Clementine Gallery announces the opening of The Lizard Cult, a group exhibition featuring work by Lee Baxter Davis, C. Mark Burt, Georganne Deen, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Lawrence Lee, Greg Metz, Robyn O’Neil, Gary Panter, and Christian Schumann.

In the 1970’s at East Texas State University, (now A & M commerce), Art Professor Lee Baxter Davis and his most devoted students were referred to in the local vernacular as “The Lizard Cult”. Davis, an artist and regional icon who has only recently gained wider recognition, composes deeply personal and exhaustively complicated psychological narratives steeped in his own eccentric brand of fire and brimstone mythology. These richly layered ink and watercolor drawings reveal not only the vision and insight that made Davis such a compelling teacher, but the tremendous influence he had upon his students’ ideas about art and art-making. In a recent article for ART L!ES, Charissa N. Terranova wrote:

The red thread truly uniting these artists is the vocabulary of symbolic form inherited from Davis. It is an idiom of iconic references- sometimes abstract, sometimes identifiable, sometimes both- that, while clearly marking Davis’s presence and influence in their lives, has become remarkably individuated in each artist’s work. Getting to the core of his influence, it is Davis’s alchemy of imagination that has been so communicable and expansive among his inheritors, spreading like both branches and seedlings of a magical broad-girth tree living quietly in an enchanted, hallucinogenic forest in rural Texas.

It is a testament to Davis’s, and to the Lizard Cult’s, legacy, that many of these students, who studied with him over the course of three decades, have achieved great professional success, appearing in solo gallery shows and major museum exhibitions internationally. The Lizard Cult features the work of eight of these artists, alongside that of their teacher, Lee Baxter Davis.