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Interview with Roy Fridge, conducted by Sarah C. Reynolds

Houston ties

I had been coming back and forth to Houston for years, because of my friendship with Jim Love. He came to Houston in 1953 or 1954, and started showing at the New Arts Gallery

The New Arts Gallery was founded in Houston in 1956, and closed in 1974.
in ’57. I would come down and see some of his shows, so there was a lot of back and forth. When I moved to Houston in 1966, Jim had the front part of this little building he rented on Truxillo, and he let me rent two rooms from him.

In 1966 the Dallas Museum of Contemporary Arts

The short-lived Dallas Museum of Contemporary Arts developed an audience for modern art in Texas and set trends nationally. It was opened in 1957; Douglas MacAgy became its director in 1959. Under MacAgy, the museum organized a number of innovative exhibitions that attracted national attention, but it was merged with the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1963.
no longer existed, so the exciting things happening were here in Houston at the Contemporary Arts Museum that Jerry MacAgy ran—and Jim of course was very important to her for installations and support.

What was exciting was the fact that the galleries like New Arts were showing contemporary Texas artists—so all that added together made it interesting to me to come to Houston, once I decided not to be a hermit on the beach.

As soon as I got here in 1966, Dianne David had David Gallery.

Dianne David founded and operated David Gallery in Houston from 1963 to 1983. She showed various artists, including Jack Boynton, Bob Camblin, Roy Fridge, Jim Love, David McManaway, among others.
She had seen some of my things and invited me to put a show together there in September or October of ’66. Some of the pieces were earlier works; most of them had movement of some kind. I called them “wooden machines” for lack of better terminology. The main piece was called “Singer,” which was based on an old Singer sewing machine that I had built a top on, and by pumping the pedal, you made things move and also play the keyboard things. Every time you’d play it, things began flying off of it—so it was destined to destroy itself to some extent. It survives in a sort of tall totem piece which I call Memorial Singer.

Big man machine

1968. Courtesy of Roy Fridge.

Mixed media

I was in Houston until August of 1969. Besides making sculpture during that period of time, I had two shows at David Gallery. And for two semesters in 1967-68 I was invited by John O’Neill

John O’Neill became chairman of the Rice University Department of Fine Arts in 1965.
to be what they called a guest lecturer at Rice University. Every Friday I would work with both Bob Camblin’s drawing class and Earl Staley’s drawing class. I made a film while I was there just to show students the way to do animation. It was great fun. Also at that time, the Rice Media Center
The Rice University Media Center was founded in 1969 by John and Dominique de Menil with scholar Gerald O’Grady as a consultant. The de Menils’ vision for the center was to use film, photography and art as education tools in research and teaching.
was starting up and Gerald O’Grady invited several visiting lecturers to come in who were pretty well known. In those days they called it “independent filmmaking” and it was basically short, experimental art films, of which I made some. I did one of Claes Oldenburg’s
Claes Oldenburg, b. 1929. A Swedish-born American pop sculptor.
images, rearranging them into my own storyline and putting my own soundtrack to it. There was another film I made about David McManaway. But I made my first film in 1949 while I was still a student at Baylor University. I learned everything I could about making film, and invented my own style of animation. I started this film studio in Dallas in 1951, and did animated television commercials on film—did that for ten years.

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Source:  OpenStax, Houston reflections: art in the city, 1950s, 60s and 70s. OpenStax CNX. May 06, 2008 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10526/1.2
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