Terry Allen: MemWars + Truckload of Art 

In celebration of the publication of Truckload of Art: The Life and Work of Terry Allen (Hachette, 2024), artist and musician Terry Allen performs selections from MemWars, a sprawling multimedia series that has spanned drawings, performances, and installations to meditate on the intertwined mythologies of the artist’s childhood and the American West. In live settings, these “little stabs of memory” take the form of story-songs and sintesi (a type of short-form theater favored by the Italian futurists), often joined by his wife and frequent collaborator Jo Harvey Allen. Tall-tales and penetrating autobiography told by the Allens, together and separately, summon a cast of improbable characters—white whales and Denny’s waitresses, monkey men and disc jockey Wolfman Jack. The stories explicate, deepen, and in some cases confound the meanings of the related songs, performed here by the pair, their son Bukka Allen, and frequent collaborator Richard Bowden. 

Allen will be joined by Paradise of Bachelors founder, folklorist, and Truckload of Art author Brendan Greaves, who will read excerpts from the newly published biography and appear in conversation with the artist. Their conversation will be moderated by Randy Kennedy, a Texas panhandle native and author of the recently published a novel Presidio. Kennedy worked as a writer for The New York Times for 25 years and is currently the director of special projects at Hauser and Wirth. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing. 

Texas Renaissance man Terry Allen is an interdisciplinary artist whose border-blurring work has traversed sculpture, painting, drawing, theater, dance, installation, video, performance, sound, and music, all refracted through a Flatland storyteller’s voice since the late ‘60s. A student at the Chouinard Art Institute (later incorporated into CalArts) and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three NEA grants, Allen’s work resides in the collections of MoMA and the Met and has been shown at Documenta and the São Paolo, Paris, Sydney, and Whitney Biennales. His conceptual art country—including classic song suites JUAREZ and Lubbock (on everything)—has led to collaborations with Guy Clark, Little Feat, David Byrne, Lucinda Williams, and The Flatlanders, while his country-concrète radio plays have been broadcast to car radios across vast expanses of after-hours open roads.

See also: Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band on Thursday, October 10, 2024