James Surls thinks on a large scale. A few years ago, after telling me about the late Houston artist Bert Long’s ambitious but impractical concepts—such as dragging an iceberg into the Gulf—the sculptor, who often works with wood and metal, turned to a gigantic, twisted log nearby, and, without a hint of irony, launched into his own formidable plans for turning it into art. “If I hang it, it’s going to be tough, because it’s going to weigh like 10,000 pounds.”History shows that Surls, now 82, is a man who has followed through on his ideas—no matter how outlandish, fantastical, or impossible they may have once seemed. As I wrote in a 2018 profile, he transformed a 100,000-square-foot warehouse into the Lawndale Art Center in 1979. That same year,…
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