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.”