James Harithas, the San Antonio Philharmonic, and Jared Patterson
Art Dies, is Reborn, and is Suppressed
Here are a few brief items in the news lately.
James Harithas has died. He was 90 years old according to the Houston Chronicle. Harithas was hired in 1974 to run Contemporary Arts Museum. His tenure was marked by an intense engagement with Texas artists. When I think about Houston as it was, I think of a culture with a well-deserved inferiority complex. Harithas was a major figure in helping to lessen that sense of cultural cringe locally. Harithas’ first exhibit as director was 12/Texas, which featured work by 12 Texas artists, including Dorothy Hood, Luis Jiménez, James Surls, and Michael Tracy. He was only director of CAMH for four years, and while CAMH continued its practice of bringing art from all over to Houston, Harithas also made sure that CAMH would present Houston to itself. With exhibits by Richard Stout, John Alexander, James Surls, Forrest Prince, and many others, CAMH under Harithas became a place to see the best of Houston and Texas artists. The museum board were dealing with difficulty raising money and told Harithas that they were hiring a business manager because they thought his management style was too loosey-goosey. Harithas was outraged and protested in a letter to the board, which they interpreted as a resignation. (This story is related in detail in Collision by Pete Gershon.) But by this time Harithas had put down roots in Houston—marrying a Houston gal, Ann O’Connor, in 1978. Harithas remained involved in the art world by starting his own museums, the Art Car Museum in 1998 and the Station Museum in 2001. Ann Harithas was born in Victoria, Texas, and the couple moved back there and in 2016 founded a small museum for their new home, Five Points Museum of Contemporary Art. I’ve visited the Five Points Museum once in 2016 and saw Harithas at his home in Victoria, but he was looking pretty ill when I saw him. I never knew the man, but he was a beloved figure in the Houston art scene.
One weird thing about the Art Car Museum, the Station Museum and the Five Points Museum is that they were privately owned. They were not 501c(3) non-profits, like most museums are. I don’t know why that is, but Harithas had lots of experience with non-profit institutions. I assume he didn’t want to have to deal with a board of directors. But because they were all owned by the Harithas family, and the matriarch and patriarch are now dead, what happens to them? The Station closed late last year. What will happen to the Art Car Museum and Five Points Museum?
Back in 2022, I wrote about one of the institutional victims of COVID, the San Antonio Symphony, which declared chapter 7 bankruptcy and dissolved itself. I was very sad that a symphony’s worth of musicians were suddenly unemployed. It seems that after the Symphony was dissolved, a new organization was formed calling itself the San Antonio Philharmonic. And as of a few days ago, the San Antonio Philharmonic signed a collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Musicians for 60-odd musicians to form their orchestra. It sounds like the musicians will get paid less than they did with the San Antonio Symphony, and I am curious about other details of the contract like the seniority bonuses (which as a big part of the CBA for the Houston Symphony). A CBA between a musicians union and a local orchestra society is a very detailed and complex agreement, But I am happy that this orchestra has gone through a dark night of the soul and come out on the other side.
I am not a good Texan; I have never read Lonesome Dove. I’ve read other Larry McMurtry books over the years, and I saw the TV show version of Lonesome Dove. But you know who else hasn’t read it? State representative Jared Patterson from Frisco. Patterson is a far-right religious nut who is a sponsor of the READER act, a bill designed to prevent people from becoming readers by banning books from school libraries. In short, he is human shit. And we know he has never read Lonesome Dove because he was asked about it in a hearing on the inaptly named READER act. Representative James Talarico asked him if he would ban Lonesome Dave. Texas Monthly reported:
Patterson hadn’t read Lonesome Dove, he replied, committing his first error. But if it contained the ribald passages Talarico indicated it did, well, then, “they might need to ban Lonesome Dove.”
Even his fellow Nazi representatives realized that this was a bad look. They hate it when you point out that they are trying to “ban” books. As Christopher Hooks wrote:
Patterson’s snafu makes clear that the bill’s sponsors don’t really care about books—or that they don’t understand them. Which is fine. That’s why we have Netflix. But maybe they should leave the regulation of literature to Texans who read.
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