When it comes to the builders of modern Houston, the guys, naturally, get most of the credit. There are the philanthropic foundations still thriving thanks to the oil fortunes of wildcatter Hugh Roy Cullen and industrialist George R. Brown, and there are the contributions to social justice and fine arts from visionary John de Menil. Our downtown starchitect skyline is mostly courtesy of developer Gerald Hines. We have the eccentric Judge Roy Hofheinz to thank for the so-called eighth wonder of the world, the Astrodome. And doctors Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley are behind the world’s largest medical center. And so on. But when it comes to women, there are only four who get mentioned repeatedly, including oil heiress Ima Hogg (who gets dinged for her name and her nonexistent sister, Ura); Lynn Wyatt (who is rarely without the somewhat reductive “international socialite” modifier); and Dominique de Menil, who by most accounts could be a pretty tough customer (not unlike the driven men mentioned above). And, of course, there’s Beyoncé, but she transcended the city long ago.
I had been thinking about the achievements of so many unheralded local women when circumstances collided to remind me of two in particular. The first is Wendy Watriss, who at 83 is stepping down from her work as a cofounder of the forty-year-old international festival known as FotoFest, now one of the most influential showcases for photography in the world. The second is 80-year-old Fredericka Hunter, who closed her Texas Gallery in February after opening Houston’s eyes to contemporary art for the past 54 years.
Maybe these two weren’t wildcatters or captains of industry, but their contributions to the cultural life of Houston and its global reputation as a destination for the arts are significant. Nor should it be forgotten that the particular character of this city—especially its go-for-it, never-be-afraid-to-fail aspect—shaped ambitious, creative women here every bit as much as it boosted those world-beating dudes.
Wendy Watriss, a True Visionary
I caught up with Watriss at lunch in early March, at a restaurant near her home in Montrose. FotoFest was in full force (the biennial ends May 10), with parts of town teeming with photographers and curators from around the world showing and sharing their work, shuttling among multiple venues on FotoFest buses. It was one of those perfect spring days that are so treasured in Houston because they are so fleeting, and the garden around us was just starting to bloom, much to her delight.
Watriss’s face is deeply lined from all the years she worked outdoors as a prominent photojournalist, in the American South, Texas, Vietnam, and western Africa, among other locales. Her hair has gone white, and she now needs a walker—which she maneuvered like a Coast Guard cutter through the crowds at FotoFest. Her pale blue eyes have retained their glittering light, though, and she still has the air of a young woman game for anything. “It’s probably a good thing that I never think it’s enough,” she said of all the work she has done and still wants to do.
But this was a time for gratitude and goodbyes. Watriss was honored at the organization’s gala and honored with a show of photographs she curated at the Menil and honored at dinners hosted by longtime friends from around the world. FotoFest was founded in 1983 by Watriss; her late husband, the photographer Fred Baldwin; and the German-born Petra Benteler, who operated one of the first photo galleries in the U.S. in Houston. Since its first formal exhibition, in 1986, it has grown into a massive biennial, multinational festival of panels, films, concerts, and workshops. The photographs have always represented photojournalism at its truest, pushing for social change—a reflection of Watriss’s and Baldwin’s values. “From the beginning, FotoFest has approached photography not only as an art form, but as a way of seeing the world more clearly and more generously,” Watriss writes in the introduction to “Global Visions: FotoFest at 40.”
Seeing the world clearly and generously could also describe Watriss’s dreams for herself. She was born to wealth and privilege in 1943; her father was a career diplomat (he possibly, maybe did double duty as a Cold War spy), while her mother was described in her obituary as “the ‘Golden Girl’ of San Francisco society.” Watriss’s early years were nomadic, as her family moved from San Francisco to New York to Greece and back to the U.S., settling in Washington, D.C. She did a stint at a proper East Coast boarding school, after which she refused to apply to any of the socially proper women’s colleges—Bryn Mawr, say—and instead headed for the University of Madrid, then the Sorbonne and, finally, New York University. She became fluent in Spanish and French.
