Today we’d like to introduce you to Amy Beth Wright.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I don’t remember a time I wasn’t drawing. My first diary before I could write words is all in pictures. My parents say I would sit and draw for hours as a three-year-old and unprompted started going door-to-door selling my work when I was five. Growing up, I was surrounded by makers and inventors. I realize now how fortunate I was to have family and teachers that encouraged and pushed me to work hard doing what I love during art programs every year in grade school. With the support of my art teacher, Nicole Brisco, by the time I was 18, I had a portfolio scholarship to SCAD and my first-year credits of college completed in high school.
At Savannah College of Art & Design, I studied under mentors I still try to keep in touch with, painters Craig Drennen and Michael Brown. In college, I spent the money I earned in the food and service industry intended for energy bills, actually buying mostly art supplies and often slept on desks pushed together in the winter. By the time I graduated, I was lucky enough to be in a group show with Michael Brown and sell all the paintings I showed in Savannah galleries. Tired of waiting tables, I moved to Houston in 2005 as the artist assistant for Molly Gochman. She started a collective of artists, and I became her Art Director helping create and install major multimedia interactive installations. I wanted to get back to painting and began teaching leisure classes to adults and children. I kept a studio on Montrose Boulevard and showed locally.
In 2010, I applied to graduate schools to get better at painting and chose the University of Houston to be able to study under Rachel Hecker. For years, I have thought of her as the smartest and most talented painter in the south, and she easily became my favorite supportive and generous mentor. However, all of the UH Graduate Faculty were incredible like Aaron Parazette and Rex Koontz. I owe much of my growth to many of the art faculty there.
Jerry Saltz has also always been this sort of remote guide from afar with his candid writing and energetic lectures, and I got direct advice from him when he picked my work for a group show the semester I graduated from UH. I followed his advice and spent the last five years focusing on my paintings and working with the underground art scene of Houston. I gave up my phone and car for a year to be more isolated in the studio in order to develop my own voice. When I’m not in my there, I’m probably teaching at Houston Community College with hope to enrich the lives of our community with art in a very direct way.
I guess it all started, though, with my grandmother Betty Wright – I keep the Beth in my name in her honor, and my work is a tribute to her, her mother, our creative time together, and all underrepresented women makers.
Please tell us about your art.
An ongoing painting series since 2014, Calendear examines processes and materials from women textile artists that have been historically overlooked, typically made to the scale of small books or large blankets. Appropriated grids from my great-grandmother’s afghans compositionally order my collections of repetitive sensations from each season, never resolved through a computer in order to emphasize the paintings’ slow physical impromptu handmade qualities, taking months or even years to complete. I like to think of my paintings like blankets growing as flora.
I continually ask the question, ‘What else can paint do?’ By sculpting my own paint, I make with various materials and lifting it off the surface of a raw ground, I push the typical expectations and possibilities of painting. Specific patterns and colors hopefully encourage meditation and an awareness of slow natural rhythms, cycles, and interconnectedness. I try to record visual connections between people and plants such as weaving, a symbolic gesture of intertwining.
Ultimately, I’m playfully interested in the colors, textures, and forms that repeatedly surround our daily lives and their effects and significance on our subconscious thoughts and actions.
Given everything that is going on in the world today, do you think the role of artists has changed? How do local, national or international events and issues affect your art?
We live in a time when anyone can make and share practically whatever we want within our financial limitations, but at the same time, we also run the risk of it all looking the same when we oversaturate ourselves with the internet and specifically social media. However, those platforms help to massively share information about so many of the important cultural revolutions we are going through. I find our current women’s movement of particular interest, empowering all women in general as well as artists, making them more visible after they’ve been shut out the majority of the time. I love being a part of a local women’s painting collective/critique group called Bdgrrlsclb, and think it’s important for creatives to band together because being an artist has its own unique difficulties, and I find the most support from other women artists.
I try to keep an awareness of what’s going on in the world as well as my backyard but believe I can make my most significant contributions through making and sharing artwork, so I keep my studio a place of meditation, not letting myself get drowned in outside noise. Or drown in a hurricane! The increasingly extreme weather has encouraged me to use resourceful durable materials whenever I can. I moved outside the loop to afford a bigger studio recently because I got a deal after Harvey with my studio being in a major flood zone, so there’s definitely an even increased pressure I put on myself to make my most meaningful work and get it out into the world as soon as possible.
There are so many manipulative negative images of unjust propaganda we surf through daily that I aim to combat it with deliberate, thoughtful and hopefully beautiful tactile experiences, maybe bringing us back into our own bodies and temporarily away from our congested digital lives. Painting is unique in that way. I make work that typically doesn’t show well on a screen because it’s meant to be seen, felt, and even heard in reality, deliberately tiny or large scale, with details slow to see at once, but like all good art, the more you look, hopefully the more it opens up in meaning and form, empowering and encouraging your own creative thinking.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
The meticulously talented Celan Bouillet curated a show recently with her colorful work, the exciting sculptures of Grace Zuniga, and my most recent paintings called Endless Summer, currently at Sabine Street Studio’s new main gallery space, open to the public weekdays through Saturday 9 AM – 5 PM through December 15th of this year.
I contribute work every year to help local nonprofits like Lawndale Art Center, but this year my retablo is benefitting MECA opening October 15, 2018, and organized by a local curator I love, Theresa Escobedo. She’s curating my upcoming solo exhibition opening June 6, 2019, at the new Main Street Projects gallery, 3717 Main Street 77002.
I have another body of work for a different solo exhibition that’s also been in progress for years and will be looking for the right venue when it’s completed in another year or two. In the meantime, I try to keep my website and Instagram accounts updated with selected works, current exhibitions, and general information – but I’m warning you now, I haven’t owned a computer in years!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.AmyBethWright.com
- Email: helloamybethwright@gmail.com
- Instagram: @amyamyamyamyamyamyamy & @amybethwrightdotcom
- Facebook: https://Facebook.com/amyelizabethwright
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/amybethwrightok
- Other: https://LinkedIn.com/in/amybethwright
Image Credit:
Diana Nash (for my profile picture only)
Getting in touch: VoyageHouston is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
