Digital, mixed media

Colorful digital mixed media contemporary collage by well-known Houston, TX artist, Jesse Lott. This work features various cutouts of various street scenes around Houston such as a taqueria food truck, a house window with cats, an apartment façade, and many more. Signed by the artist at the bottom right. Framed in a modern black frame.

Jesse Lott is an African-American artist known for his wire and wood sculptures, papier mâché figures and collages made from found materials within an aesthetic he calls “urban frontier art”. He attended E.O. Smith Elementary School and Kashmere Gardens High School. Lott was born in Simmesport, Louisiana in 1943. He is African American. During the 1950s, his family relocated to Texas, eventually settling in Houston's Fifth Ward. He attended E.O. Smith Elementary School and Kashmere Gardens High School. In 1957, at the age of 14, he sold his first artwork, a painting. Lott has said this event marked the beginning of his professional art career. At the time, people of color were only allowed to visit Houston's Fine Arts Museum on one specified day each week. Galleries, too, generally prohibited viewings. The exhibition of black artists' work was virtually unheard of. Muralist John Biggers was an early mentor. Biggers was founding chairman of the art department at Texas Southern University (formerly Texas State University for Negroes). Following a trip to Africa, he visited area high schools, including Lott's, and expounded on art, specifically the role of the black artist. Biggers taught that African American artists should turn to the mother country rather than Europe for inspirational models. On Biggers recommendation, Lott enrolled in the historically black college Hampton Institute. He studied there during 1963 and 1964. From Virginia, he moved across the country to California State University (1965) and then Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. During his time at Otis, 1967 to 1969, social realist Charles White was his drawing teacher and personal advisor. Lott fell in with the Black Arts Movement, a group of conceptual artists and collagists that included White, David Hammons and Joe Overstreet. While Lott was skilled at painting and drawing, he soon discovered his true gift, turning trash into treasure and combining it with the spirit of activism. In Collision: The Contemporary Art Scene in Houston, 1972–1985, author Pete Gershon writes, "Very much in line with the Black Arts Movement, Lott's work involved a kind of community-building social practice. It was common for him to hire a pack of loitering kids to dismantle a castoff bedspring and sort out its components. As Lott says, 'There's one kid that didn't become a juvenile delinquent that day...'"

H 16.38 in. x W 28.38 in. x D 1.5 in.