The Unstoppable George Hughes, or: How to Make a Western

You have to understand, you can’t stop George Hughes.

George Hughes, Red Contention, 2004. Oil on canvas, 69 1/2 x 49 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

You have to understand, you can’t stop George Hughes. Talk to someone who knows him, and you’ll start to get it, even secondhand. Tell someone you’re going to speak to him, and they’re excited for you.

Hughes’s paintings have that energy too. He hurls himself at the canvas as a proxy for the immovable forces in our world — the colonial system of things, the ever-growing power of the commodity in our imaginations, the red fact of violence — piling innumerable efforts at the feet of these mountains. And you see them quiver.

Andy Krzystek, an artist who has made films with Hughes, put it this way, “George told me, ‘I moved into a house. The garage was twenty feet long. I couldn’t wait to make paintings that were nineteen- and-a-half feet long.’” What’s the limit of what’s possible? Do that.

Here’s another example. It starts at a party. Friends have a cowboy hat hanging on the wall, and — it’s a party — people take turns wearing it, acting the part. Someone suggests that Hughes, who is known for making performance videos, do a Western. The next day, someone not even at the party hears about all this and drops off a book about cowboys they found in a used bookstore. Over six months Hughes pulls together the costumes. Every Sunday he goes to the thrift store to look for hats. Someone loans a horse to the picture. When it comes time to shoot, fifteen of the forty people who said they would show up do. Some people stick it through. Others disappear. Hughes shoots some of it in Lockport, in Alma, in a bar in Buffalo where they only paid for the beer. The dialogue is improvised, some of the words are intelligible, sensible, but sometimes it’s just gib- berish in the form of the American West. The person who could do the best accent became the star. It wasn’t planned, it just happened that way.

And so, Hughes made a Western.

“Being African, people never thought that I grew up experiencing Westerns. But I grew up watching Bonanza,” Hughes says

Bonanza was one of the longest running Westerns on US television. Week after week, for more than fourteen seasons, Ben Cartwright and his three sons by different deceased mothers tend to a thousand-square mile ranch called the Ponderosa, learning how to love each other and to love justice. It’s a kinder, gentler incarnation of the cowboy. Bonanza, in its own way, took on racism against Asian Americans, Native Americans, Black people, and war, but it’s still an odd touchpoint for an artist whose academic bio — for his role as an associate professor of painting at the University at Buffalo — speaks to his interest in the “residual effects of colonialism.”

In any case, the Cartwrights, on the tide of United States culture, spilled across the Atlantic to Ghana, where Hughes picked them up. Without a TV in the house, he’d go to a neighbor’s to watch a different world stream across the screen. He played “Cowboys and Indians,” too.

Hughes prods at something here about who has the right to a myth, who gets to play in it. Maybe there’s a little cowboy bravura in just laying claim to the territory.

George Hughes, Fruition, 2003. Oil on canvas, 72 × 100 inches Courtesy of the artist

Hughes trained at Kwame Nkrumah University, enrolling in a master’s program in arts education. Many of his peers looked forward to teaching careers. But some, like Hughes, nursed the ambition to become working artists and pursued the knowledge of what that would entail. They studied not just the making of things but also how to survive a life of making things. The lives of famous artists, African and Western, became road maps. “We read about people who really suffered and that gave us some kind of consolation,” Hughes says. “We dug into Francis Bacon. We knew Kandinsky and the risks he took in pure abstraction.”

Because easel painting was originally a Western import, some in Hughes’s cohort rejected it entirely. But distilling symbolic form from local traditions was no easier path for city kids (there are at least seventy- five distinct language groups in Ghana alone). Those who did embrace easel painting, like Hughes, had to discover their own paths forward in a foreign idiom.

Picasso was one of their heroes. “Our training took from traditional African sculptural concepts, blended with Western ideas, and that's the reason we love Picasso, because he took inspiration from African sculpture and also, of course, took inspiration from Cézanne and also Iberian art.”

Hughes had a map, and a goal, and he was prepared to suffer: “If you go for broke, and you’re prolific . . .”

At twenty-eight, he went to Europe for two years. At thirty-two, he came to the United States.

“I came here as an adult,” Hughes says. “When I came, I already had a master's degree. My accent was made, my thoughts were made. I knew my bearings, mentally, and then I had to start from scratch.”

In London, he washed dishes, washed cars. Hughes’s first job in the United States was in a dairy warehouse. “You can imagine coming from the tropics and being thrown in a big fridge.” He wore a winter jacket and a hat every day.

Hughes made friends with guys much younger than him, in their twenties, some eighteen and nineteen, who helped initiate him into the system. Some of them didn’t have cars, so Hughes would pick them up and drop them off, receiving an orientation to life in the United States in return. George remembers the mechanics who helped keep his wayward ’83 Chevy on the road particularly fondly.

