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Arts
Bryan Rindfuss
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A peek inside the weird world of enigmatic San Antonio artist James Smolleck
BY BRYAN RINDFUSS
While some artists are driven by the prospect of fame and fortune, others are simply driven by the need to create. San Antonio native James Smolleck easily falls into the la er category.
“I always kind of knew I was going to be an artist,” Smolleck told the Current during a recent studio visit. His business-minded father teased him about his chosen career path by handing him the classifieds and asking, “You see any jobs for artists?”
Undeterred, Smolleck stuck to his guns but found his way through the unexpected discipline of skateboarding. As a teen a ending Churchill High School in the 1980s, he palled around with fellow skaters Aaron Curry and Erik Parker — both of whom went on to become renowned artists.
“Around ’86, ’87, skateboarding was pre y underground,” Smolleck said. “So we kind of all found each other. … It was really formative. The graphics and just the whole idea of doing your own thing — that’s actually what got me more into making artwork: skateboarding.”
Those strange bedfellows became further intertwined when Smolleck studied art at UTSA then purchased Zulu’s — a local skate shop he and his business partner renamed Goodtimes and operated until 1998. Nevertheless, he drifted away from skating as he started taking painting and drawing more seriously.
A pivotal moment arrived when Curry, who was then studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, returned to the Alamo City and invited Smolleck to Blue Star to check out an exhibition of paintings by Peter Saul, a boundary-pushing artist known for his cartoonish aesthetic and biting social satires.
“Seeing that show really got me [inspired] to paint,” Smolleck explained.
While Saul emerged as a major influence on Smolleck’s early work, the UTSA community also played a key role in his artistic development. “Ken Li le was one my first professors,” he said. “I had him for drawing. It was a really good experience. I had Connie Lowe for painting. … Dario Robleto was in one of my classes. … Hills Snyder was a graduate student. So, it was a real melting pot at that time.”
During his senior year, Smolleck started shifting away from Saul’s poppy sensibilities, honing his painting skills and embracing the aesthetics of Flemish and Italian masters.
“When I finished school, my dad asked me, ‘What are you gonna do now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m gonna do carpentry.’ He said, ‘What the fuck? I just paid for this school,’” Smolleck recounted. “I always knew I [would] have to find a way to make revenue, because there’s no way to [earn a living] just making artwork. … So, my wife’s father hooked me up working in a mill shop. … I worked for this contractor for a year — the worst year of my fucking life. But I learned a lot … and I was making a shit ton of artwork … it was just piling up in my studio.”
Around that time, Smolleck ran into Ken Li le at First Friday, and he scheduled a studio visit from his former professor. Li le was so taken by the quality and volume of Smolleck’s work that he arranged a meeting with Chris Erck and Gabriela Trench of the influential Finesilver Gallery.
“Gabriela just started selling [my work],” Smolleck said. “She was like, ‘Let’s find homes for all this stuff.’ And so that’s how I ended up working with Finesilver for a while.”
Upon the birth of his daughter in 2006, Smolleck decided to take a break from creating work.
“Having my daughter opened my eyes up to a lot more things,” he said. “[I stopped caring about] trying to do shows or what this person might think. When she was born, I was like, ‘I don’t give a shit about any of that stuff. She’s the coolest thing ever.
MArtist James Smolleck in his home studio with recent works including the 2021 drawing The Goblin Skapegoat.
6A work in progress in Smolleck’s studio (top) and his painting Boundaries of Opacity.
This is all that ma ers — everything else is bullshit, dude.’”
That epiphany marked a turning point. As Smolleck slowly returned to the studio, he allowed himself to start addressing themes that had long interested him but hadn’t yet appeared in his work: the occult, alchemy, architecture, Persian manuscripts, even his own subconscious.
“I was pu ing all this off ,” he said. “It freed my head — like, ‘Fuck it, I don’t care what anybody thinks.’”
By 2009, Smolleck had developed the signature style he works in today — dark, enigmatic and increasingly theatrical. Reminiscent of everything from fraternal organizations and secret societies to science fi ction and the masked drama of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Smolleck’s meticulously rendered drawings and paintings often place hooded characters in mysterious situations he sums up as “choreographed rituals.”
