It’s that chasm that famed Texas writer Dave Hickey exploited to amass a decades-long career as an essayist, at one point being described as the “bad boy of art criticism.” He was born in Fort Worth, attended Texas Christian University for his bachelor’s and earned his master's from the University of Texas. By the time he was let loose into the sphere of art criticism, he was about as Texas as it gets.
In 1967, four years after getting his master's, Hickey borrowed $10,000 and converted the downstairs of an old home in Austin to a DIY art gallery. It was named A Clean, Well-Lighted Place after a 1933 short story by Ernest Hemingway. The gallery’s first show was built around visual artist Jim Franklin, who displayed everything from large-scale paintings to small comic illustrations.
Hickey eventually moved the gallery out of the house to a bigger space just a block away from the Texas Capitol, but would be forced to leave it behind in 1971 when he and his wife, Mary Jane, moved to New York City.
There, Hickey grew to prominence among those within the fine art niche, fashioning himself as a sort of iconoclast who combined razor-sharp criticism with an accessible, everyman sensibility. In 2021, Hickey died of heart disease at 82, leaving behind both an influence and a void to the generations that followed his work. Among those people are Tessa Granowski and Brandon Kennedy, two Texas-born, Hickey-obsessed art curators.
“When I read Dave Hickey's essays, it was like a bright light,” Granowski says. “He writes about art in a democratic way, where he’s breaking open the kind of insular, coded language that people who are in the quote unquote art world only know about. Instead of being purely academic, he’s relating high-minded ideas to kind of high and low culture.”
“I went to North Texas for undergrad, and he was writing for Art Issues at the time,” Kennedy says. “Like, woah, this is different, a new light, honest and not high-falutin. We would just wait for the issues to come out. I was obsessed with reading about art.”
The two connected at a pre-COVID gallery event in Los Angeles and stayed connected on social media for years until Granowski moved to Dallas. They’ve only officially known each other since last December, but they immediately bonded over their reverence for Hickey and mutual interest in opening a physical art space. For Granowkski, her own art gallery. For Kennedy, a home and retail space for his book collection.
“Similar energies attract,” Granowski adds.
A small house in Oak Lawn will be the canvas for Granowski and Kennedy’s joint creative visions. Located at 2921 Sale St., the house’s front two rooms were converted into the Nature Of Things, a small gallery space that Granowski curates. The back room of the house became Kennedy’s OOps bOOks, a book vendor with handpicked selections that match Granowski’s installation.
The debut exhibition was obvious. Granowski and Kennedy collaborated to craft a minimalist interpretation of a maximalist concept, paying tribute to Dave Hickey's life and times using just a few walls of artwork and a table of his books. The exhibition is called A Clean, Well-Lighted Place in meta-homage to the house gallery Hickey founded in Austin.
The centerpiece of the visual art is a Jim Franklin original. This pink and green triangular painting was created as part of the same series featured in Hickey’s original 1967 debut show. Other highlights include Ellen Khansefid’s "Josephine," a reimagined painting of a model on a promo poster at a ‘60s adult theatre, and "Enterprise," a hanging cast bronze sculpture of a thumb going up an ass from Texas artist Terry Allen. In a small courtyard behind the house, a beautiful 1971 Buick Centurion sits fully decked out in mosaic tiles, a striking and intricately designed piece from Allen “Big Al” Bartell.
Nature Of Things' mosaic car in the back is one of the coolest pieces we've seen this year.
Simon Pruitt
Nature of Things and OOps bOOks held their grand opening on Friday, April 11, with Franklin in attendance. The installation will run through May 31, and it will be open Friday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. or by appointment during the week.
The gallery and bookshop are here to stay beyond the Hickey show, with new offerings planned to change out seasonally. Granowski says she hopes to program poetry and small film screening nights at the gallery, describing it as an “open forum cultural space.” We’re excited for what the future holds for this unique new location, but especially to soak up the current Hickey-high that the two curators have us on. As for the ambiguity with how the new space will be used and the eclectic selection inside, it seems the Granowski and Kennedy are following in his footsteps.
“I think some people, especially with Dallas arts coverage, don’t know how to approach it,” says Kennedy, referring to Hickey’s work. “It’s not purely about the art. There’s usually a great narrative that goes along, builds and takes you from place to place.”
