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Artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin have covered miles of interdisciplinary ground during the first decade of their “50 States” project, an epic undertaking to reclaim long-lost histories of queer life across the United States, state by state.
Their first installations incorporated videos, conceptual actions and a wild range of objects. The history always comes first, then the artists design a show with whatever mix of media sings with it best.
To convey the open roads of Wyoming, they “painted” by driving over panels coated with soil and wax. For their Louisiana project about a ship captain, his cabin boy and the indigo trade, they designed and hand-dyed sails for a boat. As part of their Colorado project, they evoked the life of a 19th century transgender rancher with a flannel shirt and heritage sheep’s wool.
“Wayfinding,” at the Blaffer Art Museum, is something else again. The artists’ strongest and most straightforward presentation yet, it captures the soul of the whole project through the eerie visual poetry of drawings made with charcoal powder and wind.
When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; noon-5 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays, through Oct. 9
Where: Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, 4173 Elgin
Details: Free; blafferartmuseum.org; 713-743-9521
The drawings are based on photographs the artists convert digitally into laser-cut stencils. They lay the stencils on paper, dust them with the powder, lift the stencils, and turn on an air compressor to stir up wind. It’s not a gimmick; the powder would not adhere without the air, which forces the particles into the paper’s texture.
The results are mysterious. Crisp lines bleed into deep shadows. Larger grounds fade in and out, suggesting the shifting sands of time. The subjects are there and yet not there, appearing and disappearing at once.
Vaughan and Margolin don’t really want to spend their career experimenting. They’ve been hungry to find a signature technique that might connect the dots between each state’s histories.
They first used wind with graphite powder in 2017 for “50 States: Texas,” which featured a series of accordion-fold drawings based on the pages of a late 19th century novel about a lesbian love affair. The technique was passive then: They lifted the stencils and left the powder to sit and smudge with ambient air currents and visitors’ hands. (Eventually they fixed the drawings, which were printed and boxed by Flatbed Press a limited edition artists’ book.)
They made their first large-scale wind drawings after two years of unsatisfying research in Arkansas. They learned that in 1926, the white president of the Missouri & North Arkansas Railway moved with his Black lover to a small town that had expelled its entire Black population 20 years earlier, and that the men had lived there together in a converted luxury railcar for seven years before they were run out of town, too.
But Vaughan and Margolin couldn’t verify the story. “We were working off the assertions of a couple of historians and hints in contemporaneous newspaper articles, but nothing that you could stand by and say, ‘Here’s the smoking love letter that fully documents this,” Vaughan says. The artists finally found the railcar, but it had been destroyed.
“It was burned into a heap of ash, like so much of the rest of our histories — whether by people covering their own tracks or embarrassed family members,” Vaughan explains. “The Texas project was still fresh in our minds, so this methodology of ephemeral drawings that were done with the remains of fire — charcoal — felt like the thing.”
They made seven Arkansas drawings and figured they were done — until a year or two later, when someone asked to see the drawings. By the time Blaffer director Steven Matijcio approached them about doing a show, they realized the concept could be “flagbearer” for the whole “50 States” project.
“It hits so many of the emotional, thematic elements of our work — this idea of wind having a long memory and these histories existing in our broader cultural fabric almost through their erasure,” Vaughan says. “There’s something about the entropy in them that makes them more a part of our collective American memory, identity, mythology and history.”
The new drawings of “Wayfinding” represent all the states they’ve covered so far.
The centerpiece is a pair of multi-panel works, “Oregon Trail” and “The North Platte River,” reflecting the moment when “50 States” was conceived. Stretching 26 feet long and displayed back-to-back, they’re based on stills of video footage the artists shot in Wyoming in 2013, when they retraced the 1,200-mile route of the pioneering couple they’d read about in the book “Men in Eden.”
The show opens with “The Spit Image,” a monumental depiction of a cell tower at a Dallas strip mall where a lesbian bar by that name once operated. The shifty shadows within this tower’s tubes conjure a continuous stream of human histories.
The charcoal also sucks the light out of images, casting a gloomy mood that feels right at a time when queer culture is being repressed. The artists weren’t aiming for that, but they see it.
Major strides were happening in the queer rights movement when Vaughan and Margolin started “50 States,” and they felt exuberant, sensing that the rugged landscape of the American west was a land of gay men, too. “Now we’re all witnessing an enormous societal and legislative backlash to that progress,” Margolin says.
Also, the further he and Vaughan dug into the idea of a queer national heritage, the more they realized they couldn’t just own the proud parts. They had to own the darkness, too. The drawings honor stories of loss “with somber reverence,” Vaughan suggests. “We’re trying to hold both the great beauty and the melancholy.”
And moody charcoal is apparently just a beginning.
Earlier this summer, Vaughan and Margolin were commissioned to create a video for the façade of the Museum of Art and Design in New York, to pay homage to an earlier structure that was a nexus of queer culture-making before the AIDS pandemic. They based their video on two new wind drawings, this time choosing a pigment that’s more confrontational, sassy and celebratory than charcoal: It’s a ferocious Dayglo pink.
Molly Glentzer is a Houston-area writer.
Molly Glentzer, a staff arts critic since 1998, writes mostly about dance and visual arts but can go anywhere a good story leads. Through covering public art in parks, she developed a beat focused on Houston's emergence as one of the nation's leading "green renaissance" cities.
During about 30 years as a journalist Molly has also written for periodicals, including Texas Monthly, Saveur, Food & Wine, Dance Magazine and Dance International. She collaborated with her husband, photographer Don Glentzer, to create "Pink Ladies & Crimson Gents: Portraits and Legends of 50 Roses" (2008, Clarkson Potter), a book about the human culture behind rose horticulture. This explains the occasional gardening story byline and her broken fingernails.
A Texas native, Molly grew up in Houston and has lived not too far away in the bucolic town of Brenham since 2012.
“It’s serious,” Payne said Saturday afternoon. "People are dying. People have died. We just want ... the environmental injustice to stop in our community."