During the visit to his home studio, works in progress lined the walls. Smolleck estimates his drawings and paintings each take about two months to complete. He doesn’t create them with any destination in mind.
“I just like to make work,” Smolleck said. “I’m fi ne with it just piling up. If somebody sees it, that’s cool. My end goal with making work is not to have shows or anything, just to make work.”
When quizzed about his exhibition history, he replies, “My resumé is pre y pathetic.” Selective might be a be er word for it. In addition to being included in the permanent collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art and the McNay Art Museum, Smolleck has exhibited in Mexico, France and Denmark, and he’s represented by David Shelton Gallery in Houston.
Despite some disillusionment with the gallery system, Smolleck goes all-in when the right opportunity arises. He cites both 2012’s “Neophyte Doublestare into the Eighth Dimension” at Sala Diaz, curated by Hills Snyder, and 2018’s “Transmissions from the Blue Egg” at the Southwest School of Art, curated by Chad Dawkins, as milestones.
Pondering the work that piles up in his studio, Smolleck refl ects on the outsider artist and writer Henry Darger, who became famous upon the posthumous discovery of his oeuvre — especially the epic, 15,145-page novel The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
“Darger was a fucking janitor and just made all that work,” Smolleck said. “It’s just something he felt he had to do — and that’s the way I feel. If I’m not doing this stuff , it just feels weird.”
Bryan Rindfuss
arts
Find more arts coverage every day at sacurrent.com
Katelyn Earhart
Waging War
Symphony Society slashes health benefi ts as latest volley in ongoing musicians’ strike
BY KELLY MERKA NELSON
The San Antonio Symphony was to have held its fi rst performances of the season by now. Instead, its musicians are a month into a strike over unilaterally imposed contract terms they call unfair and detrimental to the orchestra.
Last week, as the latest development in that dispute, the Symphony Society, the orchestra’s managing body and musicians’ employer, canceled the performers’ healthcare benefi ts, eff ective Nov. 1.
While the Symphony Society has released multiple statements declaring its love for the orchestra and its willingness to negotiate, the performers paint a much diff erent picture.
Path to the picket line
In 2019, the Symphony ratifi ed a collective bargaining agreement, or CBA, for the 2019-2020, 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 seasons.
Amid the pandemic crisis in 2020, the Symphony’s musicians agreed to a new contract that covered the 20202021 season, for which they voluntarily took an 80% pay cut. Included in that agreement was the option to reopen the third year of the CBA, which management subsequently requested.
When contract negotiations began again this fall, the musicians were shocked by the drastic cuts included in proposals from management. One such off er would have slashed all performers’ salaries by half, with additional cuts to health insurance benefi ts.
While the clause allowing for talks to reopen was tied to the pandemic crisis, the Symphony Society has made multiple public statements indicating that its austere contract proposals were presented in the pursuit of what it purports to be “a sustainable artistic and fi nancial future.”
“To stabilize the organization and sustain it for the future, the Symphony must hold strong to only spending what we can aff ord,” Symphony Society Chair Kathleen Weir Vale said in a statement emailed to the Current in late September.
On Sept. 26, the Symphony Society declared an impasse and imposed the terms of what it deemed its “Last, Best and Final Off er,” which would cut the ensemble’s 72 full-time members to 42, converting 26 positions to part-time and eliminating four currently unfi lled positions.
That proposal had previously been rejected in a unanimous vote by the Symphony’s musicians.
As a result of the imposition of terms, the San Antonio chapter of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) called a strike Sept. 27.
Martin Gordon moved his family to San Antonio in September 2020 to take a full-time position playing contrabassoon and bassoon for the orchestra. He auditioned for the position in January 2020, prior to the onset of the pandemic.
Under the “Last, Best and Final Off er,” he would be downgraded to a part-time position, facing a loss of benefi ts and a pay cut of approximately two-thirds from what his salary would have been under the 2019 CBA. Gordon described the pay cut as “untenable.”
