Art without compromise

Printmaker Tim High has been a professor at The University of Texas at Austin for almost 40 years, ever since the art department hired him as a 24-year-old with a newly minted Master of Fine Arts (MFA).

He says he’s “weathered a lot of storms” over the years, but he’s survived—and even won a teaching award—despite being a Christian. He often incorporates Christian themes into his work: Each piece in his 12-part “Vanity Fair” series of Prismacolor and enamel drawings depicts alluring carnival and midway backgrounds with people in the foreground going about their business, seemingly unaware of the danger.

High’s home studio in Austin bursts with stuff. Cabinets contain prints. Three guitars hang along a wall. Six papier-mâché Mardi Gras masks explore human nature. Half of each face shows the happy expectation of fulfilled desires—alcohol, luxury goods, celebrity. The other half shows the dark side of those desires.

High founded and leads the university’s printmaking program, but he doesn’t limit himself to prints. On one wall of his studio hang two rearing horse sculptures: a “Luciferian horse vs. the Christo horse.” A supine face looks up from the saddle of the faux-jeweled Luciferian horse, and the Holy Spirit in the guise of a dove with a jeweled eye sits on the Christ horse. High spent a year constructing the piece out of papier-mâché: “I was thinking about the idea of warfare and the bloody reign of the Antichrist.”

The innovative artist uses Photoshop for some recent work and sometimes invents tools to create particular effects: For example, a wooden stylus shaved out from a golf tee allows him to create tiny dots that hold back color. He works slowly and has made only 70 prints in his lifetime.

High’s uncompromising art is hard to characterize on the political spectrum. In “Feeding Frenzy III,” sharks circle naked swimming babies. The names and logos of big corporations and bad organizations—ABC, IBM, Planned Parenthood, a Nazi swastika, Hustler magazine—decorate the border. He explains: “I opted to represent us, the American consumer, as infants stripped bare of any privacy and propriety, in a sink or swim situation.”

High also plays guitar with a band, The Flight Risks, that performs old rock ’n’ roll classics at barbecues in his backyard. Most of the members are young, and High, 66, says he may have to quit “when we start smelling like old men.” He also knows that if he made prettier art, it would sell better, and says of another artist who sold out at a solo show, “That’s something I haven’t experienced.”

‘Play Me, I’m Yours’

British artist Luke Jerram says he was sitting in a laundromat and noticed that no one was talking. That gave him an idea: Place a piano in the space to act “as a catalyst for conversation.” Since 2008, Jerram has placed more than 1,300 pianos in public places in cities throughout the world. Local organizers solicit donated pianos. Community groups design and paint them. On each is the invitation, “Play Me, I’m Yours.”

Jerram works with local arts organizations to place the pianos in parks and other public spaces for two to three weeks. U.S. cities that have hosted the local artist-decorated pianos include Austin, Boston, New York, and Florence, S.C. When the project ends, the pianos go to local schools and organizations. In some cases, Jerram takes pianos from cities where old ones are common—London, for instance—to cities in other parts of the world where they are rare and expensive.

Melbourne, Australia, hosted the project in January 2014. There, other artists piggy-backed on it. One photographer did a time-lapse video of the random people who played a particular piano. Some musicians played at each of the 24 pianos placed throughout the city. Philanthropist Betty Amsden funded the Melbourne project: “I wanted to see people get together. I wanted people to connect with one another. I wanted people to talk to one another instead of playing with all these mechanical things that they have. I wanted people to join in and feel part of a lovely program.” —S.O.