Road Angel, 2016
Artwork © Terry Allen
Bronze with audio and light. 65 x 181 x 81 1/2 inches.
Collection of The Contemporary Austin. Commission, purchased with funds provided by the Edward and Betty Marcus Foundation, 2017.2.
Photograph by Brian Fitzsimmons.
This piece, cast in the Deep in the Heart Art Foundry, in Bastrop, was unveiled in December on the outdoor grounds of Austin’s sculpture park at Laguna Gloria. The work is an almost-exact copy of Allen’s first vehicle, a 1953 Chevy, except for a missing front passenger-side tire.
That wheel well instead hides a speaker that blasts, as Allen put it, “Things you’d want to hear coming out of a car.” an ongoing audio archive: recordings by musicians, artists, and writers emanate as if from the car’s radio at random intervals, recounting songs and oral histories lived in the backseat and behind the wheel.
The American romance with the automobile and the open road can be seen throughout the artist’s decades-long career, as he came of driving age in the 1950s, filled with the promise of adventure and escape. Allen has noted: “The sense of hurtling through great black empty space...late at night on a dead straight line of asphalt with headlights shining...driving a car as fast as it would go...and listening to The Wolfman on the radio turned up as loud as it would go...is probably where every freedom I most value first began.”
Road Angel, 2016, a bronze cast of a 1953 Chevrolet coupe, embodies a range of emotional and nostalgic associations with the American automobile. The artist has placed this three-wheeled car far from any road, resting haphazardly amid the trees, as if the vehicle has careened off its path or the stage were set for a lovers’ tryst.
Detail of studio wall with proposal for The Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria, 2016. Artwork © Terry Allen.
Lubbock native and one-semester Texas Tech dropout Terry Allen, arguably the first of Lubbock’s legendary post-hippie semi-country singer-songwriters.
Allen’s first two albums, 1975’s Juarez and 1979’s Lubbock (on everything), are as canonical to hard-core Texas music fans as Townes Van Zandt’s Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas and Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger; even those who don’t know Allen’s music firsthand have probably heard his song “Amarillo Highway,” which has been covered by the likes of Bobby Bare, Robert Earl Keen, and Sturgill Simpson.
As large as Allen looms over Texas music, however, he is even more revered as a visual and multimedia artist: his paintings, sculptures, and installations—which can be found everywhere from New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art to the DFW and Houston airports—have earned him both national and international recognition.
https://www.thecontemporaryaustin.org/exhibitions/terry-allen-road-angel/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/return-of-terry-allen/
