I’ll never forget him. I had some good times with him, and I also got to witness some of the more crazy aspects of his personality, like when he dumped all the rotting blood from The Blood Show out the door of the Reese Palley Gallery on Prince Street, stinking up the block for days. I got to see him in rage and in unstoppable laughter.
The writer and MacArthur Fellow, whom I got to know in the 1980s, awed me with his insistence on how beauty mattered just not in the way we might think.
The visual art scene, however, lacked a center. Local artists were creating work that could compete in New York, but Texas galleries weren’t interested in showing contemporary art, and few buyers knew what to select to impress their friends. “It was just bluebonnet paintings,” remembers the artist Barry Buxkamper, who was an undergraduate student at UT when he first met Hickey. This was the void Hickey set out to fill.
The name “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” was a reference to a rather bleak story by Ernest Hemingway, who was one of the subjects of Hickey’s dissertation, and a literal description of what he wanted to create: a gallery with good art on the walls and good natural light. It was also an inside joke about what the gallery represented to him: the controlled burn of his previous life as an academic. “I coined the first axiom of ‘combat aesthetics,’ ” he later said. “Nothing can light up the place you are like a burning bridge behind you.”