The Story of Art in America featuring Odessa

In an effort to show there is art outside of New York, LA and Chicago, the third season of the Amazon Prime Video series The Story of Art in America features Odessa and several other West Texas towns.

Pierre Gervois, CEO & Executive Producer of Legit Productions and producer of the series, said it is available to stream now.

“The idea is to explore the role of art in American society, particularly in small towns. We’re not going to make an episode about New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles because everyone knows these cities. We wanted to start exploring smaller towns in America and show that there are amazing artists everywhere, even in places off the beaten path for cultural travelers,” Gervois said.

“When we decided to do Season 3, we were considering doing some episodes in the state of Texas, so we had three or four episodes confirmed in Texas cities. We started to have a lot of conversations with museums, artists (and) art organizations. There is so much interest in Texas and so much appreciation of the arts that we saw that we could do an entire season only in the state of Texas, which we have never done,” he added.

Other towns in the season are Corsicana, Georgetown, Texarkana, Alpine, Canyon, Dallas, Dennison and Salado.

He said they had a great conversation with Odessa Arts Executive Director Randy Ham and were “very impressed by the amazing work they’re doing to promote the arts in Odessa.”

As a result, they decided to do an episode on Odessa because it was really interesting.

“I want to thank Randy Ham who convinced us to do an episode in Odessa,” Gervois said.

Ham said he is thrilled to see arts in Odessa featured on the small screen.

“Odessa’s arts and culture scene has been growing and thriving for the last decade. We all see it every day in our community, but it is a thrill to see it on the small screen broadcast throughout the world,” Ham added.

The director and creator of the show was award-winning filmmaker Christelle Bois. She came to Odessa with her film crew and found a diverse group of artists such as chef Alejandro Barrientos and floral artist Edgar Salazar.

“We hope people that like the arts and travel to Texas will not only go to Dallas or other big cities, but also will come to Odessa,” Gervois said.

Season 4 will be in Alaska. The entire process takes about a year. There is six months of preproduction where they do research on the region and figure out what to cover. Then they have a lot of Zoom meetings and phone calls.

“The purpose of this show is to celebrate art in the United States and also to encourage people who are going to consider traveling to Texas for a leisure trip or an art and cultural trip to go, of course, to the big cities in Texas, but don’t forget to go in the smaller towns because you’ll have amazing art experiences. Take the time to go to the museum, take the time to go into the shops, take the time to go into artists’ studios. The best way to discover a city is to talk with artists. That’s really what we believe,” Gervois said.