On a Saturday evening in September, the small gallery that sits on a residential street in Fort Worth's cultural district will reopen its doors—or rather, its single glass wall—for a quiet kind of homecoming. Blind Alley Projects, the eight-by-ten-foot vitrine conceived by artists Terri Thornton and Cam Schoepp, is relaunching its public programming with Jeff McMillan: Second Glance, an exhibition that has been years in the making, quite literally, on the building's own exterior.
The "meet the artist" event takes place Saturday, September 12, from 5 to 8 p.m., and the exhibition remains on view through November 7. But the story of the show begins long before that, roughly two years earlier, when McMillan—an American painter based in London—attached a series of near-monochromatic paintings, composed on second-hand linen, to the outside wall of Blind Alley. There they hung, exposed to the full force of a Texas climate and the daily comings and goings of its non-human residents. Weather, pollution, insects, and birds transformed the once-unblemished surfaces into chance patinas and welcomed degrees of disintegration. For McMillan, whose practice is guided by the introspective question "What happens when we just let things be?", that exposure was not an accident but the point.
For Second Glance, once the ecological "co-creators" had done their part, McMillan removed the works from their wood stretchers, cleaned their surfaces, and flattened them. Rather than restretching them, he meticulously relined the fabric to arrest any further changes, then pinned the canvases to the gallery's interior wall, leaving few clues of their previous plight. Viewers may think of Color Field painting—the raw, exposed margins of the works counter the rectangular planes of color traditionally associated with the emotional, transcendent experiences of that movement. Occasionally, areas of color show losses of pigment, reminders that the work is a constructed object.
McMillan's connection to this landscape runs deep. Born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1968, he grew up on the Great Plains, whose flat fields of patchwork colors and geometric patterns—shaped by agriculture on a flat landscape—still live inside him. "In some way these expanses in my paintings have an equivalence to where I come from, to my travels, to my autobiography," he has said. "The idea of a picture being one expanse of colour feels right to me—natural." After earning a BFA from Texas Tech University in 1991 and an MFA from the University of Alabama in 1995, he moved to the UK in 1998. His work is held in collections including Tate London, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. He has shown recently at Ivorypress in Madrid and Kristof De Clercq Gallery in Ghent, and has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California and an Abbey Painting Fellow at the British School at Rome. He is also a curator, having run the project space PEARL from 2001 to 2004 and co-curated British Folk Art at Tate Britain in 2014.
That the exhibition should unfold at Blind Alley is fitting, for the space itself is a meditation on the relationship between art, architecture, and the natural world. Conceived by artists Terri Thornton and Cam Schoepp, and designed in collaboration with Mark and Peter Anderson of Anderson Anderson Architecture, the building is topped with a shortgrass prairie living roof—a shallow-soil habitat employing a unique tile system that emulates the Walnut Glade just west of Fort Worth. The roof is a native habitat for insects and birds, a proof-of-concept for the benefits of a living roof in an unpredictable environment. Strategically placed near the front of a residential lot, the gallery is visible through a large, street-facing glass wall, allowing drive-by or pedestrian viewing of rotating projects around the clock.
Blind Alley debuted in April 2020 with Liminal Space, an exhibition series that continued annually through 2024 alongside curated projects featuring singular works or site-specific installations by artists including Frances Bagley, Matthew Bourbon, Celia Eberlee, Annette Lawrence, and Lucia Simek.
The relaunch carries a deeply personal weight. Thornton, who died in December 2024, was not only a co-founder of Blind Alley but a beloved figure in the Fort Worth art world. Born in 1958, she was, in the gallery's words, "not only a talented visual artist, but also an advocate, educator, and mother," whose influence on other artists and writers manifested itself in numerous friendships and mentorships.
The relaunch honors Thornton's shared vision through a new creative partnership between Schoepp and Amy and Patrick Kelly, longtime friends and museum professionals at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas, where Patrick is also a visual artist. Patrick Kelly has deep ties to the space, having presented his own solo exhibition, Layers of Brutes and Innocents, there in 2021.
For McMillan, the exhibition is a return to a place that has been part of his work's own biography. The paintings that now hang inside the gallery spent nearly two years outside it, weathering alongside the prairie roof and the passing life of the street. In handing over the work to its ecological collaborators, McMillan considers how he remains part of the development process from his home in London—an intangible relationship in which the art and the artist mirror each other. The edges of his paintings, like the edges of his own journey from the Texas plains to London and back, are weathered from the long passage between past and present. Second Glance offers viewers the chance to see what happens when an artist lets things be—and what remains when he finally brings them back inside.