Art is sometimes found where you least expect it, far beyond the confines of city spaces and tourist-packed museums. This was certainly the sentiment I felt as I made my way to the Surls + Locke Museum of Texas Art in Splendora, nearly 40 miles northeast of Houston down U.S. Highway 59.
What looks like a quiet residential area with towering trees and manufactured homes hides a buzzworthy artistic space that, while currently small, has big plans for the future. Pioneered by James Surls and his wife and fellow artist Charmaine Locke, the Surls + Locke Museum of Texas Art is slated to open on 40 acres of the couple’s Splendora property in 2030.
Surls + Locke Museum of Texas Art (temporary)
Open Wed-Thur and Sat-Sun 10 a.m.- 4 p.m.
26041 Midline Rd., Cleveland. 402-203-2308; surleslockmuseum.org
Surls, 82, is a household name in the art world. The sculptor and visual artist founded Houston’s legendary Lawndale Art Center in 1979 and has displayed his shapely sculptures, often made with wood and metal, in private collections and international destinations like the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Singapore Botanical Gardens. Today, he’s focused on building a legacy that extends far beyond his own remarkable body of work.
Surls and Locke plan on using the new museum as a means of displaying their combined collection, of course, but the real purpose and ultimate mission of this in-the-works museum is to highlight Texas’ incredible pool of art and artists ranging from early Texas art to contemporary. As to what it means to be a “Texas” artist, though, is something that remains open to interpretation. Surls likens it to an ever-expanding territory whose reach has influenced areas as far as Los Angeles and San Francisco all the way up to New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C.
“It’s a big, big territory, and in that territory artists know each other from all over. It’s not a little group you can draw a little circle around. This playground is big and it keeps getting bigger,” Surls says. “The goal is to make the scope vast, but we wanted to define and pinpoint the core, and that’s why we called it the Surls + Locke Museum of Texas Art.”
While the official plans and funding for this museum are underway, the organization has charged forward with a temporary space that’s already showcasing a road trip-worthy exhibit. “Heard of G.O.A.T.s” opened in late April on the couple’s Splendora property and highlights Texas’ greatest of all time (g.o.a.t) artists—or at least Surls and Locke’s opinion of the best, with 21 artists of all mediums and backgrounds featured.
There’s a layered bronze bust of a man by Lubbock visual artist Terry Allen, a welded steel and cast iron flower sculpture from Houston artist Jim Love, a must-study “Annunciation” painting from Marfa-based artist Julie Speed, and an immersive painting called “Thicket” from Texas-born Paul Manes that brings to life a familiar Texas landscape, among other pieces that provoke discussion and challenge perspectives. The well-curated exhibit serves as an appetizer of what’s to come in a museum that’s poised to become a vital platform for Texas artists.
So why settle in Splendora when international art destinations like Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth, and Austin are close by? Surls says he looked at a potential location in Austin and was even “offered a piece of land in Fort Worth,” near a Neiman Marcus and condominiums. But when it came down to it, the couple couldn’t envision an urban destination being the right home for such a museum. It was Splendora’s serene and rural backdrop that defined much of their artistic inspiration and expression for many decades.
“All of our energy has come from the green grass, the trees, the rivers, the sticks, and the rocks, and the sky, and the frogs, and the birds,” Surls says. “It’s all about nature, and it just did not make sense to put our museum anywhere else.”
Stephan Grot, executive director of Surls + Locke Museum of Texas Art, says that while Splendora is small, Montgomery County and other counties on the northside of Houston, are among “the fastest-growing counties from an urbanization standpoint in the entire country.”
Indeed, according to research from the U.S. Census Bureau, Montgomery County was the ninth fastest-growing county by numerical growth in the whole U.S. from 2023-24. This continued population surge could very well change how the museum’s surrounding area looks by the time it opens in 2030.
“We feel that the remoteness of it is going to become a moot point in five years,” Grot says. “In the meantime, we want to protect the acres that are there and make it an oasis. It’s a beautiful space, and it will be an even more beautiful space once we have the ability to maintain and manicure a spot and get people to appreciate the wilderness behind it.”
