What’s Happening in Texas: Benito Huerta and the Fear of Flying Chalupas

Benito Huerta is an artist, curator, and educator. He has a long and storied career in Texas and has spent years cultivating opportunities for others. He received a B.F.A. from the University of Houston and an M.A. from New Mexico State University and has organized dozens of exhibitions, including surveys of the work of Luis Jiménez and Mel Chin. Huerta was Co-founder and Executive Director of the Texas art journal Art Lies which was published from 1994-2011. After teaching for 27 years as Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, Huerta recently retired from teaching and stepped down as Director and Curator of The Gallery at UTA. I caught up with Mr. Huerta to get some of the details of his development as an artist.

Gabriel Martinez (GM): I saw one of your paintings at Vincent Valdez’s show at Art League. He had selections from this amazing collection in one of the rooms.

Benito Huerta (BH): Joe Diaz’s collection? 

GM: Yeah, exactly. That’s it.

That was probably a late ‘80s piece called Murmur. They took another version of the Art League show to Artpace — which is up now. Zhaira (Costiniano, the curator) didn’t want to use a lot of the same artworks that were in the Art League show so she expanded it and they had three pieces of mine — a chalupa drawing that I did in the mid-80s, one of the black velvet chalupa paintings, and then a small work on paper. Joe Diaz has a few other pieces of mine, but those were the pieces in the show. It was hung salon style just like it was at Art League, and it filled that whole room.

It was really impressive to see all the variety of work in his collection. He had bought one of my ceramic plates that I did back in the ‘80s. It was from a series that was initially part of the Christmas show, at Judy Youens Gallery on Colquitt, which hasn’t been there in a long time, but for a while, she had a Christmas show — commissioning artists to make these ceramic plates. They could do whatever they wanted. I decided to take that idea and make it into a Last Supper kind of thing. He bought one of those plates and ended up getting some more later.

He likes to tell people that my work was one of the first works he ever bought, but I think I was the second. I was probably the third. I kind of kidded him because there was an artist who smoked cigars and did these illustrative works for sports things — Leroy Neiman. That was his first piece, and then he bought a painting by a Houston artist named Kelly Alison. He bought my piece and then he wanted to meet me. That’s kind of unusual because there are some collectors who don’t want to meet the artists. They just want to buy the work and enjoy it but he really wanted to meet. We ended up becoming friends. 

We would go together to look at the galleries in Houston back in the late 80s, and he would pick up the resume for the artists and I would say, “What are you looking at the resume for? Look at the work. If you like it, you like it, with the resume, all you’re doing is thinking of it as an investment. You need to throw that idea away because art is something that you live with.” I remember that he really liked Peter Saul’s work. I said that he couldn’t afford it and asked if he’d ever looked at the work of John Hernandez. We went to Moody Gallery because John’s work was showing there, and he saw the piece, loved it, and bought it.

He now has about over 70 pieces by John Hernandez. When we did the retrospective of John’s work back in 2016, half of the show was from Joe Diaz’s collection. I was kind of kind of guiding him to look at different artists. I introduced him to Cesar Martinez, Luis Jiménez, Mel Chin, and a few other artists.

He started going out on his own and learning and buying art. In the beginning, he was buying a lot of small pieces. A lot of people do that at first because they’re not sure. I said, “When are you going to stop buying appetizers and buy an entree?” That’s when he jumped in and started buying larger works. 

GM: What led you to art?

BH: I was not going to go into fine art. I was going to go into commercial art at that time. It was called commercial art back in the 70s. I grew up listening to rock and roll. I started going to concerts in Houston when I was about 16 and the first concert I went to was Jimi Hendrix in 1968. In the late 60s, concert posters and album covers were like works of art. That’s what I wanted to do. 

