Truckload of Art Road Show

A concert, reading, and book signing with songwriter and artist Terry Allen, actor and poet Jo Harvey Allen, biographer Brendan Greaves, and songwriter Daniel Milewski

Truckload of Art, by Brendan Greaves, is the definitive, authorized biography of Terry Allen, the internationally acclaimed visual artist and iconoclastic musician whose work bridges the disparate worlds of contemporary art and country music. Join Allen and his wife and collaborator, celebrated actor and poet Jo Harvey Allen—who has appeared in films as different as David Byrne’s True Stories, Fried Green Tomatoes, and most recently, with Terry, in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon – for a special performance of autobiographical songs and stories from Terry’s MemWars project, following an opening set by songwriter Daniel Milewski and a book reading by Greaves. Terry and Brendan will be available to greet audience members and sign copies of the book following the show.

“People tell me it’s country music,” Terry Allen has joked, “and I ask, ‘Which country?’” For nearly sixty years Allen’s inimitable art has explored the borderlands of memory, crossing boundaries between disciplines and audiences by conjuring indelible stories out of the howling West Texas wind.

In Truckload of Art, author Brendan Greaves exhaustively traces the influences that shaped Allen’s extraordinary life, from his childhood in Lubbock, Texas, spent ringside and sidestage at the wrestling matches and concerts his father promoted, to his formative art-school years in incendiary 1960s Los Angeles, and through subsequent decades doggedly pursuing his uncompromising artistic vision. With humor and critical acumen, Greaves deftly recounts how Allen built a career and cult following with pioneering independent records like Lubbock (on everything) (1979)—widely considered an archetype of alternative country—and multiyear, multimedia bodies of richly narrative, interconnected art and theatrical works, including JUAREZ (ongoing since 1968), hailed as among the most significant statements in the history of American vernacular music and conceptual art.

Drawing on hundreds of revealing interviews with Allen himself, his family members, and his many notable friends, colleagues, and collaborators—from musicians like David Byrne and Kurt Vile to artists such as Bruce Nauman and Kiki Smith—and informed by unprecedented access to the artist’s home, studio, journals, and archives, Greaves offers a poetic, deeply personal portrait of arguably the most singularly multivalent storyteller of the American West.

Biographies

Terry Allen is a songwriter, visual and recording artist, and playwright. He’s released more than a dozen studio albums since his 1975 debut Juarez, and his wide-ranging artwork resides in collections around the world, including the Met, MoMA, and LACMA. Raised in Lubbock, Texas, since 1989 he has resided in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and collaborator, the performer and poet Jo Harvey Allen.  

Jo Harvey Allen, an actress, playwright, poet, and pioneer of women in radio, is best known for her numerous film roles and critically acclaimed one-woman shows. “A storyteller in the best Texas tradition” (LA Weekly), she “has elicited comparisons with Flannery O’Connor (New York Times). Her film credits include Fried Green Tomatoes, David Byrne’s cult classic True Stories, Tommy Lee Jones’s The Homesman, and most recently, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.  

Brendan Greaves is founder and owner of the record label Paradise of Bachelors and has collaborated on numerous projects with Terry Allen, including Pedal Steal + Four Corners, for which he earned a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes. A folklorist, essayist, and lapsed art worker, he studied at Harvard and UNC and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, Samantha, and son, Asa.

Daniel Milewski is an artist, singer songwriter, and guitar player based in Miami, FL. Drawing on the many rich influences in Americana, Rock and Folk, he carves out his own space with a playful spirit and a commitment to the song. Writing, collaborating and performing extensively, Daniel has shared the stage with such acts as Bonny Light Horseman, Cat Power and John Craigie to name a few. He spends his summers in Stonington, Maine with his family.