GALLERY

In a farewell tribute to Benito Huerta’s 26 years at The University of Texas at Arlington, The Gallery at UTA showcased two concurrent exhibitions of his work, Profane Truths and Sacred Lies and Post Modern Fulcrum.

Huerta, who officially retired from the Department of Art and Art History in the spring, says the works shown in the exhibition are exclusively from his time in Arlington, which began in 1997 when he joined UTA as director and curator of The Gallery at UTA.

Profane Truths and Sacred Lies was an amalgamation of political, economic, and social commentary along with personal identity and pop-culture references. With this exhibition, Huerta says he was intentionally a bit more confrontational with some of the art.

“Sometimes I like to work with those pieces where I’m dealing with identity because I feel compelled to in the political climate that we’re in, but I’m also angry that I have to do that type of art and that something needs to be said,” Huerta says. “If things were more stable and in a perfect world, I would do whatever I wanted, and it wouldn’t have to deal with race. It’d probably still be socially and politically conscious, but sometimes I like to make it more subversive—in the sense that it’s there, but it’s not there.”

Post Modern Fulcrum, a collaboration between Huerta and his wife, Janet Chaffee, presented works exploring physical and psychological boundaries of Huerta and Chaffee’s individual and shared living and workspaces. Dealing more with aesthetics and architecture, the exhibit used an array of materials usually used in construction—such as steel, tar, paper, concrete, grass, wood, Tyvek, and fiberglass—alongside traditional art materials.

“The pieces that are in the collaborative exhibition are part of my makeup, and it’s in part because when I came to Arlington, I bought a midcentury home built in 1951,” Huerta says. “There’s this affinity between me and the architecture of the house. I really like how it’s constructed and designed and how one lives in it. I think about how the space works as a home, and as a result, those ideas pass into my work.”

One of the things Huerta likes most about the show is the opportunity for others to get a better understanding of who he is.

“I feel happy with the way everything turned out in the exhibition. Although, I’m still thinking about the last painting and still adding to it because it’s what I am—it’s what I do,” says Huerta. “It’s not much, just detail kind of work, but to me it’s important. When the show opened, the painting looked different than the way it looks now, but it looks better than it did, and I’m hoping it gets even better.”