I was making concert posters in undergrad for the entertainment committee, the university’s program council. Then one year I became the chair of the entertainment committee that booked the concerts. During my undergraduate years, I was doing stage crew for concerts. It was a combination of all those things that led me to the organizational skills that would help me with being a curator. During my last year of undergrad, I had all these electives left over. I took painting, advanced drawing, watercolor, lithography, and short story writing. I wasn’t interested in art history, but all of a sudden, just doing all those things opened my head up and the light bulb went off.

I never really liked school. I went to university because my father never graduated from high school. He got drafted when he was in high school at the end of World War II. My mother did graduate from high school, but she never went to college. Being a Latino, I felt that maybe I should go do something that my parents didn’t do. And also to outsiders, this would probably be good for us, overall. So I went but I wasn’t as excited by that as I was about working on concerts and booking concerts. The concerts I brought were important ones, like, George Carlin, Stevie Wonder — right before he became famous again as an older musician, Loggins and Messina, and John Prine. We worked with other concert promoters and helped bring the Rolling Stones to Hofheinz Pavilion back in 1972.

Gael Stack was one of my teachers, and she suggested I go to graduate school. I went to New Mexico State. NMSU was great because I received a teaching assistantship the first year, which they rarely do. I was able to do whatever I wanted. They pretty much left me alone. I did a lot of work and felt like I was catching up. I was learning about art for the first time, learning on my own. I didn’t know much about the art business. I knew there were galleries and some of my peers and I would go to openings and I remember we would rate openings by whether they had food or liquor — wine or hard liquor. Other than that, I didn’t know the business of it. And so I said, “Well, what do we do now? Now that you got the work done what do you do with all this work?” That’s when I started organizing shows on campus to get the work — mine and others, out into the public arena.

After New Mexico State, I moved to San Francisco for two years. I was doing my chalupa drawings. Graduate school was more exploratory in the sense that I was doing a lot of different things. At the same time, it was giving me ideas about what I’d like to do. Star Wars had come out and everybody was talking about it. I jokingly said that if George Lucas could make money off Star Wars, I could make money off flying chalupas. So I started drawing chalupas and making them look like they’re flying — just something to play with. But when I moved to San Francisco, I thought, “Why not take that idea and play with it?”

I had already started to play with black velvet. When I was in New Mexico State, friends and I would go to Juarez and see all these black velvet paintings. I thought, “Why not paint on black velvet?” In the beginning, I tried to make them look like chalupas, and they started looking like hats and shells and some people think they look like female and male genitals. The painting that Joe has, that’s in the Artpace show, is probably the first black velvet painting that I did. It kind of grew from that.

I felt was important to me as an artist to keep growing and to keep pushing boundaries, not for the sake of the art world, but for myself. When you start to get bored with your own work, it’s time to move on. I did this set of chalupa drawings, I refer to them as the desecration series. One of the first ones that I did was Fear of Flying Chalupas. I got an Exacto knife and kind of sliced it. Not enough to where the paper would fall off the sheet, but where you could see that it had been slashed. 

Another one was called, Assassination of Certain Chalupas. I borrowed my brother’s .22 rifle, took the piece to the shooting range, turned it backward, and shot it. When the bullet went through it, the paper jetted out. It was the first time I ever shot and I got all of them. The drawing was probably 22 by 22 or so. I thought, “That’s not a bad shot.” 

There was another one — I think it’s Frighten Chalupas Held Hostage — I can’t remember. I have to look it up. Dominique de Menil bought it. It had a string that I dyed and sewed in and out of the paper. So there’s this cross-hatching of string. It looks like they’re tied up. Mrs. de Menil ended up buying that when she saw a show at Lawndale, the old Lawndale Art Center that (James) Surls started because Walter Hopps was doing a talk there. Mrs. de Menil was walking around the show with Mel Chin, who I was friends with. They came across my pieces. I had five of the chalupa drawings, and that was the one that she bought.

