New York City, NY
May 14-17, 2026
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December 16, 2025: Arrive at Diego’s new studio in Austin, shot of tequila, make a deal: A footprint & cig portrait por plata y 2 days labor. I go home to NY for Christmas.
January 18, 2026: I am UWS at Roerich museum fiending for Nada (Camus, Love of Life).
February 18, 2026: Lent starts, I fly from NY to TX for day 1 of labor. Grass harvest in Hill Country with Diego and two lads. 200 bushels of little bluestem grass.
March 12, 2026: Day 2 of labor, building outdoor shower attached to Diego studio. Stones, dirt, gravel, water.
March 19, 2026: I arrive in Castell. 3 days later become Art resident #2, Diego is #1.
March 28, 2026: Diego comes to Art. We are first on planet to feed TX longhorn doña sauce. Pee in perfect circles. Silent Sunday morning.
April 12, 2026: At Art sign, red ants on my feet, friend on my shoulders, precisely measuring dimensions.
April 30, 2026: Home in NY, thinking about Art.
May 6, 2026: Back in Art. Diego and Jack join for the night before they depart from Art.
I walk into the closest library to Art, Texas, and ask the librarian if they have any information on Art.
“Are you talking about art or Art Art?”
Many walk into Diego’s studio and, with stone faces, ask: “Where is the Art?”
Outside Diego’s studio, little bluestem grass is drying all over the actively terraforming yard. He bathed the grass in cochineal dye in the repurposed cattle trough that’s now his outdoor shower. We built a stone wall between the shower and the encroaching bamboo forest. We spent days and nights stacking, using Andy Goldsworthy’s technique passed down to us by Diego. The stones were harvested from the cybernetic home construction site across the street.
Poncho is mostly assembled inside the studio. The missing face is to be completed with a mountain laurel seed, and the last bit of tail will be attached with metal wire to welded dollies for more motion. Poncho is surrounded by cicada paintings, drawers of mediums (bugs, seeds, cigarette butts), and hand-me-down familial wood.
Some look at Poncho and see grass. Some look at Poncho and see a dog, dragon, sperm cell, porcupine, wooly-bugger, armadillo, snake. The imaginative child is enthralled, and plays with Poncho like a pet.
In Art we wake to the birds singing–in Austin we wake to nail guns blasting. In Austin we pee, discretely, in the corners of the backyard. In Art Diego asks me why I am peeing in shrubs, ashamed. Plato or some other rube said there’s a societal line where once crossed, into the country, we may turn our backs to passerbys and pee publicly in peace.
Art imitates life, art is life, art is beauty, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, beauty will save the world blah blah art art. Art is a place in the center of some lines we drew to call Texas. In Art there are Artists. Pop. 10 (or is it 9 now). One artist spends a Wednesday installing a guillotine into a flatbed trailer in an effort to market a Mad Max looking meat smoker. He refers to Llano (pop. 3800) as ‘the big city’. Another artist, part of the first three frontier settling families, left Art due to the crowded conditions after a few more folks settled nearby.
The Artists see me on my laptop and say, “He needs a job”. I was doing work at Willow Creek Cafe, I say, but word gets around and the collective conscience finds it odd that I would come to Texas from New York just to work in a cafe. I came to Texas from New York to harvest grass.
Art or art, job or job, work or work? Art, I am told by the wisdom larping instant answering machine, could be from Latin ars meaning skill, craft, technique. Or, “Our Father who ART in Heaven”, from the German ar-ti– to be. Art; to be, skill or mastery, Art a place, cicadas as paint, art in heart, heart in Art (30.739488, -99.111591), Poncho fresh print–press rooted in Art.
In Art, the stacked stones stay, while lines blur, heading towards thermodynamic equilibrium, we depart. Diego draws a perfect circle in the dirt by peeing around himself, and tells me you’re either in or out. Art or art, to be or not to be, in or out ouroboros.
- Edward Oak