April 16-June 11, 2005

Terry Allen is an exceptionally gifted artist - a combination of poet/songwriter, musician, playwright, filmmaker, sculptor, and installation artist - with an original voice he uses to express complex multidisciplinary ideas. Allen's work is a hybrid of high and low art, social dynamics and personal contexts, embracing theoretical conceptualism on the one hand and popular vernacular on the other. Described by L.A. Times art critic David Pagel as a "multitalented master of multitasking," Allen stretches traditional definitions of the creative process, expanding our understanding of what it means to be an artist and what form art can take.

Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1943, Allen grew up in Lubbock, Texas, influenced by both country western music and rock and roll. He knew from an early age that he wanted to work in the arts and headed off to Los Angeles in the mid sixties to study at Chouinard Art Institute. After completing his BFA in 1966, he embarked on a career primarily in music. His early songs, such as Truckload of Art and Art Mob, both written in 1967, are musically sophisticated and intelligently crafted, humorous salutes to California culture and the art world. In his next song cycle, recorded in the album Juarez, Allen developed a storyline and cast of characters that morphed into a major body of visual art, encompassing drawings, sculptures, and multimedia installations; it eventually grew into a performance and radio show co-produced with David Byrne.

Allen's refusal to operate within accepted structures has afforded audiences with rare aesthetic experiences. In Allen's practice, traditional musical performances turn into full-fledged theatrical events, part chautauqua and part vaudeville. The content of his lyrics moves far beyond the expected. What starts out as a straightforward project - such as writing a movie score - often takes on monumental proportions. Youth in Asia (1982-1991) is a perfect example. This large body of work addresses the aftermath of the Vietnam War for both Americans and Vietnamese. Inspired by Southeast Asia, where Allen wrote the score for AMERISIA, this ten-year project - comprising more than sixty-one works of art as well as numerous songs and performances - is a broad exploration of parallels between the American Southwest and Southeast Asia.

Allen is a creative risk-taker whose energies expand to meet all available borders. In this sense he is a true auteur: equal parts author, composer, inventor, visualizer, agitator. Since 1994 he has been working on a magnum opus under the rubric DUGOUT. Mixing autobiography and fiction, theatrical stage techniques and twenty-first-century installation, tone poem and raucous musical, this multipart series of works freights simple images and words with myriad levels of meaning. DUGOUT, which initially debuted in 1994 as a program for National Public Radio, has had three incarnations since: DUGOUT I, a series of drawings and sculptural assemblages; DUGOUT II: HOLD ON to the house, a group of room-sized mixed media and video installations; and finally DUGOUT III: Warboy (and the blackboard blues), a musical theatre production. Each installment of DUGOUT follows a sweeping, nonlinear narrative concerning the "Man," a minor league baseball player from St. Louis, who meets, falls in love with, and marries the much younger "Woman," a honky-tonk piano-playing lounge singer from somewhere in the midwest. Their trials and tribulations, and the complicated deepening of their lives together are couched musically in the idiom of jazz and country lament. Allen describes them visually through a fluid combination of abstract gestures, evocative representation, and odd-object assemblage.

Blaffer Gallery brings together many of these key elements in a special presentation entitled Terry Allen: Stories from DUGOUT, a selection of drawings, sculpture, and installations from DUGOUT I and DUGOUT II: HOLD ON to the house that provide an overview of Allen's elaborate and wide-ranging visual narrative. The DUGOUT trilogy, Allen says, "is about another America, an America that is lost. The time span of the piece runs from the end of the nineteenth century, across the first half of the twentieth century, and stops at the cusp of the start of the 'new wilderness,' shortly after the breach made by the atomic bomb. It is an America that no longer exists.if it ever did." While loosely based on his personal history (Allen's father was a retired minor league ballplayer, and his mother was an itinerant pianist who played hotels and honky-tonks throughout the Southwest) and memories of stories his parents told him in the 1940s and 1950s, the three elements of DUGOUT take on universal themes of lost innocence and a changing world.

Generous support for the presentation of Terry Allen: Stories from DUGOUT is provided by Charles Butt, with additional funding from Marilyn Oshman.

In conjunction with Blaffer Gallery, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, the new center of artistic collaboration at the University of Houston, in its inaugural performance will present DUGOUT III: WARBOY (and the backboard blues), written and directed by Terry Allen, featuring original music by the artist, Richard Bowden, and Lloyd Maines, and starring veteran actress Jo Harvey Allen. The performances will be on Friday and Saturday, April 29-30, at the University of Houston's Lyndall Finley Wortham Theatre, located inside the new Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts building, which is currently undergoing renovation. Both performances will begin at 8:00 p.m.

Both performances are free and will begin at 8:00 PM. To reserve tickets please call 713.743.2929.