I kept painting the chalupas for a while, and then I started moving away from them. It was an evolutionary process. I got the position of a visiting artist for a year at East Carolina University in Greenville. Being away for a year, I decided that I would do whatever I wanted to do when it came to painting, drawing, or whatever, going back to the attitude I had in graduate school. If I have an idea, I want to be able to attend to that idea, whether it relates to other work of mine or not. I like being in the position of trying to do something new as far as either concept or process and trying to challenge myself. Sometimes, the outcome is not necessarily what I might like, but if it is not working out, I try to figure out ways to make it work.

I like that aspect of art making because we’re problem solvers. We create our problems and then try to make those problems or issues or concepts work. It’s almost like the work takes a life of its own and dictates or leads you to go in a direction you never even thought of. That to me is one of the more exciting aspects of being an artist.

I got asked by Moira Kelly, who was the director of Lawndale, the old Lawndale, before the building that they have now. She asked me and couple of people to curate three sections of a show called Cowboys, Cadillacs, and Computers. This is 1985. She said “We’ll pay you” and I thought “Wow, you can actually make money off of this.” I was selected to do the Cowboys section. Tacey Tajan was the curator for the Cadillacs and Bernard Sampson was the curator for the Computers. 

LeBeth Lammers and I worked together on the concept for an installation for Lawndale in one of the three big bays. We ended up making this maquette for what we wanted to do and enlisted 23 or 24 artists to work on this installation and we would show some of their individual work. It was an expansion of ideas — instead of just painting on canvas or velvet, you have this broader space to create an installation — working with others where everybody comes in with their ideas and you start having this input. I really like that a lot. 

We also created a large TV set with the state of Texas coming out of the TV at an angle and had a bunch of these little horses that were made of different materials. We had a motif. Somebody asked, “Why don’t you use tostada chips to cover the state of Texas?” Somebody did the Alamo as a piñata, and somebody made a tornado out of barbed wire. We had all these things going on, and you could go behind the TV — we created a little dirt trail.

I was talking with LeBeth and asked, “How about we have the viewer ride one of those mechanical horses, like kids?” We found three people who had mechanical horses and all of them, surprisingly, only cost a dime. Not a quarter, but a dime. We had the different colored extension cords going up to the ceiling for electricity, and people rode them during the opening. 

About a year later, I was asked to curate a Hispanic show for Midtown Art Center, Chulas Fronteras. They wanted me to do a statewide show and they paid me pretty well at the time. I decided to travel around the state by bus because I thought don’t have the money to fly around and I could have driven, but I wanted to have the time in between on the bus to make notes and write and think about the work that I’d seen and was going to see. It was really great. I had different people pick me up.

Dallas was the first stop. Celia Muñoz, who I did not know at that time, picked me up at the bus stop and she was really surprised. She said, “I never have thought of picking up a curator at the bus stop.” She took me to John Hernandez’s studio in Live Oak and it was the first studio that I got to see. His work was just amazing. I had probably seen his work at Betty Moody when she opened up in 1985, in Houston. I remember seeing John’s work because it was different. But it was not as colorful as the work that I saw in ‘86, in the studio. John’s work set the bar for what I wanted to have in the show. Celia took me to several studios and took me to her studio and she was, of course, in the show automatically. Her work was already great, doing this photography and text combination. Then I went around the whole state: Austin, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and Mission.

In the meantime, in 1985, there was a national Hispanic art competition that was going to open at the Museo del Barrio in New York, produced by Canadian Club called Mira. I entered it and ended up getting two large chalupa paintings in. One was called Schizophrenia and the other one was called Tres Equis, a triptych.

I was starting to use imagery in the drawings that related more to my personal life and things that people experience universally. There might be a cross because it kind of related to that I was brought up Catholic. In my late teens, I moved away from religion completely but it was something I was brought up with. My work dealt with religion, sexuality, images from popular culture, like, Batman and Superman kind of thing — I grew up with comics, grew up with Mad Magazine, those kinds of things. Then there’s other imagery that was like universal. Some of those things were really universal things that other people experienced.

