This October, the American Folk Art Museum will present self-taught artist and musician Otis Houston Jr. with the Museum’s Visionary Award, which recognizes the achievements of Houston Jr.’s prolific, three-decade artistic practice encompassing installation works, performance, collage, found object assemblages, paintings, text-based works, and music.
Based in East Harlem, New York, Houston Jr. is best known for his unmistakable and provocative site-specific performances underneath the Triborough Bridge (now the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) alongside the FDR Drive in Manhattan, designed to engage with motorists and passersby. For more than 25 years, Houston Jr. has conducted impromptu street performances at this site, composed of sculptural assemblages of ephemeral objects, such as fruit, as well as signs made of towels and cardboard covered with poetic phrases in spray paint.
The public stage for his art has earned him the attention of international media, with profiles in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others, as well as recognition from renowned galleries and museums, including The John Michael Kohler Arts Center and Art Preserve, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, which staged the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in 2022.
An ever-present theme running throughout Houston Jr.’s practice is social activism. His work frequently calls attention to issues of racial injustice, poverty, addiction, and inequality, often through his irreverent sense of humor, while simultaneously offering liberatory messages of hope, health, and love. His signature, aphoristic text-based works include messages declaring “Can’t GO Unless WE ALL GO,” “You Can Kill Me But You Can’t Kill My Spirit,” and, “The Last Frontier Love.”
Raised in Greenville, South Carolina, Houston Jr. did not begin to engage with art until he was incarcerated in the late 1970s following his relocation to Harlem. It was during this time that he began to read voraciously about art and attended art therapy classes, setting the foundation for the practice that he would later maintain through his regular presence along the FDR beginning in 1997. The American Folk Art Museum currently holds three works by Houston Jr. in its permanent collection, all of which are dated to the artist’s early career in the late 1980s when he first began experimenting with mixed-media and collage as part of his art therapy classes.
Otis Houston Jr. remarked: “”Well, it feels really great, after twenty-seven years, to be receiving this award, and to know that all of my work hasn’t been in vain. I’m thankful for all the people who have helped me get here, Jacob and Sam and everyone from the gallery, and everyone else down the line. And I thank God and my family for telling me to be myself, and I appreciate it. Art has helped me in so many ways. In one way, just doing what my mother told me to do—being myself. My art is an outward expression of who I am. It fulfills me. I meet so many people, it relieves stress, helps me to have a purpose in life, and I enjoy every minute of it.”
Jason T. Busch, Becky and Bob Alexander Director & CEO of the American Folk Art Museum, commented: “For nearly four decades, Otis Houston Jr. has cultivated a truly unique and independent voice, imbuing his art with social consciousness to drive awareness for change and progress. His work is situated at the core of the Museum’s mission of championing self-taught artists whose practices participate in the expansion of the art historical canon. We are extremely honored to present Houston Jr. with the American Folk Art Museum’s Visionary Award, and further shed a light on the importance of his work.”
Established in 2008 through the generosity and foresight of AFAM’s late Trustee Audrey B. Heckler, the Visionary Award honors an individual, institution, or project that has made a unique and distinctive contribution to the field of self-taught and vernacular art. Supported by the Foundation to Promote Self-Taught Art, past recipients of the Visionary Award include Phyllis Kind (2008), Sam Farber (2011), Lee Kogan (2013), Ruth DeYoung Kohler (2015), The Souls Grown Deep Foundation (2016), Rebecca Hoffberger (2017), and Tom di Maria, Creative Growth Art Center (2019), among others.
The Visionary Award will be presented to Houston Jr. during a ceremony at the Museum’s annual benefit gala on October 25. The gala will also recognize and honor Miriam Buhl, pro bono counsel at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, as well as AFAM Trustees Ralph and Bobbi Terkowitz, whose longtime support and contributions to the Museum have made a lasting impact at the Museum. This year’s “Casino Night” theme for the gala is playful homage to and celebration of the Museum’s current exhibition, Playing with Design: Gameboards, Art, and Culture, which features more than 100 historic gameboards, from the collection of Bruce and Doranna Wendel, and explores the history of play and games in American culture.
Busch remarked further: “We are proud to honor Miriam, Ralph, and Bobbi at our gala this year. Each of them has been so magnanimous in their generosity to the Museum, donating their time, expertise, and guidance in helping steer the Museum into the future, and better positioning us to deliver on our mission. We are grateful for their support.”
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About Otis Houston Jr.
Otis Houston Jr. (b. 1954; Greenville, SC) lives and works in East Harlem, New York. A self-taught artist and musician, Houston Jr. began making work after taking an art class while incarcerated. Since 1997, he has maintained an ongoing presence under the Triborough Bridge on the FDR Drive in New York, where he stages impromptu performances and a site-specific installation of signage and sculpture.
Houston Jr. has presented solo exhibitions at The John Michael Kohler Arts Center and Art Preserve, Sheboygan, Wisconsin (2022); Gordon Robichaux, New York (2021); Room East, New York (2017), and two-person exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux, New York (with Florence Derive, 2018), and Cave, Detroit (with Miles Huston, 2016). His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at Vielmetter Los Angeles (curated by Mark McKnight), Los Angeles; apexart (curated by Sam Gordon), New York; Room East, New York; The Broodthaers Society of America, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park (curated by Chelsea Spengemann), New York; and CANADA, New York; Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; Marc Selwyn Gallery, Los Angeles; Rebecca Camacho Presents (curated by Bob Linder), San Francisco; and F Magazine, Houston, Texas.
Profiles of the artist and his art have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Art Newspaper, the Brooklyn Rail, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, and Contemporary Art Daily.
In 2022, the first monograph dedicated to Houston Jr.’s work, Can’t GO Unless WE ALL GO, was co-published by Zolo Press and Gordon Robichaux and included text by Zoë Hopkins.
Images and videos of his work taken by daily commuters and passersby populate YouTube and numerous blogs. Houston’s album of original songs, America, was released in 2006 on iTunes and reissued in 2020 as a vinyl record published by Post Present Medium. BLACK CHEROKEE, a twenty-two-minute documentary on the artist directed by Sam Cullman and Benjamin Rosen, was released in 2012.
About the American Folk Art Museum
Founded in 1961, the American Folk Art Museum is a global leader dedicated to the preservation and promotion of folk and self-taught art across time and place. Candid, genuine, and unexpected, the Museum celebrates the creativity of individuals whose singular talents have been refined largely through personal experience rather than formal artistic training. With a collection spanning 8,000 works of art from four centuries and nearly every continent, the American Folk Art Museum engages people of all backgrounds through its collections, exhibitions, publications, and public programs as the leading forum shaping the understanding and appreciation of folk and self-taught art. Thanks to the generous support of our members, patrons, and donors, admission to the Museum is always free.
Image: Otis Houston Jr. Photo by Ejlat Feuer, courtesy Gordon Robichaux, NY