And she became a journalist, working at The St. Petersburg Times, in Florida, and then the Public Broadcast Laboratory, the precursor to PBS, where she delved into the most controversial subjects of the sixties: drug use, the Vietnam War, civil rights, and feminism. She began to travel the world as a reporter and photographer for the major magazines of the time, as well as The New York Times. “Coming to photography through journalism,” she said, “put a special emphasis on important things that were happening” in the moment. Watriss investigated socialism in Hungary and Romania and photographed a civil war in Chad. She won awards while galleries in Mexico and European capitals clamored for her work.
In 1970, her solo act became a lifelong collaboration. It happened at a party in the Manhattan home of an Italian duchess. (As it does?) “I walked in and saw Fred. Something immediately drew us together. We spent the rest of the evening talking to each other,” Watriss told me. Baldwin then was a beanpole-tall, WASPishly handsome raconteur. Along with being a photographer for National Geographic—a chick magnet then for sure—he was a maestro of the romantic. “The next day we had a picnic in Central Park. Red wine, French baguette, Brie cheese, and hard salami,” Watriss said. Baldwin, as recounted in his autobiography, Dear Mr. Picasso: An Illustrated Love Affair With Freedom, made a crucial observation. “Wendy turned out to not only be sexy but also fiercely intelligent. Although my recent history revealed a predilection for good looking, screwed up women, Wendy wasn’t screwed up.”
They were made for each other, in fact. Baldwin’s blue-chip background was not dissimilar to Watriss’s own. But unlike Watriss, whose rebelliousness was tempered with common sense, Baldwin was a restless seeker professionally and emotionally, haunted by the death of his father, a diplomat like Watriss’s, when he was five. Baldwin was thrown out of one boarding school, later dropped out of the University of Virginia, and enlisted in the Marines, taking his first photos on the front lines of the Korean War. He went on to famously talk his way into Picasso’s studio, where the artist allowed him to shoot a portrait.
On the day they met, Watriss was heading for an assignment in Vienna, thinking she would never return to the U.S. Instead, within eight months, she and Baldwin had loaded up an $800 trailer—towed by his 1970s Mercedes-Benz Cabriolet convertible—determined to write and photograph rural America. What followed were peripatetic years across the South before the pair finally settled in Texas, which Watriss found “more exotic than Moldavia.” She told me, “We were trying to rediscover our own country, having lived so long in Europe and on assignments.” They chose three cultural frontiers to serve as a microcosm of the U.S.: “The old corn, cotton, slave frontier; the German Hill Country; and then the border from the lower Rio Grande Valley to El Paso.”
They were both young and beautiful and so curious, characteristics that provided an all-access pass to just about anywhere, including Grimes County, where the couple spent two years researching and writing and photographing and, in a story that still makes a smile bloom across Watriss’s face, frog gigging. “I think there were the sort of odd things about our characters and our experience that interested people,” she told me. “We were different from most of the people that they saw, but we weren’t particularly threatening, and we were not arrogant. So probably we got away with things that other people didn’t, necessarily.”
Traveling to Austin, they befriended future Governor Ann Richards and her circle. In Houston Dominique de Menil gave them a show of their Grimes County work at the Rice University museum and also offered them a home in one of the bungalows that would in later years frame the Menils’ own eponymous institution. Meanwhile, the couple’s reputations grew. In 1982, for instance, Watriss won one of photography’s most prestigious awards for the Implications of Agent Orange, a series for which she interviewed and photographed soldiers exposed to the defoliant in Vietnam. And then, on a trip back home from a major photography festival in the south of France, Baldwin and Watriss—soon to be Fred and Wendy to just about everyone—came up with the idea to have a similar event in Houston. Neither could agree who’d had the idea first.
But they had to figure out how to pay for it. “Houston was ready to take on innovative, good ideas that could be a benefit to the city,” Watriss recalled. “The people that we were going to have to go to for money were very open. It wasn’t a class- and caste-ridden city. It was expansive in its thinking, even if it wasn’t sophisticated or highly cosmopolitan then. It was just ready to look and create things and knew how to take risks. You put a stick in the ground, you don’t know whether you’re going to get sand or oil.”