Those were images that I was beginning to do. It was the idea behind Schizophrenia — not so much a mental state, but in the sense of being bi-cultural. For me, it was being from two cultures. Growing up in the late 50s, and early 60s, the idea of assimilation was a really big thing. My parents, both spoke Spanish — my father was from Mexico, decided that when we went to school, we were they were going to talk to us in English. I did not speak English and all of a sudden, when I started going to kindergarten I had to confront the fact that I didn’t speak English. I had to learn English. I feel like I’m still learning English.

All these things that were in the work were about dealing with two different cultures. Growing up in Corpus Christi, all my relatives were Latinos. They were all speaking Spanish, and I was going to schools where they all talk English. Corpus at that time was very diverse. I didn’t realize it till later. There was some racial tension at the time that I didn’t know about because I was a kid. It was a real mixed neighborhood. I like that kind of mixture of different cultures, different peoples. Schizophrenia deals with having this Mexican heritage and this Anglo cultural thing that I was trying to grow up with. The idea behind Tres Equis was to have three modes of painting in which I painted the pieces. It’s about the process. 

I was in NYC to help Mel Chin take down a 30-foot sculpture Myrrha/P.I.A. in Bryant Park and it coincided with the opening reception of Mira! On the day of the opening at the Museo del Barrio, I ended up working later than I thought and didn’t have time to go back to the studio so I could change for the opening. We took a cab to the Museo walked in and went straight to the bar and I hear they were making announcements. The bartender says, “Well, we can’t serve until they finish their announcements.” It turns out that I won first place, and went on stage dressed like I had just worked. I mean, I wasn’t dressed for the occasion, but they gave me an envelope and I didn’t know that the envelope contained $5,000 until later. But what was interesting was that you also got to donate another $5,000 to a nonprofit of your choice. I decided to donate the $5,000 to Midtown (Art Center) and said “I’ll donate it if you can earmark it for a catalog for Chulas Fronteras. 

We used most of the money for that catalog and I ended up writing the curatorial statement for it. That’s where my short story writing class really helped. Writing curator statements at the time was like pulling teeth. Now it’s a lot easier because I’ve been doing it for years and I don’t mind writing as much as I used to. People started to ask “Are you going to travel Chulas Fronteras?” I went back to Midtown and asked if they would help give seed money and we’ll figure out a plan to pay for this. It traveled all around the state, for a little over a year and a half. I would fly to the place, rent a truck, pick up the work, drive it to the next place, lay it out, help install, be there for the reception, and then fly back home.

After all that was done, people were seeing me as a curator. They were not seeing me as an artist, so I said, “I’m not going to curate for a while,” and I stayed in my studio and worked. Then, Marilyn Zeitlin, who was a curator at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (CAMH) at the time, suggested my work for a show at Artists Space in 1989.

The Houston Chronicle had an article about this controversy in New York at an art space. They mentioned the name of the place but I didn’t connect everything. There was another show there, in a different room from the one that I was in, that was curated by Nan Goldin and it had to do with AIDS, called Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. David Wojnarowicz wrote the essay for the show which was somewhat inflammatory because he talked about Jesse Helms — basically what an ass he was. The director informed the NEA because they got a grant for the catalog. The NEA read the essay and rescinded the grant. While I was installing my work there were House and Senate representatives coming through Artists Space. John Frohnmayer, the chair of the NEA, came through. 

I was on the periphery of that storm and the opening night was a madhouse. They would not let people in until others left through the back door, because it was so packed. I felt really fortunate. Later, Marilyn (Zeitlin) gave me a one-person show at the CAMH in 1990. I showed a lot of that work and some newer works as well.

