AOTC

Sometime around 1995 my friends Jeff Elrod and Mark Flood opened a gallery in Houston named Art of This Century. At the time Jeff was living in this absurd storefront, previously occupied by a driving school. Sleeping in the back on two co-joined vinyl couches, surrounded by his paintings, the front of the space became a never open to the public exhibit space, with art displayed on the very hip fake wood paneling. Each show was inaugurated by an opening attended by ten or so of Jeff's friends, and a couple mysterious art world insiders. The shows would remain installed for a couple months, tantalizing high powered culture workers/power brokers who could only peer in the windows, on account that they'd come by at three in the afternoon - hours before Jeff would be getting up.

I can say without reservation to this day AOTC is the most chic art space I've ever seen, and a big inspiration for my lucrative career as a high powered gallerist.

There were four shows at AOTC, Objects Beside the Economy, Hines and His Circle (tragic fading supergraphic), Blank Expression (Tina Marrin and Katrina Moorhead), and Other Museums. I've made PDF files of the highly collectable catalogs of the first two shows, which you can download below. They're fairly large files (11 megs each, ack!) so be forewarned, ye of slow modem.

Objects Beside the Economy
Hines and his Circle

Also, I must demand that everyone read the call for entries.