76 works span galleries themed At Odds, At Sea, At Home
MARFA — The Suburbs of Eden, a solo show featuring 76 works by Marfa-based artist Julie Speed, opens at Ballroom Marfa Friday, September 20, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m.
At 5:30 p.m. Speed and curator Christopher Blay will lead a walk through of the exhibition, predominantly paintings, that take over the entire gallery with three main themes: At Odds, At Sea and At Home.
The Suburbs of Eden is Speed’s first large-scale exhibition in Marfa, where she has lived and worked with her husband, musician Fran Christina, since 2006. The vast majority of the works on view are more recent, having been created at Speed’s studio, the old Fort D.A. Russell jail adjacent to the Chinati Foundation.
Ballroom co-founder Fairfax Dorn, who helped curate the show, said the inspiration for the exhibition evolved from the ongoing celebration of Ballroom Marfa’s 20th anniversary, informed by “the spirit of Marfa and the artists — local, national, international — who have explored making work in Marfa, Texas.”
“Speed’s paintings and collages are visual stories of the cosmos, and the complex mysteries of being human, which resonate deeply in the context of Ballroom Marfa,” added Ballroom Director Holly Harrison.
For Speed, a prolific artist who has shown work across Texas and the greater United States for the past 40 years, the exhibition is an excuse to sink her teeth into a good project and make room for new ideas. “I’m like, ‘Oh, boy. Let’s finish off the details with this, and then let’s go to the next thing’,” Speed said.
She has a concurrent exhibition, Cain & Able, on view at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center For The Arts in Lubbock.
When what was originally planned as a two-person show turned into a one-person show this past summer, Speed got to work selecting the 70-plus works, organizing them into themes and measuring gallery walls with the help of the Ballroom curatorial team. Speed said it took several shake ups of plans to ensure the exhibition “kept the flow from gallery to gallery so it makes both visual and psychological sense.”
The “At Odds” section of the gallery, painted a deep red, represents human strife, conflict and chaos — a common theme in Speed’s work. The “At Sea,” section, painted in hues of gray, centers around oceanic scenes and her abstract works. The final “At Home” section, painted shades of black and lit so that the paintings appear to float off of the walls, features scenes of domesticity and the night sky. In addition to paintings, a number of 3D objects are on view.
Speed is known for her figurative paintings that incorporate elements of collage — found, damaged paper from widely-published 19th century biblical, medical and newspaper texts she has been collecting since she was 18-years-old. Her gender ambiguous human forms, often obscured by a third eye or limb, can be found interacting with each other, animals and the environment in literary scenes that offer contemporary takes on timeless themes like war and male domination.
She’s always thought deeply about the world, specifically the destruction of the earth at the hands of humans. Her current fixations — with crypto, A.I. and quantum computing — echo concerns she had as a child about The Bay of Pigs and the atomic bomb. “I was trying to understand relativity — like I couldn’t. I still can’t,” Speed laughed.
With most of her earlier works already sold to collectors and no time to borrow them before the start of the exhibition, The Suburbs of Eden features mostly newer works by Speed. One of the latest — titled She Took The Snake (…and left him up a tree with his dick in his hand) — is a biblical, Adam and Eve-inspired scene turned on its head. Adam appears in the tree, where the serpent is traditionally depicted, his torso dripping with blood from his freshly removed rib, in the same pose as the muse in Manet’s painting Olympia. Eve, her back turned to the viewer, is walking away wielding the snake, her supposed tempter.
Speed — noting she doesn’t have a religious bone in her body — said the stories of Adam and Eve and The Tower of Babble resonate especially now given current events. The exhibition title, The Suburbs of Eden, is one her friend singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin dreamt up for one of her paintings that she put in her pocket and finally decided to use for the Ballroom show. (A recent close encounter with a rattlesnake was another inspiration.)