After being on another NEA panel in DC in the mid-nineties, I came away from the panel sessions realizing that not many people on the panel, my peers from around the country, knew what was going on with regards to contemporary art in Texas. One of the most often repeated questions that came up was “What was happening in Texas” — even though visual arts organizations in Texas had submitted about a fifth of all of the grant applications. Only Dave Hickey who was on the panel knew what was happening in our state aside from myself. When I returned to Houston, the question I posed is “What were we, the art scene in Texas, missing?” The answer was simple: an arts magazine to focus critical attention on contemporary art in the state and to get the word out within and outside the state. That was the impetus for Art Lies. But that is another chapter.

I had read a book by Rainer Maria Rilke that had a poem called Autumn that influenced a painting of mine called Otoño. In that book of collected poems, there was an essay about this 17th century philosopher by the name of Novalis which stated that there are two parts to an artist’s development. One is that you look inside yourself as to who you are. I felt like the chalupa drawings were part of that looking for yourself and examining who you are and what you are. The second part of that development is to look at the outside world and see what your relationship is to that world, and what that world means to you — to see the bigger picture.

With that in mind, some of the work started taking on aspects outside of myself — outside of the chalupa thing, which was, to me, an important part of my development as an artist — to figure out who I was, because to me it was about identity and asserting that identity. At that time, nobody talked about identity as being a part of an artwork, but it was important for me to understand myself, my culture, and how I fit into society. Once you get outside of that you look beyond yourself and see how your work is about the world.

GM: Tell me about the upcoming Kirk Hopper show.

BH: There was an article in a magazine up here in Dallas, about the lack of artists of color in commercial galleries. This was right before the pandemic, probably about 2018, or 2019. Kirk asked me several times if I would be willing to curate a Latino show. I said, “No, I don’t want to.” Later, he asked again, in response to the article, because he didn’t have a lot of Latino artists in the gallery and again I said “No.” But he asked when I was about to step down from running the gallery at UTA and at the time I was curating the Luis Jiménez show that I did in the spring of ‘23 and I had a show planned for ‘24 — my going away present from the department. I said, “Yes, I’ll do it for three things in return. I have three requests: the first one is that I want all the shipping paid for, back and forth. Second, you treat all the artists to dinner after the reception, and third that my wife and I have a show this fall.”

The exhibition was called More Contemporary American Art. It was about Latino artists without mentioning Latino, Chicano, Mexican, etc. (Though I used an American flag for the image of the show with green replacing the blue). I preferred this title because it places the work in a more general category instead of being in an isolated one — as if Latino art is something different from American art. Let the names of the artists in the exhibition define the work. This might be my fourth show with them, but it’s the first time I’ve shown with my wife. Janet (Chaffee) and I do work collaboratively. That work, as well as my own work, was featured in the UTA show that I had last spring. But this exhibition is showing her individual work and my work. The Kirk Hopper Show is a continuation of all the ideas that I’ve been working with.

There’s a painting on my website called Oh, Shit, There’s a Smudge On The Painting. It’s a very minimalist kind of painting. If you know my work, I usually like to fill up the whole thing — sometimes too much. On one edge is a gun and on the opposite side, at the other edge is a knife. At the bottom is a mushroom cloud, but with regular clouds painted overtop it. The top is the silhouette of a coronavirus. And the smudge is real. It was accidental. When I was working on the knife part, I had graphite on the bottom of my hand, and I rested my hand on the yellow painting and it transferred onto it. I didn’t see it immediately. When I did see it, I thought, “Oh, shit. There’s a smudge on it.” And then I thought, “You know, this is probably a good thing,” because all these things in the painting are real, gun violence, violence, the possibility of nuclear war, that could happen on a really nice day — somebody could drop the bomb. Coronavirus is hovering all over us. But yet by saying, “Oh, shit, there’s a smudge on the painting,” it makes people look for that smudge and not see the other things. This is really about our times. The idea of disinformation, misinformation, and distraction, — not dealing with the real issues.

 

She Said, He Said: Janet Chaffee and Benito Huerta will open on December 7 at Kirk Hopper Fine Art, in Dallas.