Opening Reception: Charmaine Locke: Scenes from A Blues Opera

Charmaine Locke: Scenes from A Blues Opera
opening reception: Saturday, March 2, 7 pm
on view: March 2–30, 2024

Charmaine Locke’s early eighties oil pastel and putty drawings came straight out of her daily life in the woods of the Big Thicket in east Texas, where she made her home and studio for twenty years. Her figures are players in an allegory, her dwellings psychological as much as physical. The strokes in the drawings are hewn and carved, as if drawing a life out of the woods. In fact, she was.

Locke was born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1950 to an Air Force family living in Florida, Texas, Nevada, California, Okinawa, Bangkok, and Boston, eventually settling during her teenage years in Bethesda, Maryland. A formative moment was involvement with her mother in the Poor People’s Campaign on the Washington Mall in 1968. During this period, her family visited textile mills in North Carolina, lumber and paper mills in southwest Arkansas where her parents were raised, and historical tours in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Receiving her B.A. in Psychology from Southern Methodist University in 1974, Locke moved with artist James Surls in 1976 to Splendora, Texas, north of Houston where they purchased 22 acres of land, built homes and studios and raised their family until 1997, when they relocated near Carbondale, Colorado. The compound in Splendora, now grown to 200 acres, is currently the Locke Surls Center for Art and Nature, which opened to the public in April, 2023.

The artist has shown her work internationally, including at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; The Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore; Gallerie Simone Stern, New Orleans; The Sculpture Center, New York; The Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; Aspen Art Museum; National Art Museum of China, Beijing; the Museo de la Nacion, Lima, Peru; La Romita School of Art,Terni, Italy; and Atelierhaus Hilmsen, Hiilmsen, Germany.