Terrell James is an American artist who makes abstract paintings, prints and sculptures. She is best known for large scale work with paint on stretched fabric, and for parallel small scale explorations such as the Field Studies series, ongoing since 1997. She lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Early life and education
Terrell James was born in Houston, Texas in 1955. A seventh generation Texan, she graduated from Houston's Lamar High School in 1973. In 1973, James studied painting and printmaking at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende. During 1973–77 she attended The in Sewanee Tennessee, where she continued her studies in painting and printmaking.
Art practice
Painting
James' painting suggest ambiguous visions of nature, urban geometries and technical artifacts, resisting easy determination. Instead of obvious images and visual stability, the viewer finds a pictorial landscape composed of alternate potential readings. Writing for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Daniel Stern stated that "To gaze at a painting of Terrell James' is to enter into an experience in the making: painting in which the act of painting continues on as the eye wanders the finished surface. Each individual painting is completed by each individual encounter."
Field Studies
James' numbered series Field Studiesm begin in 1997, are small works devoted to ongoing, open-ended visualization. Curator Alison de Lima Greene has written: "Sometimes a drawn line darts across the field or serves as a scaffold, sometimes pale afterimages challenge the viewer's eye, and even the occasional collaged element is welcomed as well." Field Studies are often made in parallel with much larger synchronous works, tracking their internal color relationships in a secondary form.
From 1980 to 1985, James worked as a field collector and material archivist for the Archives of American Art, at the Smithsonian Institution. While in this position, she was involved in the cataloging and exhibition of works by artist Forrest Bess. This assignment included her research involving Bess' family and contacts in Bay City, Texas, her cataloging of correspondence related to the artist's exhibition with New York gallerist Betty Parsons, and her organization of the 1986 exhibition of Forrest Bess' paintings in collaboration with Hiram Butler Gallery. This show led to the involvement of other galleries, such as New York's Hirschl & Adler Modern. Her research on Bess' life and work was seminal to the posthumous emergence of his worldwide following among collectors and institutions. In addition to archival work, James was integrally involved in the production of films and books about Bess. James played the archetypal feminine figure of Forrest Bess in Jim Kanan's 1987 film of Bess, Fishmonger, and was a primary source for Chuck Smith's book Key to the Riddle.