Still, the couple knew they had to do something unique to raise enough cash to make FotoFest a going concern. “We decided that we had to be big in Texas, and we had to do something that related to Texas.” So for the first exhibition, they invited four internationally known photographers to photograph the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, including the controversial Helmut Newton. “He made a splash by shooting one Houston socialite in front of the backside of the largest Charolais bull he could find,” Watriss said. “My God. The biggest balls.”
“They became photo royalty,” said Houston artist and photographer Bennie Ansell, who traveled with Baldwin and Watriss to a show in Korea and watched their impact grow over the following decades. “People knew them all around the world.”
Fredericka Hunter, the Contemporary Queen
If Watriss and Baldwin were driven to bring about social change through photography, Hunter and her longtime business partner, Ian Glennie, had a similar but equally passionate goal with a more challenging medium: contemporary art. It, like Hunter herself, possesses a sophistication that can be daunting. With her glacier-white bob, assessing gaze, and authoritative air, Hunter was read by many locals as Too New York—too scary—in the early days of her Texas Gallery.
But any true art lover would find her eager to share her passion and her belief in its power. As Hunter told the Houston Chronicle in 2002, “An artist makes you look. A good artist makes you see. A great artist makes you change your frame of reference.” Or, more simply: “It was just all we wanted to do,” she said of herself and Glennie. (It’s notable that both Watriss and Hunter had longtime collaborations with men who weren’t intent on dimming their lights.)
Born and raised in Galveston, Hunter was a Ball High School graduate who knew how to hunt and fish long before she had ever heard of color-field painting. Headstrong, she dropped out of Wellesley in her junior year. (Maybe there’s a pattern here.) She loved the academics and crewing on a campus lake, but she had also fallen in love with contemporary art, which was not a priority at the school. Then, too, as Hunter said, “it was 1967, and the revolution was coming.” Again, not so much at Wellesley. Her college counselor suggested she “get a job in a trust department of a bank to meet rich men.” Instead Hunter moved to Houston, where, as Watriss and Baldwin would a few years later, she joined a crowd of young creatives in the sway of John and Dominique de Menil.
Hunter decided to finish her art degree at the University of St. Thomas, which Dominique de Menil was using as a kind of private artistic fiefdom—and de Menil, in contrast to Wellesley’s faculty, did not look down her nose at contemporary art. As a collector and curator, she knew some of the major artists of the day and so could introduce her students to the likes of Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. Impressed with Hunter’s enthusiasm, de Menil offered her academic credit when the young woman expressed a desire to move to New York. There she worked as gofer, driver, and whatever else was needed for the transformative, hard-driving gallery owner Richard L. Feigen. Walking in the city, Hunter literally witnessed the emergence of women-run art galleries. “Galleries were historically the one example of women with their own businesses,” she told me. An idea began to take form. It didn’t hurt that in Manhattan Hunter also met the kinds of artists who would later serve Texas Gallery so well: Chuck Close, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Mapplethorpe, and more. It was also where she met Glennie, who was working as an architect in I.M. Pei’s firm while a student at Rice University.
Soon enough, both were heading home. Glennie needed to finish his Rice architecture degree, and Hunter had a job in Houston at Menil U.“The night before we left,” Glennie said, “Don Barthelme came up the stairs of this house we were staying in and he just kept saying, ‘You can’t go back to Houston. You have to stay in New York.’ And then years later he came back too.”
Those years—the late sixties through the oil boom of the seventies and early eighties—saw Houston metamorphosing into an international city, with a not-coincidental flourishing of arts and letters. NASA sent men to the moon while the Menils installed the iconoclastic curator James Johnson Sweeney at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, immediately propelling the place into the big leagues. Meanwhile, a new stainless steel–sided Contemporary Arts Museum went up across the street. Barthelme, who had been that museum’s first director in 1961, came back to teach in 1979 at the University of Houston’s fledgling creative-writing program. Ken Kesey caused a stir when he stopped in to visit Rice professor Larry McMurtry; architect Philip Johnson moved on from designing the jewel box–like Rothko Chapel to building Pennzoil Place, which started the whole starchitect thing here.