But work in the dairy was killing him. A truck driver who delivered milk from Canada noticed his evident despair one day. Hughes was thinking of quitting. He had a newborn daughter. The equation had changed, and he would need to pick up more work. The driver told him not to quit yet: he should have a job while looking for a better job. So Hughes picked up work for UPS. He’d work an eight-hour day at the dairy, get home to his family, and then at 2 am go and unload trucks. And he painted. If you’re prolific . . .

George Hughes, Tactics, 2022. Oil on linen, 48 × 38 inches Courtesy of the artist.

A friend told him about a company hiring a forklift driver, and somehow that was enough of a break. “The forklift was an upgrade,” Hughes says. He quit UPS, he quit the dairy, and for eight hours a day for the next four-and-a-half years, he scanned UPCs in a big warehouse in Toledo, Ohio. “And the more you scan, the more you see your name on the board as being a great worker. Everything is for sale. Everything has a label.”

The UPCs infect his work. The characteristic line patterns subsume faces and lifeforms, cutting up flesh like the blades of a mandoline.

Hughes started taking classes toward an MFA, wanting eventually to teach. His boss helped accommodate his coursework schedule, and Hughes made use of every available minute. “I would do my drawing practice in the van.” After class finished, he’d drive to the warehouse, and with less than an hour before his shift started, he’d draw. The van became a mobile studio: it had a drawing board, his portfolio, and he produced. He kept another studio — not on wheels — for painting: an entire floor of a building (twenty bathrooms), for which he bartered a couple of completed works to the landlord each year.

Eventually, Hughes finished his MFA while working as an adjunct professor on top of the warehouse gig. He got his first full-time academic job in 2001 at the University of Oklahoma. “For the first time, I only had one full-time job. It was like paradise.”

And with the break from the physical labor of his blue-collar jobs, he started working out ambitiously. You get the sense Hughes almost needs to exhaust himself to get any sleep. Hughes is, by the way, massively tall, and he must have carried his workout regime with him to the University at Buffalo (a former student reports that he looked like Hercules).

It helped. A 2017 accident left him nearly paralyzed. He was never supposed to walk again. Over the pandemic, he bought a treadmill. His paintings of flesh and violence feel uncanny here. Carcasses and meat populated a 2006 show at Hallwalls, Social Predation. Just last year, Albright- Knox Northland showed a work from his Ohio years: a twisted abstraction of a yellow car partially obscured by a plastic baseball bat hung nakedly over the canvas from a piece of rope. Hughes’s work is raw in its sense for the vulnerability of bodies.

He's painting again. Working, in part, with assistants to mix paint and cover certain limited areas.

“It's been hard,” Hughes says, “but I think that it's improved. It's gotten better because I have to reconcile my situation with my symptoms. I have to live with it, and I have to figure out how to cope with it.”

George Hughes, Yield, 2015. Acrylic, oil, and enamel on canvas, 72 x 228 inches. Photo: Shirley Verrico.

It’s changed his style, he feels, but for the better. Before the injury, Hughes veered between hard- edge painting and an almost explosive use of paint. Since the injury, he’s tended much more toward hard-edged works with areas of flat color — an idiom much more demanding of his motor skills than broader, expressive gestures.

“You’d think I would go explosive, because it's easier to hide.” Moreover, painters often “paint badly” on purpose, showing their sophistication by self- consciously letting virtuosity come and go like any other element in the work. Hughes, however, states, “I don't want my disability to influence the way I think. I would rather allow the psychology of my impairment — but not the physicality of it — to be vested in the work.”

Hughes wants his mind, not his body, to be in control of the choices that appear in his work, but one also gets the impression that whatever was most challenging for a painter to do, Hughes would do that. If it was harder to paint a banana than an apple, he would paint the banana.

“Painting is a mysterious thing,” Hughes says. “Sometimes the painting that looks like it took forever to paint actually took less time, and sometimes some paintings that look so simple, I suffered more from painting them.” Some of his paintings have date ranges like “2008–2022”: shorthand for something that he did in 2008, kept around in the studio for a few years, moved to the basement for storage, forgot for years, and then finally brought out again. “I figured out the problem,” Hughes said, explaining the grid lines he had just added to a work for his recent exhibition at Buffalo Arts Studio, Identity, Power, and Reconciliation. Those grid lines came out of a work, Two Heads and a Fish, which features an actual metal grate. Before appearing in last year’s Northland group show, that work had been sitting in Hughes’s basement for decades. His solution was years in the making.

In these Truths, 2022, installation view, Albright Knox Northland.

Hughes notes that he did real research for his Western. Contra myth and film, in the post–Civil War era one in four cowboys in the United States West was Black, another third were estimated to have been Mexican. They were rarely instigators of violence. The job was physically grueling, often literally backbreaking, and most cowboys retired by the time they were in their mid-twenties.

Imagine never stopping.

by M. Delmonico Connolly

M. Delmonico Connolly writes, often about race and music, and revises sentences, often about art, at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. His chapbook Ronnie Spector in Rock Gomorrah is out from Gold Line Press (2020).