0.5 H.j. bott, b. 1933

To houston by way of galveston

I went to high school in San Antonio and left there in 1952, but I didn’t return to this area until 1969. I moved to Galveston and should have moved to Houston right away, but Galveston was an incredible experience. We lived there ten years and my wife DeeDee

I moved to Galveston from New York. I had a job with an ad agency and I just happened to go to Galveston and see all these old storefront buildings that were vacant. I asked why they were all available—my God, in New York they would have been just chock full—and the man said, “They want too much money.”

I asked, “Well, what is too much money?”

He said, “Well they want $45, $50 for some of those lofts.”

Even in those dollars, in 1969, I mean this was nothing. I went back to New York, resigned my job and made it to Galveston. Part of the decision also had to do with the fact that the Menil Collection, which at that time was at University of St. Thomas, had had a very large article in Art in America about what they were doing in Houston…and it all happened to gel at the same time.

I thought this was going to be a wonderful situation of being able to be outside of Houston so I could be left alone, but at the same time it wasn’t difficult to get here. I had made the terrible mistake of moving from what is now the Chelsea area in New York out to Long Island so I could be by the foundry and hell, I could have gone to Wyoming and it would have been the same thing; it was so difficult to get back into the city. But with Interstate 45, even with the construction it wasn’t that bad. Now, many of those trips I don’t really remember because that was when I was still drinking, which just frightens the hell out of me—to think that I’d come up here and go to an opening and drive back and have no idea how we got back home.

But anyway, the bottom line of the Galveston experience which lasted ten years was that it was very enriching and it was a fulfilling kind of thing that I had always wanted—to have a complete atelier like Max Ernst had set up in the southwest. And I think I did well self-satisfaction wise. DeeDee thought at first we were going back to New York because when we met, she was on her way to New York…but I had determined after I spent one winter here that I wasn’t going back to New York.

Odd jobs

I went out to the medical branch (University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston) and got a job there as a ghostwriter and an in-house management consultant since my academic background is in cultural anthropology. DeeDee was in banking at the time and she wanted me to go full-time as an artist, saying that she would support it, but I was too much of a male chauvinist. I couldn’t handle it. So I kept the job at the medical branch for four years, then I set up an art therapy program that had to do with disassociated people, feeling that an artist would have more of a touch with that and be a better art therapist than someone straight from psych. I set up a program with MHMR (Galveston Mental Health and Mental Retardation) that lasted about four years. We had the art therapy center and then we had working studios. I had a little apartment complex for my studio assistant and two of the art therapists had studio apartments. Michael Tracy was one of the artists that I trained as an art therapist, and Michael was just a really incredible therapist. I mean, [the clients] absolutely loved him. They’d say, “How can he be the art therapist? He’s just like us!” He had wonderful command and a great sense of empathy.