring works by five female sculptors, some of whom are Surls’ contemporaries: Celia Eberle, Kana Harada, Sharon Kopriva, Sherry Owens, and Linda Ridgway.
Surls was born in East Texas in 1943. After graduating from the Sam Houston State Teachers College and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, he taught at SMU from 1969 to 1976. He then moved to Splendora, Texas and taught at the University of Houston, where he was instrumental in the founding of the Lawndale Annex (now Lawndale Art Center). In 1997, Surls moved away from his longtime studio and home in Splendora to live and work in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley.
If you want to see Surls’ art, you can visit his exhibition James Surls: Through the Thorn Tree on view at the Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas. You can also see his prints at Flatbed Press in Austin.
