ART SOULS OF THE SOUTH

Art Rosenbaum, My Mind Will Never be ’Aisy. Courtesy of Tif Sigfrids.

This April, three Dallas Art Fair exhibitors to bring shining examples from their artist roster.

BY TERRI PROVENCAL

Image captions.

Above: Roscoe Hall, Knew it was Real, 2021, acrylic, paper, pastels, and Benny Green, 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of Scott Miller Projects. Below: Austin Eddy, Autumn Song., 2021, oil, Flashe, paper on canvas, 46 x 28 in. Courtesy of SOCO Gallery.

Clockwise from left: Roscoe Hall, Uncle Johnny (Circa 1991), 2021, acrylic, denim, rayon, ink, pastel, tears, and touch, 72 x 60 in.; Roscoe Hall, Jerusalem Heights, 2021, acrylic, pastels, charcoal, spray, new Drake album, orange wine, and indica, 60 x 72 in.; Roscoe Hall, Alabama Blackbelt, 2021 acrylic, ink, charcoal, and love, 48 x 60 in.; Roscoe Hall, Morality Check, 2021, acrylic, ink, charcoal, pastels, brandy’s newsiest album, German beer, and sativa, 48 x 60 in. All Courtesy of Scott Miller Projects.

Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, Alabama

While it’s a very new gallery, Scott Miller Projects is already making its second appearance at the Dallas Art Fair; with 2021’s delayeduntil-November iteration barely in the rearview mirror, Miller is back for 2022. His booth will focus on a sole artist: Birmingham’s own Roscoe Hall, whose large-scale paintings mesmerized viewers in 2021. Look for seven to ten new works this time, (no returning pieces, since they all sold last year) and expect to be knocked out. Last November, Hall’s enormous triptych of Black inmates behind bars, End How You Start, (2021, acrylic, pastel, ink, paper towels, hybrid sativa and indica, Hennessy, and Anita Baker) was a fairgoer magnet. “People came to the booth specifically to see that painting,” Scott Miller recalls, “and they’d stand in front of it for 20 minutes or so. It’s a powerful painting that spoke to a lot of people in many different ways; the face of each prisoner tells a different story…it’s what I think is amazing about the way Roscoe paints.”

Although he’s newly minted as a gallerist, Miller has a long history in the art world. For the past 30 years his love of art has cast him as a collector, a tour guide for collectors and students on artrelated trips, and a consultant who’s helped place works in private and public collections. “It’s just out of a passion and a love for the art,” he admits, “and at 52 years old I decided if I don’t do it now, I’ll never follow that dream, so I opened the gallery in June of 2021.”

Miller learned of Roscoe Hall’s art just as he was deciding to open Scott Miller Projects. Hall’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Jerusalem Heights, involved large-scale autobiographically based paintings: Hall’s grandfather, Uncle Johnny, his neighborhood, friends, and more. His work’s been described as equal parts German neo-expressionism, graffiti, and folk art, but with his undergrad in photography and an MA in art history, he’s nobody’s naïf. Hall, also a renowned chef, grew up in the restaurant biz, working at his grandfather’s legendary Dreamland Bar-B-Que in Tuscaloosa. It’s no wonder that his paintings’ highly textured surfaces are chunked with media, including paper towels—a nod to his barbeque upbringing. And it could well be the chef in him that includes miscellaneous creative “ingredients” in his lists of mediums—Hennessy, sativa, “brandy’s newsiest album” and “lots of love” get cited, right alongside “acrylic, ink, charcoal, pastels.” It’s all in there.

Takeaways from Miller’s Dallas Art Fair 2021 experience? “It was interesting being on the other side of the table, because for the last 30 years I’ve been going to fairs all over the world as a collector,” he says. “What was great about Dallas is that we were able to really engage with the collectors that we met, and we had lots of time to sit down with them, learn about their collections, and talk about the artists that we brought—Roscoe Hall, Deborah Brown, and Merrick Adams. We were able to place all of those artists in collections, which was really nice.”

SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina

A first-timer to the Dallas Art Fair, Charlotte’s SOCO Gallery is showing four artists at their booth, culled from their roster of 23. Gallery director Hilary Burt and owner Chandra Johnson aren’t strangers to the fair, but 2022 seemed like a great time to finally bring their program to the party. SOCO recently exhibited at the Armory Show and at NADA, Miami, and Burt’s perspective is telling. “The Dallas Art Fair really feels personable,” she says. “NADA and Armory are completely different too, but Dallas was totally different when I visited last November. It felt less crazy and harried, more personal; you could have great conversations as you were walking around, and there was an excitement about the fair being back too, which was wonderful.”

SOCO Gallery is seven years old, and from the get-go its mission has been uniquely welcoming. Located in a renovated 1920s bungalow, it also houses its own bookshop, a coffee shop, and a men’s shop—a great place to get lost. “We really pride ourselves on giving more of an accessible, less-exclusive view into the art market,” Burt says. “It gives people a relaxed feeling, where you’re not walking into a white cube where no one’s going to talk to you about the art or answer your questions…we really want to make people feel comfortable when they walk in, and we’ve been quite successful in that.” They specialize in contemporary work from mid-career and emerging artists, with a program of six or seven, usually solo, exhibitions annually. Recently the gallery opened an adjacent space, SOCO Annex, which is more experimental in nature—“more performative, more digital, more socio- and politically driven art,” Burt adds.

