Al Souza delivers more fundamentals at Shelton Gallery show

Souza was born in Plymouth, Mass., in 1944 and studied at the Art Students League in New York, and received his MFA at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has exhibited internationally and received much critical acclaim, including awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Souza retired from teaching at the University of Houston in 2009.

Souza began his new mixed-media Gaman series soon after finishing the Bookworks series. Several pieces from this tribute to the sufferers of the tsunami that ravaged the east coast of Japan in 2011 are also on view at David Shelton. Each piece in the Gaman (which means "reverence for perseverance" in Japanese) series is made of pieces of random odds-and-ends, such as old plastic toys, broken electronic parts, stones, and bits of wood, to which Souza has added bright dollops of paint. Scenes of the storm's devastation were widely televised, and were viewed by Souza while he was recovering from his own trauma, a hip replacement that kept him on his back in front of a TV.

The Gaman works are as noisy and chaotic as the Bookworks series are calm and secure, but seen together they both seem to whisper, "Quick, pay attention, grab onto life. Soon everything will change, and much will disappear." •

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