“This job becomes, at that pay level, almost a fi nancial albatross, because you’ll make nothing, and it will prevent you from being able to supplement your income,” he said.
“This is an obliteration of the artistic structure of the orchestra, because the jobs are now not even possible to do and fi nancially survive because of the time commitment and the lack of pay.”
aMusical Bridges Around the World’s Suhail Arastu speaks in support of the striking Symphony musicians at a rally in front of the Tobin Center Friday, Oct. 29.
Canceled coverage
At 4:51 p.m. on Oct. 28, Director of Orchestra Operations Sara Vreeland notifi ed the musicians via email that the Symphony Society was ending their healthcare benefi ts eff ective Nov. 1.
The Symphony’s assistant principal second violinist Karen Stiles, a single mother of a college-aged daughter, told the Current that she had to scramble to fi nd a new plan immediately after learning of the lost benefi ts. A recent cancer survivor, both she and her daughter have ongoing health concerns that make the abrupt loss of coverage catastrophic.
“I am angry that the Symphony management chose to notify us of the cancellation at 4:51 p.m. on Thursday, leaving us only one business day to scramble to fend for ourselves,” Stiles, a member of the orchestra since 1991, said via email. “They did not properly have COBRA in place for us, and I was unable to put my daughter on the UT student insurance plan because no offi cial le er of termination has been provided.”
At press time, the Symphony Society had not responded to a request for comment regarding the missing paperwork.
“I have never felt so disrespected by our management and board,” Stiles added.
In a statement supplied to the Current on Oct. 29, the board indicated that striking employees don’t earn wages and aren’t eligible for benefi ts. However, it added, “the Symphony carried employee benefi t off erings through the month of October.” The statement asserts that “employee benefi ts will be forced to change on Nov. 1, 2021, to conform with the implemented contract,” referencing management’s imposed terms.
Both Vreeland’s email and the Symphony Society’s statement characterize the loss of coverage as an unavoidable consequence of the strike, but Musi-
cians of the San Antonio Symphony (MOSAS) Chair Mary Ellen Goree and the group’s a orney, David Van Os, both construe the move as retaliatory.
“Since the current contract [2019 CBA] does not allow the cancellation of accrued benefi ts, it is an act of illegal retaliation against the musicians for exercising their lawful right to strike over unfair labor practices,” Van Os said in a statement.
Goree told the Current she’s been privy to a “private communication” on the subject between Symphony management and a musician. Paraphrasing the exchange, she said management implied that continuation of health insurance was “up to the orchestra commi ee.”
“They couldn’t have made it more plain that the cancellation of our benefi ts is retaliatory for the strike if they had spelled it out in so many words,” she said.
The Symphony Society didn’t respond to a request for comment on the alleged exchange.
An empty table
“We are eager for the union to come back to the bargaining table so we can work together to move past this,” the Symphony Society said in its Oct. 29 statement.
However, Goree says negotiations have remained at a standstill for weeks because management won’t accept the musicians’ terms for resuming talks.
“We told [Symphony Executive Director Corey Cowart] the conditions under which we would return, which included the retraction of their so-called ‘Last, Best and Final Off er’ and the lifting of the imposed terms, and he declined those terms,” she said.
Goree said it’s up to the Symphony Society, not the musicians, to restart talks.
“When you are the ones who call your proposal ‘Last, Best and Final,’ then you are the ones who have shut the door — slammed the door — on future bargaining,” she added.
“I reject any suggestion that the musicians are in any way responsible for the current lack of movement in negotiations.”
Deep wounds
The strike’s resolution remains uncertain, but one thing is clear: deep wounds have been opened and they’re unlikely to be repaired by simply ratifying a new contract.
Goree, Gordon, Stiles and other Symphony musicians expressed incredulity, despair and a sense of betrayal when speaking to the Current about management.
“I’m extremely disappointed to see how they’ve lost track of their humanity somewhere in this mess,” principal oboist Paul Lueders said via email.
“I still am in disbelief that our board and our management are so evidently willing to completely blow up such an artistically respected orchestra and such an integral part of our community as the San Antonio Symphony,” Goree said.