One of the SOCO artists on the bill is Summer Wheat, a New York–based mid-career artist who’s well known to Dallas collectors and to the Dallas Museum of Art, which has her large-scale painting Bread Winners (2017) in its permanent collection. Wheat’s practice involves painting, sculpture, drawing, and installation; expect one or two of her works, including Pulling Tongue of Snake (2019), a mosaic pebble seat fashioned from fiberglass, stone, and grout. Her recent acrylic-on-aluminum mesh paintings involve her proprietary technique of “pushing” the paint through the mesh, creating a tapestry-like texture that begs viewer engagement. “They look almost like textiles,” Burt offers. “It’s crazy, it’s amazing.”

SOCO artist Jackie Milad will also be on view at the booth. The Baltimore-based artist’s large-scale Falla (2021, mixed media on hand-dyed canvas collage) is a great introduction to her work. A child of immigrants, (father Egyptian, mother Honduran), her art acknowledges iconography from both cultures. “Her pieces are collages, but they’re deep, there’s a lot of different layers to them, much like the graffiti that she’s seen in Cairo,” Burt explains. “The buildings, the mosque built on top of a temple, and a church that’s on top of the mosque—decaying and showing all these different layers—that’s what her work is based on. Her textile pieces are quite thick.”

Look too for abstract works from Austin Eddy and Halsey Hathaway, both New York–based.

Opposite page: Summer Wheat, Pulling Tongue of Snake (2019), fiberglass, stone, grout, 18 x 30 x 26 in.; Jackie Milad, Falla, 2021, mixed-media on hand-dyed canvas collage, 69 x 74.5 in.; This page top: Summer Wheat, Outpouring, 2020, acrylic on aluminum mesh, 47 x 68 in.; Below from left: Halsey Hathaway, Untitled, 2020 acrylic on canvas, 45 x 30 in.; Jackie Milad, Openings in the Walls (second iteration), 2020, mixed media on hand-dyed canvas, 72 x 68 in. All courtesy of SOCO Gallery.

This page top: Art Rosenbaum, Painting Fire, 1993, oil on linen, 80.75 x 106.25 in.; Below from left: Art Rosenbaum, A Man Has Been Here a Long Time, Dilmus Hall, Artist, 1986, oil on linen, 88 x 64 in.; Gracie DeVito, NY Protagonist, 2021, oil on canvas, 84 x 84 in.; Opposite: Adrianne Rubenstein, Little Trees, oil on panel. All courtesy of Tif Sigfrids.

Tif Sigfrids, Athens, Georgia

Tif Sigfrids has a long history in the gallery world, much of it in Los Angeles. Before she ran her own eponymous gallery in Hollywood from 2013 to 2017, she’d cut her teeth as director of LA’s Thomas Solomon Gallery, starting in 2010. But Sigfrids also has a long history, or love affair, with Athens, Georgia. “I’d spent time in Athens as a teenager, and it had always been this place, in my imagination, that would be nice to live in some day, and I’d come back and visit,” she says. “It has a really rich music scene, and as a teen I was really into music—still am—but that was part of my attraction to the place. But coming back there after LA was a really big leap, I have to say…”

She made the big leap to Athens in 2018, opening Tif Sigfrids in June of that year. Although she’s attended Dallas Art Fair previously, in her director’s role, 2022 marks her first visit as an owner/gallerist, and she’s psyched. “I’d been meaning to do the Dallas Art Fair for years,” she says. “I’m super excited to do it because I’ve spent a lot of time in Dallas, and I have several relationships with people there. Dallas is this incredible place for collectors, I think—there’s some really serious, impressive collections there.”

When Sigfrids made the move to Athens she brought along her same roster of artists, but she also added some from the Athens area. One local artist she’s worked extensively with is Art Rosenbaum, whom she plans to show this April. Rosenbaum is an Athens art legend, having taught for decades in the University of Georgia’s art department there; he’s also a Grammy-winning musical folklorist and documentarian, and something of a bridge between the city’s visual arts and musical worlds. Sigfrids will also be bringing works by New York–based gallery artist Adrianne Rubenstein, a painter whose expressionist-leaning works are representationally grounded, often depicting everyday objects, sometimes mined from childhood memories. Paintings by LA-based gallery artist Gracie DeVito will also be on view. Sigfrids plans to show DeVito’s recent large-scale paintings, which blur the line between abstraction and figuration. The artist may already be familiar to fairgoers; local gallery 12.26 presented her at the fair in 2019.

For this inaugural showing at the Dallas Art Fair, Tif Sigfrids will be sharing a booth with March, a new New York–based “curatorial platform and gallery” that’s the brainchild of founder Phillip March Jones. A colleague of Sigfrids, Jones himself has deep roots in the South—Kentucky specifically—and he’s the founder/director of Institute 193, Lexington’s acclaimed nonprofit contemporary art space. “Phillip is thinking about bringing drawings by Thornton Dial,” Sigfrids says, “because he’s just establishing his gallery and program in New York; there’s a lot of artists that he’s worked with over the years…he’s still developing his program, so to speak.” Look too for paintings by gallery artist Claudia Keep, originally from Virginia, whose scene-based works elevate the quotidian to the extraordinary. P