Hunter and Glennie soon connected with two partners who had a print business called Contract Graphics; along with producing art prints for all the new skyscrapers that needed work for their interior walls, they were printing the work of California pop artist Ed Ruscha. He took a liking to the pair. “That led to meeting everybody,” Hunter said. And soon, it also led to the kinds of shows that had previously been a distinct rarity in Houston. “Nobody was showing work from either coast.” In 1972, Hunter and Glennie’s business partners bailed, and Contract Graphics became Texas Gallery. Hunter was 26. The first show featured work by Ruscha. “Our big mistake was that the first show sold,” Glennie told me. “We thought life was easy.”
It wasn’t always—hardly ever, in fact. “Our collectors came from Dallas and Fort Worth more than Houston at the very beginning,” Hunter said. But the de Menils continued their support, and gradually (relatively, for an art gallery), a steady group of collectors turned the gallery into an ongoing concern—and a destination. Houston, Hunter said, turned out to be more accepting than Dallas. “It’s more open—not necessarily open-minded, but it’s more diffuse, and that creates a situation where you can kind of do what you want.” In 1978 the gallery was doing well enough to move from its spot near Rice University to the art deco–style River Oaks Shopping Center, though in discreetly IYKYK style, its entrance faced away from the bustling West Gray Street, perching instead in line with the service entrances of other stores. Its sign was painted so low on the plate glass window that it was nearly invisible. (The infamous make-out bar upstairs in the same center was similarly understated.)
Hunter became the public face of the business, while Glennie worked behind the scenes, organizing and hanging the shows with a diamond cutter’s precision. “He gets not only the spatial thing but the resonance thing,” Hunter said, citing his background in art history as well as architecture. “The formal concerns—with color, form, or subject.” Texas Gallery exhibited artists who were then or would soon become the twentieth century’s most influential: Billy Al Bengston, Lynda Benglis, Brice Marden, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Serra, James Rosenquist, and William Wegman, to name just a few. There were also Texas artists like Melissa Miller, Kermit Oliver, Earl Staley, Nic Nicosia, James Surls, Rachel Hecker, and David McGee, who adopted Houston as home after growing up in Detroit and Louisiana.
It was fun, and sometimes more than a little wild. For a Warhol show, “there was such a press of people that Andy was pressed into the wall,” Hunter recalled. (For a 1978 show of sports portraits, Warhol deadpanned, “Athletes are great. They are the biggest and best-looking.”) And there was controversy. A bright red Claes Oldenberg sculpture of a mouse, placed in front of the downtown public library in 1975, inspired a city council debate over the piece’s appropriateness.
Hunter also became a huge proponent and friend of minimalist Donald Judd and was crucial to the 1986 establishment of the Chinati Foundation, in West Texas, and, in turn, Marfa’s transformation into an arts destination. For her trouble, she found herself defending an Icelandic artist in 2002 whose work in a show there included the phrase “George W. Bush is an idiot.” (Said the mayor at the time: “We see better graffiti on the railroad freight trains as they go by.”)
Despite Hunter and Glennie’s important contributions to the art scene here, they are not exactly boldface names. “Someone who has lived down the block from the gallery on Peden Street for the last twenty-five years didn’t know we were there,” Hunter told me. And among some who do, the two still have a reputation for haughtiness. Noted Houston philanthropist and arts patron Emily Todd explained, “Art is scary sometimes. They’ve always been trailblazers, and I think sometimes the world hasn’t caught up with them.”
It’s also true, though, that over the years Hunter became a generous mentor to local artists, fledgling gallery owners, and people—Houstonians—who just wanted to learn to see. “They helped me understand why artists make what they make because they knew the artists personally,” said Todd. “They have a very high level of seeing and understanding. They are gateway people for ‘hard’ art.”
Their Legacy
Fred Baldwin died in 2021 at the age of 92, but to outsiders, Watriss carried on diligently, working on the next FotoFest iteration, which focused on the historical understanding (or misunderstanding) of the relationship between geography and Western power structures. The couple had begun searching for a successor as early as 2010. “I don’t think either of us felt a particular loss. I mean, from time to time . . .” Watriss said, her voice growing softer. They promoted from within, choosing artist and curator Steven Evans to serve as executive director in 2014; Watriss remains board chair.
