Gertrude Barnstone, her story, "Ay Que Vida"
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( Gertrude Barnstone gates, Houston ,Texas. 1999--2014 )
Since 2010 I have been working on a book about my friend, Gertrude Barnstone, a legendary Houston artist and activist. It is important that I complete publication of the book, Ay, Que Vida in this, her 90th year. I am asking for your to help complete printing and binding this book (approx 100 pages with color photographs).
When her mother instructed Houston artist and activist Gertrude Levy
Barnstone (now 90) never to marry or have children, the blue-eyed six-year-old
promised herself that, dammit, she’d do it all. “You’re going to be an artist,”
Mrs. Levy told her daughter. “Put down that broom." And, for the last 89-odd
years Barnstone has been busy making good on her promise. The arts were booming
in Post-Depression Houston. New museums, theaters and orchestras were
sprouting as fast as oil companies. Gertrude attended Houston public
schools, took classes at the art school of the Museum of Fine Arts, and graduated
from Rice University in three years.
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(Gertrude Barnstone in Rashomon, Alley Theater, Houston, Texas, ca. 1959)
A stunning dancer, actress and painter, Gertrude continued to draw,
paint, sculpt and act in local theater after marrying Howard Barnstone, a
rising Houston architect fresh out of Yale. The Barnstones befriended
contemporary artists, attended museum and gallery openings and contributed to
the founding of the Contemporary Arts Museum. Among their friends were
sophisticated art patrons and collectors, including John and Dominique de
Menil, Charles Barnes and Marguerite Johnston, Clare and Sam Sprunt.
Barnstone was always an activist. She volunteered at Poe School when
her three children attended. Occasionally she shifted her focus from art
to politics. In 1963, angered by the conservative Houston School Board’s attack
on its lone African-American member, she ran at large for a place on the
Houston School Board which had been blocking integration for a full 10 years
after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed Separate but Equal in the 1950s. Howard
Barnstone supported Gertrude’s School Board campaign, as he had supported her
art. “He never wanted a stay-at-home wife,” she says now. She ran at large,
wore out eight pairs of shoes and won by 30,000 votes. While on the
School Board, Gertrude cajoled, argued and pushed the stubborn conservative
bloc toward full integration.
Her marriage to Howard Barnstone ended in divorce in 1969. Through the sturm und drang Gertrude
preserved her smile and kept her footing. She enrolled in welding classes and
went to work for a company making skylights. Since 1965 Gertrude has
been supporting herself by making vivid and lyrical sculpture, much of it
architectural. Her garden gates, chairs, railings and screens have enlivened
Houston’s landscape. But it’s her spirit, passionate, forceful, and above all
indomitable that she’s given us. Once I asked her why she went into politics in
the first place.
“I looked at myself in the mirror and decided I couldn’t live with
myself if I didn’t run,” she said.
Olive Hershey, author, publisher of "Gertrude Barnstone: Ay Que Vida"