Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen at the Hammer

Terry Allen and Jo Harvey Allen | Image courtesy of the Hammer Museum

Artistic duo Terry Allen (Chouinard BFA 66) and Jo Harvey Allen will hold a conversation on Wednesday (Aug. 7), at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The conversation will be interspersed with audio excerpts from the couple’s theatrical works, music recordings and radio shows.

Terry Allen is an artist and country songwriter whose works were characterized by Rolling Stone magazine as “uniformly eccentric and uncompromising, savage and beautiful, literate and guttural.” His artwork hangs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in both New York City and Los Angeles, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and exhibited at the Paris, Sydney, Whitney and São Paolo Biennales, among others. Allen is also the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and Guggenheim Fellowships.

Allen’s works are currently on display at the LA Louver Gallery exhibition Terry Allen: The Exact Moment It Happens in the West, which runs until Saturday, Sept. 28. The exhibition features hundreds of Allen’s drawings dating from the 1960s to the present, as well as video installations and sculptures throughout the first and second floor of the gallery. Allen’s melding of “music, visuals and performance into a singular language of expression” throughout a decades-long career takes shape in an array of stories, pictures and songs. Read more about Allen in a 2011 East of Borneo interview.

Jo Harvey Allen is an actor and playwright best known for her film work and engaging one-woman shows, including Hally Lou, Duckblind and Homerun. She is lauded as a pioneer of women in radio, hosting the Los Angeles music and talk program Rawhide & Horses in the 1960s. During the ‘70s, Allen staked her claim as one of the first American performing artists to perform in alternative spaces, including cafes and art galleries. She has collaborated with Terry on numerous projects, including the opera Pioneer and stage musical Diaries of a West Texas Hooker.

Allen’s photographs, installations and lithographs can be found in venues like the National Museum of Peru; the Humboldt Museum in Havana, Cuba; and the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Allen is the recipient of NEA and Art Matters Fellowships, and was inducted into the West Texas Walk of Fame in 2015.