No one expects her to let go of FotoFest entirely. Strategy sessions are planned for the summer; she’s fundraising for the future and dreaming of arranging some international residencies. “You could say exhibitions are a dime a dozen, and there are always going to be more photographers than there are exhibitions,” Watriss told me. “But something that really has the disposition and dream of community building and providing a place where creative people can be excited and at the same time have opportunities for learning—that doesn’t exist that often.”
Hunter and Glennie, meanwhile, closed Texas Gallery this past winter “when they raised the rent twenty percent,” Hunter groused with her typical frankness, though she admitted that the increase was really just “the final straw” for closing. There were more reasons, she said, including the ever-rising operating costs and the conversion of art into a “market.” Meaning, of course, clients who collect art as an investment rather than a passion.
But like Watriss, she is still at it. Hunter confessed that closing the gallery was “liberating.” Now, instead of working in the spare, white-walled space situated behind the fabled River Oaks Theatre, Hunter and Glennie have, as she put it, “moved to the country,” her description of a nondescript office park just off U.S. 290, not too far from the equally unglamorous DMV. That space is now home to Texas Gallery’s library, inventory, and archive.
To Glennie and Hunter, the remaining contents of more than fifty years’ worth of work need pruning, purging, and organizing as the two move into what their farewell press release called “online sales and exhibitions as well as archive and estate management.” To anyone else, the warren-like warehouse is a heady treasure trove of art books, vinyl records, posters advertising Texas Gallery shows, and breathtaking contemporary canvases stored between wooden slats like so many china plates. One room is stocked with Glennie’s seductive flea market and folk art buys. “It’s kind of nice to not be shopkeeping,” Hunter said, seemingly unaware of the irony.
Still, on the day I visited, Hunter and the tall, balding, almost preternaturally reserved Glennie seemed more focused on dog sitting a friend’s tiny terrier mix. Peanut was oblivious to the array of front-office paintings, which included but were not limited to a particularly stunning study in blue by Billy Al Bengston called Lost at Sea, a wall-dominating canvas by the abstract painter Nancy Graves, and a massive William Wegman painting and collage composed of postcards from seemingly everywhere. (A Wegman Weimaraner portrait stood guard on an adjacent wall.)
Today, of course, there are more gallery owners in Houston showing challenging work, while the space Texas Gallery occupied will soon be converted into something else—maybe a pickleball studio for River Oaks players or a chain store like the ones that have taken over the shopping center, once populated with local businesses. But, like Wendy Watriss, Hunter isn’t holding on to what was. “I was thinking how one should never stick around too long,” she told me. “I know a couple dealers who ended up propped up in their back rooms.”
I’m not sure Hunter is the type to ever let that happen. Regardless, the gallery’s legacy will be the collectors she educated, the gallerists she mentored, the artists she supported, and the city she enriched. “Fredericka Hunter as a friend and art dealer was and is still extremely important to me. Her deep understanding and passion for my work and those before me and after me will long be remembered,” the painter McGee told me. “And what she has meant for Houston and Texas cannot be measured.”
The same could be said, and has been said, of Watriss. She and Baldwin “created the possibility for photographers from around the world to show their work,” said award-winning photographer and FotoFest contributor Susan Meiselas, not just in Houston but across the globe. “I would never have had a show in Argentina, Korea, Germany, and Mexico City” without a show first at FotoFest, artist Ansell said, echoing the gratitude of many.
“I think I’ll like Houston if they ever get it finished,” another local icon, Oveta Culp Hobby, said in 1946. She served as the director of the Women’s Army Corps; the first U.S. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare; and later as owner and publisher of The Houston Post. She was another woman sure of what she wanted and what her city needed. Hobby, who died in 1995, left the city better than she found it, like so many women before her. But thankfully, the place remains unfinished, still open to other women with big ideas and the will to see them through. More Hunters, more Watrisses, opening our eyes to what’s possible.
Featured image credits: Hunter: Rodney Marionneaux/Courtesy of Fredericka Hunter; Texas Gallery: Courtesy of Gallery 98; Watriss and FotoFest: Courtesy of FotoFest/Tere Garcia
