Following the Weird and Winding Path

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you cannot make a living as an artist.

Apologies to Miss Austen aside, that universal truth is a load of hooey. Just ask Max Marshall and Cosmo Jones, the artists (yes, artists) behind Giant Runt Gallery.

Max and Cosmo were kind enough to talk with me before the opening reception for Erica Jaeggli’s exhibition, New Works. Giant Runt is located on St. Louis Avenue in the space formerly occupied by Bale Creek Allen Gallery. There were paintings all around us – some on the walls, some still waiting to be hung, and the air was perfumed with oil paint. It was the perfect location for a discussion of art and the business of art. ‘’

Max smiled, “You can make a living as an artist. Just know that your path is going to be weird and winding.”

Max and Cosmo are alumni of the University of North Texas art program. Max has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in painting and a Bachelor in art history. She also holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in sculpture. Cosmo has two BFAs and an MFA from UNT. Both have been working in the art world while making their art since they graduated.

So, how do two artists end up owning a gallery and curating other artists’ shows?

“We knew of each other from UNT,” Cosmo explained. “One of my classmates at UNT was her roommate. We knew each other’s works but had only met in passing. We messaged for months on Instagram before we met.”

“After I finished grad school at TCU, we were trying to figure out what we were going to do,” said Max.

Cosmo agreed. “We needed studio space, which is difficult to find in Fort Worth, so we started thinking. We started looking for an abandoned school or motel that we could turn into multiple galleries. We could bring in some big name, and in our dream, they would be creating and showing next to some punk kid. There would be studio spaces that would help fund the whole facility.”

Max and Cosmo had met Bale Allen through Jay Wilkinson. “We became friends with Bale,” Max remembered. “One day, he said, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about leaving to go back to school.’ The gallery was available, and we thought this was the magical catalyst for what we’d been talking about.”

“How could we not take it when it fell into our laps?” added Cosmo.

Max smiled. “The more we thought about it, the more we thought that maybe we should do a smaller trial run before we went all in on an abandoned school.”

Giant Runt is a reasonably traditional gallery space – concrete floor, white walls, exposed ductwork. It’s pretty different from what Max and Cosmo envision for their future art compound. “It’s sort of like art school,” Cosmo said. “In school, you learn the traditional styles and the traditional rules. Once you learn them, you can then break them.”

Cosmo and Max not only run the gallery, but they also run a curatorial project called Kickpigeon Kids that introduces young artists to creating collaborative installations. “Some shows are open call; some are invitational,” Cosmo explained. “We give the artists an open-ended prompt. Then we take their works and combine them with our vast collection of weird stuff.”

Max continues, “Then we make a full-on installation work of it all so that no piece is the star. Everything is considered art. Even the junk. Even the weird stuff.”

Both artists are experts in “weird stuff.” Cosmo started at UNT studying jazz guitar; he realized that he didn’t have the work ethic for the renowned music program. At the time, he and his parents had inherited a Native American jewelry trading business that his grandparents established and became interested in metalsmithing.

“UNT has the best metalsmithing program in the US,” Cosmo said. “Metalsmithing at UNT is an art degree, and part of that degree is taking other studio classes, so I took painting. All of a sudden, I realized, ‘Hey, I can do this.’”

After school, Cosmo did a lot of different jobs in the art world. He was the construction foreman for the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe. He was the prop master at Amphibian Stage when they first moved to their current location on South Main. Now, when he’s not curating other artists’ shows, he works in a variety of media. “I do installation work, super-mixed media painting, videos… I do whatever is right at the time, but the short answer is that I’m a painter.”

Max’s artistic and career trajectory is similarly serpentine. “After school, I worked in a museum, but I realized that wasn’t for me. But it showed me that there’s a whole bunch of niche jobs that I’d never heard about that help make this whole art machine run. So I got my CDL and started driving trucks and hanging art.”

“Which is very useful for the gallery,” Cosmo interrupts.

“I’m not a painter,” Max continued. “I came out of grad school as a found object artist. My projects now revolve around something believed to be inherently American – the idea of the cowboy or football – but I pick apart the whole hidden history behind those things and find those little hidden webs of history that affect things we claim as ‘American.’ I also love using materials you can get at like the Dollar Store and presenting them with the gravitas that we reserve for ‘great art,’ seeing how far we can push those really low materials up into something else.”

Max said, “I see these kids in school who want to be artists but are doing art history or graphic design because their parents want them to have something to fall back on. I wish I could tell them, ‘Don’t be steered away from your passion. You can do this. You can be an artist and follow your passion and make it work.’”

She and Cosmo are proof of that.

Giant Runt will host a reception for Alexis Maebry’s show, Reattach Me to My Body, on Spring Gallery Night, March 29. The Kickpigeon Kids new media show, Hack the Planet, opens at The Grackle on April 12 and runs for three weeks. Follow Giant Runt on Instagram @giantrunt.