Venerable Austin gallery nurtures artists, buyers

By Jeanne Claire van Ryzin
American Statesman arts writer

Austin American-Statesman
GLOSSY
Friday, May 4, 2007

Judy Taylor says she essentially got heckled into the art gallery business.

In the early 1980s, Ann Haygood Ledbetter, who founded Gallery Shoal Creek in 1965, rented space in a building Taylor owned near Shoal Creek.

"Ann just kept pestering me," Taylor recalls. "She kept telling me I needed to be in the gallery with her, that I needed to see what she was doing and learn the gallery business."

And so, with a lifelong passion for all things visual and creative -- and in an attempt to stop the pestering -- Taylor decided to give it a try.

Now, Taylor runs Gallery Shoal Creek solo. And as it enters its fifth decade, it stands as one of Austin's flagship fine art galleries.

Long-term seems to suit Taylor just fine. Indeed, she has a host of artists she's been representing for years, decades even. Artists such as the New York-based painter Milt Kobayashi, Austin sculptor Bonnie Lynch and Texas landscape master Carroll Collier. Such long-standing relationships, Taylor says, have paid off in several ways. Not only has she enjoyed following the trajectory of an artist's creative development, she's also been able share that history with collectors.

Taylor tries to visit her out-of-town artists, such as San Angelo-based, Mexico-born painter René Alvarado, at least once a year and enjoys the ongoing back-and-forth dialogue. To a certain point, that is.

"I'll give artists direct feedback, maybe tell them what kind of reaction their work has gotten from gallery visitors," she says. "But that's it. I never try to plant any creative seeds in their minds."

However, she does like to help those seeds grow.

A few years ago, she locked onto Alvarado as the then-twentysomething was just getting started. In 2000 Taylor organized a highly successful solo show for the young artist and veritably introduced the art world to Alvarado and his psychologically intense surrealist paintings. Now, Alvarado's work is collected by patrons around the country. Taylor hosts a new solo exhibit of Alvarado's work this month.

Taylor refreshed the gallery's profile a year ago when she moved into Gabriel's Court, the intimate retail and office complex just off Lamar Boulevard and West 29th Street that features Fino restaurant as lead tenant. Taylor says the new digs have an urban feel that jibes with Austin's increasingly urban lifestyles.

While she hosts a regularly changing schedule of featured solo exhibits, she always dedicates a certain portion of the gallery to other artists.

"Most people give a lot of thought to an art purchase," she says. "They need to be able to ponder a work of art, think about it, come back to it again and again. And I try to encourage that and make that very easy for people. I try to give them a sense of the whole of an artist's career."