Andy Coolquitt

  • October 8, 2013 7:00 PM

Andy Coolquitt, artist featured in the 2013 solo exhibition attainable excellence at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston

Andy Coolquitt, an Austin-based artist, creates installations that are activated through casual but precise arrangements, suggesting purpose and relationships between elements made of what Coolquitt terms “somebodymades,” as well as manipulated and combined flotsam and jetsam of the artist’s urban environment. Stephanie Buhmann of the Brooklyn Rail writes, “Coolquitt's crops find meaning primarily through re-organization. Combined and fused into larger constructions, these objects are reincarnated.” Coolquitt himself explains his practice as an “interest in basically, creating a place . . . all these objects are just things I can use to that end.”

Coolquitt has shown from Milan, to Berlin, to New York, to Vienna, to closer to home with a recent solo exhibition, attainable excellence, organized by the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston and opening at AMOA_Arthouse in Austin in fall 2012, as well as having an artist’s residency and exhibition this summer at 21er Haus in Vienna, Austria. Despite his international exhibition history, Coolquitt has actually had a quiet and steady career rooted in his domestic setting. In fact, he is perhaps best known for a house, a performance/studio/domestic space that began as his master’s thesis project at the University of Texas in 1994 and continues to the present day. 

For Tuesday Evenings at the Modern Andy Coolquitt presents “You Had to Be There.

 

This popular series of lectures and presentations by artists, architects, historians, and critics is free and open to the public each Tuesday from September 10 through November 19. Lectures begin at 7 pm in the Museum’s auditorium. Seating begins at 6:30 pm and is limited to 250; a live broadcast of the presentations is shown in Café Modern for any additional guests. Free admission tickets (limit two) are available at the Modern’s information desk beginning at 5 pm on the day of the lecture. The Museum galleries remain open until 7 pm on Tuesday evenings during the series.

Café Modern serves cocktails, salads, and appetizers, as well as a fine dining menu, on Tuesday nights during the lecture series. Enjoy the Café Modern experience before or after the lecture; seating is available from 5 pm to 8:30 pm. For reservations, call 817.840.2157 or click here.

 

Andy Coolquitt, installation view of Bau haus, in the middle of our street. Bau haus, in the middle of our…, 2013. Courtesy Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: Johannes Stoll