Andy Coolquitt: C0oOT
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13, 2025, 6–9 PM
There is an evident consistency to everything Coolquitt makes that can be traced to (a) a predilection for a relatively narrow range of materials, most of which fall under the headings of found and poor; (b) a routine process of gathering, accumulating, sorting, and selecting these materials; (c) a set mode of construction that nevertheless allows for minute, incremental shifts in direction; and (d) an overarching philosophy of what art is, and what it is for. Only in theory may these elements be isolated in this way; in Coolquitt’s work they are inextricably linked since, from the first moment, his choice of materials is determined by a brut Duchampian idea of art. This is not to suggest that the idea prefigures the thing he makes, or that the work gives concrete form to a pre-established concept. Straightaway, one senses that this work is not so much fabricated “from scratch” via scrupulous planning, design, and execution as it is improvised on the spot, on the fly, answering directly to the dictates of the outlying object-world. Although this is no “blue-sky” practice but one ruled by a host of earthbound contingencies to which the artist willingly submits, paradoxically, the potential for a kind of transcendence remains always in play.
-Jan Tumlir, This is mine
Three O’s: elongation, excess, object—though the surplus vowel could also be a delay, a hesitation before arrival. An orthographic hesitation, not unlike the way an object resists immediate legibility. In C0oOT, Coolquitt brings together three long-running bodies of work that orbit a shared question: how does an object think, and how might it stage itself?
The Monochromes and Outfits, both initiated during a 2016 Artpace residency, extend the readymade into the realm of the pre-programmed - textiles as ready-coded vectors of the avant-garde’s once-utopian geometries, now domesticated into the fabric of mass leisure. Snuggies, Slankets, and off-brand proxies arrive not as blank canvases but as fully formed, “contemporary painting-size” fields whose color and scale ferry the ghosts of Hélio Oiticica’s penetrables, Nicola L’s furniture-bodies, and Franz Erhard Walter’s proto-performance textiles. The only decision to be made, other than choosing them, was how to stretch them out in order to view the whole thing at once without losing the piping frame already built in. The edge then becomes a thing.
The Outfits, which sort of grew out of the Monochromes, needed to be framed. They actually asked to be framed in a somewhat traditional style of wood carpentry that might suggest a cabinet, or a closet, where they live. These materials, with a few exceptions, were sourced from existing clothing. The two-panel composition suggests a relationship between the shirt or blouse, the top, and the pants or skirt, the bottom. The top/ bottom chemistry triggers a spark. Blinky Palermo’s chromatic insurgencies whisper through the seams, which oscillate between friction and harmony, garment and painting, the “put-on” as both literal and performative.
The BMs began in 2014 with Somebody Place, a temporary inhabitation of the gallery. Since then, they have occupied multiple registers— attached directly to walls, stretched on unprimed canvas, pinned to stretcher bars, or settling into floor-bound piles. Their arrangements can appear deliberate, as if composed by the objects themselves. Here, Duchamp’s “the object chooses you” meets the speculative agency of object-oriented ontology: the notion that things possess their own reality, independent of human perception, capable of forming patterns, alliances, or dissent. Could they speak in the alphabet of their makers, or emit other, untranslatable signals?
The first encounter remains central: the body lifts, spreads, tests. Arms extended to wingspan to hold a colorfield in its entirety; hands gathered to feel drape and fall. These tactile decisions determine display architectures—be they bath robe belts of BMs, or edge-conscious expanses that retain the logic of their original pipe frame.
Coolquitt’s method is neither execution of a priori plan nor romantic improvisation; it is a slow attunement to the contingent demands of the outlying object-world. Materials arrive already haunted, already compromised, already articulate. They speak not in symbols from above, but mumble from the underside—elastic returning to form after expansion, the circular embrace of the toilet-lid coozie flexing to meet the shape of its host.
Appendix:
At the eleventh hour, three vitrine works surface from HopsonShouse (2018), a domestic intervention staged in a craftsman bungalow in Houston’s Montrose district—already a jewel, already framed by its own vernacular architecture. Here, the vitrine performs double duty: as guardian of the jewel and as jewel itself, nested within the frame of the house, itself framed by the neighborhood, the city, the grid. A preoccupation develops with the wall-mounted vitrine—particularly those backed in fabric—whose logic is not display alone, but staging: the thing that frames the thing, the mise en abyme of attention.
This returns to an earlier proposition from his graduate school thesis project: that ‘a house’ might operate, not as an artwork, but as a generative apparatus—an engine for producing, testing, and holding art. In this frame, the HopsonShouse vitrines become anti-vitrines: no glass, no containment, air circulating freely between object and world. The museum frames the vitrine; the house frames living; the anti-vitrine reframes both as open systems.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Andy Coolquitt (b. 1964, Texas) currently lives in Austin. He is perhaps most widely known for Andy’s Place, which began as his master’s thesis project at the University of Texas at Austin in 1994 and continues to the present day. Andy’s Place is a multifaceted entity, serving as a performance, studio, and domestic space for Coolquitt as well as hundreds of artists over the years.
In collaboration with his partner Susan Scafati, Coolquitt most recently created DUSTY, an exhibition space within his studio, in 2022 and opened its inaugural show that March. In 2020, he produced a wide-ranging project titled How A House Works through the exhibition venue TestSite in Austin, TX. In 2018, he staged a temporary exhibition version of Andy’s Place for The Autotopographers at the Kohler Museum in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
During the summer of 2016, Coolquitt produced a multi-exhibition project titled Studio Art...........Period Room while in residence at Artpace in San Antonio, TX. In spring 2014, he was artist-in-residence at the Chianti Foundation in Marfa, TX, which culminated in the exhibition Multi-Marfa Room at the Locker Plant in Marfa. In 2012, a 167-page monograph was published by University of Texas Press in conjunction with his mid-career survey organized by the Blaffer Museum in Houston, TX.
Notable solo exhibitions have included This Much at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna, Austria; no I didn't go to any museums here I hate museums museums are just stores that charge you to come in there are lots of free museums here but they have names like real stores at Maryam Nassir Zadeh in New York, NY; Attainable Excellence at AMOA-Arthouse in Austin, TX; and Somebody Place at Lisa Cooley in NYC.
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