Andy Coolquitt

Andy Coolquitt

Artist

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Image

andy’s place, 1994-present, Austin TX. Image courtesy of the artist.

About the Artist

Andy Coolquitt is an Austin-based artist. In 1964 Andy was born in the real version of that town that is fictionalized on King of the Hill. It’s a suburb of Dallas, TX. On Halloween 1979, he went as a giant Quaalude, fashioning the pill- shaped costume in yellow painted cardboard branded Lemmon-714. Together with his best friend Brad McLemore, he formed his first band, hastily named Detour. They decorated their practice space with hundreds of those square Styrofoam egg cartons. His early music education took a turn after seeing Ornette Coleman at the Caravan of Dreams in Fort Worth. Later that year under the influence of Jaco Pastorius, he had the frets removed from his 1962 Fender Precision. He now regrets that decision. Might have been that same year that he helped a dude build a house, learning the basic skills that would be utilized fourteen years later. While in grad school at the University of Texas in Austin he embarked upon the project that still occupies most of his energy and remains “the lens through which his work can be viewed”. It didn’t have a name for a long time but now people call it andy’s place. In 2003 a story on the house came out in Nest Magazine under the title Andy Coolquitt’s Thesis. Another milestone was the publication of a monograph by the UT Press in 2012 which accompanied a 10-year survey organized by the Blaffer Museum in Houston. These days he shares his studio with a grey fox named Gregory.

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