Recognition is at Play: Portraits by Jim Pirtle & Ike Morgan
By Julia Claire Wallace
July 2026
There are many kinds of recognition.
This is what I have found myself contemplating after watching Jim spontaneously hang a show one afternoon in the upstairs of Notsuoh.
nizing another.
If the Dome was a fly on the wall of Notsuoh, it would have many stories to tell— one of which would be the story of this art show, that consists of portraits of artists by artists.
Predominantly in the main space there is a line of Jim Pirtle's portraits that last hung in a show curated by the Art Guys at Cue Gallery in New York back in 2008. Portraits of fellow artists and creative community members from years past— that he painted on stretched polyester shirts while his subjects sat patiently. On neighboring walls he has hung a selection of his personal collection of art by Ike Morgan— the largest being a smiling portrait of Jim Pirtle on found fabric.
Before Notsuoh existed, before Jim Pirtle became an antihero in Houston's art community— in the mid 1980’s, he worked as an orderly at Austin State Hospital. It was there that he met a patient named Ike Morgan.
Morgan is an artist that creates constantly and playfully with what surrounds him.
Working with whatever materials he could find, he produced portraits of presidents, musicians, friends, birds, the Mona Lisa, religious imagery, and occasional self-portraits. Inspired by books from the hospital's rolling library and photographs clipped from magazines, he developed a practice built on repetition. As Morgan has often said, painting helped him "pass the time away."
Jim noticed.
In his artist statement for a 2008 exhibition at New York's CUE Art Foundation, Pirtle reflects on his years at Austin State Hospital:
"I found one patient who drew all day as a way of fighting his demons instead of himself. I became his friend and advocate." (CUE Art Foundation)
Other orderlies routinely discarded the enormous stacks of drawings Morgan hid beneath his bed. Jim began trading coffee and cigarettes for paintings and commissioned portraits, preserving works that otherwise might have disappeared.
As Morgan's body of work grew, Jim helped connect him with galleries, collectors, and curators. Over the following decades, Morgan's paintings would enter the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the American Folk Art Museum in New York, the Collection de l'Art Brut in Lausanne, the Blanton Museum, and many others. His work has been exhibited across Texas, New York, London, Switzerland, and beyond. (CUE Art Foundation)
Jim has always occupied an unusual relationship to the art world himself.
His paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums. His performances have become part of Houston's cultural mythology. But arguably, his most ambitious work has has never entered a gallery or art museum — although you could say it functions as one from time to time. When The Art Guys curated Jim's solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation (NYC) in 2008, they argued precisely that. "…notsuoH, Jim's functional, experimental, social/sculptural urban environment, is his supreme art/life work." (CUE Art Foundation)
How can an art world experience an art piece that stands on its own on Main Street? It is hard to say— although the Art Guys made an attempt to do just that when they took Jim and attempted to bring Notsuoh to Cue Gallery. They brought in an abundance of shoes, shelves, photographs of regulars, and even --- much to the gallery's chagrin: a few Texas cockroaches that hitched a ride in the bar's various artistic accoutrements.
In the gallery guide they described Notsuoh it as "a creative community vortex nexus fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, idealism and a paradoxical, all-embracing, pro/anti-everythingism." (CUE Art Foundation)
If you spend time at Notsuoh, you begin to recognize this sentiment.
You begin to see that the piles of items are playfully & intentionally arranged — and rearranged with an aesthetic you may mistake for chaos before you catch on. And it never stays still. Not only do the installations change. The people do.
Photographers become bartenders.
Lawyers become exhibiting artists.
Scientists become sculptors.
Oil & gas executives become photographers.
Performance artists become curators.
Conversations become collaborations become transformations become exhibitions become productions.
I agree that at some point, Notsuoh became the “supreme art/life” of Jim Pirtle himself.
This latest installation is a self referential chapter in that ongoing artwork, one that lets all the newcomers glimpse the gritty, art underworld roots of the wonderous art bar they walk through today with their craft cocktails. Lore that gives a glimpse of the kind of recognition that continues to play a part in the space today.
Sometimes the most comforting place to recognize yourself is through the portraits your friends create.
Several of Jim's polyester portrait paintings—the same body of work represented in New York by The Art Guys nearly two decades ago—now hang only a few feet from the Dome, themselves part of another evolving environment. On the accompanying walls are Ike Morgan's paintings. Notice the symmetry. One artist recognized another before museums did. Recognition is at play — then and now.
Artists recognizing artists recognizing art — a magic that lives on in this social sculpture.
Pirtle has often written that his own work grew from searching for freedom.
Reflecting on his evolution as an artist, he writes:
"Out of this realization, sensitivity and intelligence, comes my art—existing where there are no cages." (CUE Art Foundation)
That sentence resonates beyond his own paintings — and into the space itself. You could argue that Notsuoh isn’t as free as it used to be but Jim still makes & breaks the rules. Stick around awhile and he will ask you if his choices are justified.
Over the decades, the building has become a place where musicians, painters, filmmakers, performers, writers, and difficult ideas have been given room to exist— if not freely, with a kind of freedom that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
“What is recognition?”
This is the kind of question Jim asks late at night, with a cigarette in one hand & a rattling whiskey & coke in the other.
Ike once remarked, “It’s nice to do a little work and make people happy sometime.”
Recognition has always been one of art's most uncomfortable currencies.
Who receives it? Who never does? Who deserved more?
What kind of recognition matters? A museum? A paycheck? A friendship? A plaque? A name on the rolling list of credits at the end of the film? A room full of people talking about your work twenty years later?
Looking back now, this story binds together Jim and Ike. It also binds together Jim and his longtime friend Michael Galbreth of The Art Guys, who helped articulate the art that Jim creates with and through Notsuoh in that 2008 exhibition. Michael, whose memorial garden and memorial mural now lives on the Notsuoh patio, commemorating a friendship consisting of countless Tuesday nights here playing chess with Jim over vodka cranberries, conversations, and arguments about art. A friendship in which recognition became a challenge and a stimulant for artistic growth.
Tuesday was also the night I began hosting Performance Art Night more than twenty years ago. I served Michael his drinks on Tuesdays before he returned to his chess game when I was in my bartender era.
The two of them even made a commercial for one of my earliest events — an act of recognition that was deeply encouraging to me as a young curator and performance artist.
And now here I am.
A long time friend of Jim.
A witness.
An artist that became a facilitator that became a bartender that became a curator.
Another recognizer.
Recognizing.
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