From the Station Museum of Contemporary Art:
“The Station Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to present Clark V. Fox: Subversion and Spectacle, an expansive survey exhibition of the work of Native American artist Clark V. Fox, opening on Saturday, February 5, 2022 through June 26, 2022. Subversion and Spectacle highlights Clark’s consistent mixing and appropriation of styles and movements from pop art to abstraction as a political statement, examining his work as an artist and philosopher, who thinks broadly about the subtle connections between the imagery of consumerism, history, identity, and formalist considerations. Organized by Station Museum of Contemporary Art Director James Harithas with Senior Curator Alex Tu, Subversion and Spectacle is an expansion of Insurgent: The Paintings of Clark V. Fox, an exhibition curated by Ann Harithas for the Five Points Museum of Contemporary Art in Victoria, Texas.
“As an artist beyond categorization, Clark’s prodigious achievements are measured in the outsized influence that his pieces exert on the viewer and the shock waves his work continues to send through contemporary art,” said James Harithas.
Using appropriated corporate and political icons, Clark dismantles the effects of capitalist culture on our consciousness. His iconoclastic portraits of American heroes provide a framework for reconnection and reinstatement as he acts to challenge our national myth-making. Political undercurrents can be found in Clark’s entire body of work, from his more subtle Situationist architectural paintings to the more obvious political symbolism of his pop-informed works that inflects history painting.
With his characteristic biting humor, Clark delivers difficult-to-swallow truths cloaked in seductive color and texture. This exhibition triangulates his position between and beyond the D.C. Color School, the Situationist International, Pop Art, and history painting.
“Clark is a thoroughly avant-garde artist dealing successfully with complex color problems and, on a profound conceptual level, with the central problems of synchrony and diachrony,” said Harithas. “The result is that he not only creates a new context for the use and perception of color, but he also sheds new light on our understanding of the static, salient elements of the past and how they emerge into the present.”
The Station Museum of Contemporary Art is located at 1502 Alabama st. in Houston, Texas 77004 and is open to the public 11AM-6PM, Wednesday through Sunday. Admission at the museum is always free. For more information, please visit our website at www.stationmuseum.com. For event and program information please contact Jordan Lee Harris, Media Contact at 281-935-8339.
ABOUT CLARK V. FOX
Clark V. Fox was born in Austin, TX, in 1946. His father in the Army-Airforce, Clark spent the first five years of his life in Honolulu before the family moved to several cities throughout Texas, including Galveston, Houston, Corpus Christi, Hereford and Amarillo. In 1960 just before Clark entered high school, the family settled in Washington, D.C. Clark attended high school in Alexandria, Virginia, a period during which he had a studio with fellow classmates, David Lynch and Jack Fisk.
Clark studied with Japanese art master Unichi Hiratsuka at the Japan-American Society of Washington, D.C. (1964-1965). Clark spent his first year of college at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (1965-66) with part-time stints at Andy Warhol’s “The Factory” studio, after which he returned to D.C., where he received his BFA in 1969 from the Corcoran School of Art (renamed as Corcoran School of Art & Design, part of George Washington University in 2014.). He soon became involved with the Washington Color School of Painting, where he apprenticed with artist Tom Downing (1967-1969) and which brought him to the attention of James Harithas, then Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. Clark received a more hands-on introduction to the art world by accompanying Harithas to parties, exhibition openings and studio visits. Harithas would often see him in museums, studying and sketching various works in the many collections throughout D.C.
In the 1970s, while protesting the second Indochina war, Clark found himself living between Paris and New York City. It was then that he would become involved in the Situationist International and Fluxus Mail art school through Ray Johnson, while studying the works of Georges Seurat and Marcel Duchamp. In the 1980s Clark got involved in the D.C. Hardcore scene (his band, Twisted Teenage Plot, once opened for Fugazi at The White House) and the New York City No Wave movement with the noise-rock band Gag Reflex.
He would later open MOCA, D.C., an art gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood of D.C., that exhibited the works of Shepard Fairey, Ron English and Mark Lombardi, among others. Clark also ran a conceptual art space Flat, out of his New York City apartment hosting experimental works of art. Harithas and Clark maintained close contact through it all.
Clark’s work is in over fifty of the United States most prominent institutional collections, including Yale University Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Whitney Museum, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, American University Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, The Phillips Collection and the High Museum. His work is in numerous notable private collections, including the Herbert and Dorothy Vogel Collection and the Richard Brown Baker Collection. Clark’s grants and awards include a Ford Foundation Grant (1965), First Purchase Award at the National Drawing Society Eastern Regional Exhibition, Philadelphia Museum of Art (1970), and Purchase Award, 35th Corcoran Biennial (1977).
ABOUT STATION MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Station Museum of Contemporary Art is a Houston-based exhibition forum for local, national, and international artists, with an emphasis on fine arts that reflects the cultural diversity of Houston’s communities. The museum has held comprehensive exhibitions from Mexico, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Congo, South Africa, Czech Republic, Austria, Palestine, Iraq, India, Afghanistan, and Russia. As an institution that supports local and Texas art, the Station has organized significant solo exhibitions by Mel Chin, James Drake, Dick Wray, Jesse Lott, George Smith, and group exhibitions that bring Texas artists together with national and international artists.”
On View: May 26, 2022 | 12–5 pm
Station Museum of Contemporary Art
1502 Alabama
Houston, 77004 TX
(713) 529-6900