Cris Worley Fine Arts is proud to present our first solo exhibition of photographs by Alan Govenar. The exhibition entitled, Always Beginning. Never Ending., opens Saturday, January 11th, and will be on view through February 15th. The gallery will hold an Opening Reception for the artist, Saturday, January 11th, from 5-7pm. The artist will be in attendance.
In Always Beginning. Never Ending., Alan Govenar’s photographs detail the East Texas landscape. Using nine photographs, Govenar sees the landscape as holding both the past and present. The images carry multitudes – as a quiet road retains more horror than it seems, as James Byrd Jr. was dragged behind a pickup truck and murdered on June 7, 1998. Contrasting landscapes across East Texas, Govenar depicts how history can be made invisible, as this horrific road is equated with the quite beauty of the lotus pond. Yet, the land never forgets, carrying these horrors even today. The history of the land never ends, yet, it is also always beginning, as the landscape’s present growth holds its past.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Govenar’s Artist Statement takes the form of a poem:
Always beginning.
Never ending.
Photographs remember.
Images define experience. Imperfections and all.
Seeing the ordinary, with an eye to make what is, something more.
Nine prints. One video.
East Texas. Disparate places. 228 miles apart.
Animating the clouds with emotions difficult to reconcile.
A lotus pond in a drainage ditch in Ferris.
A quiet road on the outskirts of Jasper.
The horrors of the past invisible.
Knowing what happened
on June 7, 1998
changes everything.
What appears peaceful may not be.
Lotus flowers blooming.
Going to seed at the same time.
Purity and rebirth.
On a summer day.
The landscape prevails.
Always Beginning. Never Ending. will run concurrently with a 50-year retrospective of Govenar’s photographs, books, and other media. The retrospective, titled The Light in Between, will be on display from January 24 – March 1, 2025 at the SP/N Gallery, University of Texas at Dallas.
Alan Govenar is an award-winning writer, poet, novelist, playwright, photographer, folklorist, and filmmaker. He is director of Documentary Arts, a non-profit organization he founded in 1985 to advance essential perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures. Govenar is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of more than forty books, including Boccaccio in the Berkshires, Paradise in the Smallest Thing, Stoney Knows How: Life as a Sideshow Tattoo Artist, Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Music, Untold Glory, Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound, Everyday Music, Texas in Paris, Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper’s Daughter, A Pillow on the Ocean of Time, See That My Grave Is Kept Clean: The World and Music of Blind Lemon Jefferson (coauthored with Kip Lornell), and Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where Cultures Converged (coauthored with Jay Brakefield). His artist books are in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) Library of Congress (Washington, DC), San Francisco Museum of Art, Chicago Art Institute, Columbia University, New York Public Library, Museum of Modern Art (New York) Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) and Gove-nar has produced and directed numerous films in association with NOVA, PBS and ARTE. His feature-length documentaries, distributed by First Run Features include Down in Dallas Town: From JFK to K2, Looking for Home, Myth of a Colorblind France, Extraordinary Ordinary People, Tattoo Uprising, The Beat Hotel, Master Qi and the Monkey King, and You Don’t Need Feet to Dance are distributed by First Run Features. Govenar’s off-Broadway musicals Blind Lemon Blues and Lonesome Blues (created with Akin Babatundé) and Texas in Paris have been staged at the York Theatre (New York), Forum Meyrin (Geneva), Maison des Cultures du Monde (Paris), Leidse Schowburg (Leiden), and other theatres in Europe and the United States.