“I can’t believe that this is the legacy that they want to leave.”
Those interested in contributing to the Musicians of the San Antonio Symphony can do so online at mosas.org or by mailing checks payable to MOSAS to Musicians of the San Antonio Symphony, 24911 Crescent Trace, San Antonio, TX 78258.
Courtesy of Joan Riviera Simoncelli
Pulling No Punchlines
Transgender stand-up comedian Joan Riviera Simoncelli explains what Dave Chappelle got wrong
BY KIKO MARTINEZ
As a stand-up comedian, Joan Riviera Simoncelli wants fellow comics to have the freedom to entertain audiences however they see fi t. To her mind, nothing should be off limits. People need to laugh.
“The week after my mom died, I went on stage and made jokes about her death,” the San Antonio-area comedian told the Current during a recent interview. “When you walk through that door, the gloves come off .”
As a transgender, intersex humanitarian, however, Simoncelli is disappointed in superstar comic Dave Chappelle and his latest Netfl ix special The Closer. There wouldn’t be as much controversy about his transgender-themed material today, she said, if he’d bothered to learn what he was talking about.
“In the special, [Chappelle] said he was rich and famous,” she said. “It’s just a shame he couldn’t take some of that money and educate himself about the LGBTQIA people. We’re not a community. We’re not gypsies or some li le tribe. We’re America.”
Simoncelli, a Cibolo resident, said she “gets the joke” when Chappelle jabs at LGBTQ+ people about glory holes and “frumpy dykes” on the special. She understands why people laugh, but she doesn’t like it that Chappelle paints with broad strokes. It’s more complicated than just ridiculing pronouns.
“When he says he wants the transgender community to stop punching down, there’s no way transgender minorities are doing that,” Simoncelli said. “I understand that comedy is an art form, but it’s beautiful when you can use it and not hurt people. You always have to be responsible for what you say on stage.”
When Chappelle makes comments like “gay people are minorities, until they need to be white again,” Simoncelli said it proves he has a narrow view of who LGBTQ+ people are. Certainly, his statement doesn’t ring true to a woman of color like her.
When Simoncelli started in the comedy industry nearly 40 years ago, she said she wasn’t allowed to say she was transgender at venues where she performed. Club owners told her to keep it to herself.
“I was told once that if [the audience] ever found out [I was transgender], I should run out the back door and keep running,” she said. “That’s the fear that we come from.”
Simoncelli doesn’t fi nd anything funny about walking into a comedy club restroom and seeing that someone has defaced one of her posters by drawing a penis on her dress. That’s the kind of lazy mockery comedians have been using onstage for decades, she added.
“You can only hear so many Caitlyn Jenner jokes,” she said. “[Chappelle] should see what the life of a transgender person is like. He needs to fi nd out who they are before he makes jokes about them.”
What’s more, Chappelle’s refusal to take responsibility for the things he jokes about frustrates Simoncelli as an LGBTQ+ advocate. She’s not saying that jokes about trans people should be off limits. Instead, her point is that comedians should stop treating trans people like the “villains of a horror movie” such as Psycho or The Silence of the Lambs.
“Transgender people, intersex people, hermaphrodites, we’ve been beaten down so badly,” she said. “[Chappelle] needs so much more education, and it’s not only him — look at Kevin Hart and the media in general. They’re not considering the person who might be thinking about killing themselves.”
Simoncelli, however, is thinking about those people, which is why she’s involved in Texas politics these days. Currently, she serves as executive commi ee woman for Texas Democrat Senate District 19, where she’s fi ghting for the rights of LGBTQ+ people across the state.
“Before Chappelle became rich and famous, we were already the bu of all the jokes,” Simoncelli said. “Now, Chappelle is just lashing out. But I’m not going to let him, or society, label me. This world is full of diff erent people. Dave Chappelle should know that. This isn’t the 1970s anymore. He needs to take the heat for what he says.”
Simoncelli will perform at the Artisan Distillery Craft Bar, 402 Austin St., on December 4 at 8 p.m. For more information, visit artisancraftbar.com.