Speed said she felt the title describes not only that particular painting but “just about all the paintings” she’s done in her whole life. “That, for me, is the whole nut of everything I’ve been doing. We get to live on this f—-ing amazing planet that you look at everything, like every blade of grass and every ant mound and everything. It’s so marvelous and so well put together and we’re f—-ing it up,” Speed said.
When she was young Speed suffered from night terrors; her first memory is of a nightmare where she got shot in the head and killed. But the night terrors subsided when she started making art, she said.
Speed is self-taught, having dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design after just one year. But she gained an invaluable informal education in her formative years when she started working at a gallery in a small town in Connecticut, home to mostly Portuguese fisherman, and selling her drawings.
“There was a gallery that had good New York artists in this little podunk town,” Speed said. “I drew every summer I worked there. I also sold paintings, and they went from $12 to $15 to $20, and then I’d have to give the gallery — at that time it was 30% — and then I just kept going.”
The gallerist Speed worked under lived a “fabulous, incredible,” life, she said. She had been an ambulance driver in World War I, ran a fashion show that traveled the world on elephants and knew Man Ray. The gallerist’s sister was a working artist, who Speed recalls being around 6-feet-tall, 65-years-old with a black pageboy haircut. “She’d take her cigarette and blow her smoke up through her eyelashes and make caustic comments. And I’d be like, ‘I wanna be her.’ I was a chubby little freckled kid,” Speed laughed.
She also had a high school teacher who played a key role by affirming her work. Speed recalls him simply saying “These are good. Weird is good,” of her paintings. “So I had someone else who would say –– okay we’re not gonna send her to the shrink,” Speed said. “This is art. This is category: art.”
The way she describes it, her paintings begin with no final picture in mind. It’s a process of “connecting the dots,” in her head, Speed said. Her routines of painting, gardening, walking and taking in the night sky allow things to subconsciously bubble to the top. And works may hold multiple meanings. A depiction of strangulation in one of her paintings, for example, is a reference to George Floyd, Speed’s mother who died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and the Coronavirus pandemic.
“It’s like I’ve had this soup boiling on the back stove for 60, 70 years –– a long time. Everything I ever read, everything that ever happened to me, everything I ever did is in there. And so one thing leads to another thing leads to another thing,” Speed said. “So I’m following it, not leading it. I don’t think of an idea and then paint it. It’s like, I start painting and then make the associations.”
There are exceptions for when she gets completely enraged by something, like in 2019 when the state court of Alabama declared abortion illegal even in cases of rape or incest, which resulted in The Rights of Sperm, a painting that appears in the show. The painting’s meaning is “not subtle,” Speed said.
The final work in the show, wryly titled Long Haul (…miracles happen & we get a brain) is a night sky painting juxtaposed by two symmetrical paper squares illustrating a group of men trudging through the snow during a storm, their sled burdened by a large cerebrum. Speed has partnered with Big Bend Conservation Alliance to produce posters and T-shirts of similar works to benefit dark sky initiatives in the region.
“If a–hole billionaires would just stop shooting space junk into the sky and the rest of us would simply put shades on our outdoor lights then maybe maybe future people on the rest of the planet will also be able to see the arch of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, in the same way we still can just about every night out here in the Big Bend,” Speed said.
In 2012, Speed and Christina decided to set up a foundation through the Austin Community Foundation that will preserve Speed’s studio, work and their home when they pass away through an endowment. At that point Speed stopped selling work through her gallery and quit smoking. Her current goal is to make 400 paintings for the foundation — so far, she’s made 250.
Ballroom Marfa, in collaboration with Speed, is planning a number of public programs around The Suburbs of Eden, which will be on view until February 2. Events include a cello concert by Matt Haimovitz on October 19 — inspired by Speed’s fondness for Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Cello — and spoken word poetry performances featuring local poets and writers responding to the exhibition on December 12. A printed catalog of the exhibition, featuring an essay by Speed, will be available for purchase.
For more information, visit ballroommarfa.org.