The Brooklyn Rail

There was really not much Jim Harithas would not do. The limit was always close at hand and he knew how to make the leap off of whatever edge was before him. He brought a brilliant young curator named Paul Schimmel with him to the art frontier of Texas and spiraled around the state looking at everything there was to see. He looked and saw, he listened and heard. He pushed every button the state had and made a call to the country: “I will show yours, but you have to show mine,” and the dark horses were set free to run. He and Paul walked into my studio in the early 1970s with the intensity of a nightstick; two hours later they had scheduled an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston to open less than two months away.