As the holiday season arrives, we all have a little reprieve from the busy slate of art openings, lectures, performances and other events. I have used this mini-break to do something I started this past summer, which is to branch outside of my immediate Montrose/Rice Village area. My trips started with an attempt to work [...]
In celebration of the Menil Collection’s 25th anniversary this fall, Calvin Tomkins spoke at the Menil in conversation with director Josef Helfenstein. Because of the occasion, their discussion centered around artists connected to the Menils and Tomkins’ memories of John and Dominique de Menil. Tomkins even wore a kelly green tie in honor of John [...]
The cryosphere is the area of the earth’s surface where water is in solid form, such as glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, sea ice and permafrost. It exists in a close relationship of climactic linkages and feedback loops to the hydrosphere, earth’s areas of liquid water. The works in this exhibition explore the fluctuating zone [...]
The Cinema Arts Festival begins this Wednesday, November 7th and will continue through Sunday, November 11th. To kick off the festival, several video installations are already on view in the Cinema on the Verge exhibition in a gallery space in the 4411 Montrose complex. Fellow Glasstire contributor, Peter Lucas has lent his expertise and eye for the experimental film, video installation [...]
To accompany the honor of being selected the 2012 Texas Artist of the Year by Art League Houston, Aaron Parazette has transformed the Art League gallery space with a dynamic, site-specific wall painting. FLYAWAY extends across two adjacent walls with converging lines of shifting, checkerboard perspective. The genius of the work is its placement in [...]
Two just-opened Galveston exhibitions are definitely worth the trip: Clint Willour’s exhibition of drawings by Robert Pruitt at the Galveston Arts center and a group exhibition of artists riffing on Galveston and the theme of mapping at the Galveston Artists Residency. Pruitt’s drawings are stoic and sensitive portraits of his friends where markers of SciFi, contemporary [...]
The Olympics are approaching, and my mind has been wandering in eager anticipation. Will David Beckham be shot into space at the opening ceremonies to light a lunar torch symbolizing the union of all galatic beings? Will the US team wear their made-in-China outfits? Or has Harry Reid already burned them? Will the world rejoice at [...]
Recently, I went to a screening of the documentary Gerhard Richter Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Going into the film, I was downright scared that I would have a repeat experience of being completely bored out of my mind, which unfortunately was my experience with another recent documentary about Anselm Kiefer, a [...]
When Richard Serra’s drawing retrospective opened at the Menil Collection, it was SERRAPALOOZA. Throngs of people congregated at the Menil, many of us on the outside lawn in festival fashion, to hear Serra in conversation with the Menil’s Michelle White, one of the exhibition’s curators. Having just spent the last few months working with the [...]
El Anatsui has been a superstar in the art world ever since the 2007 Venice Biennale, where he received international acclaim for his large-scale sculptures made from thousands of discarded metal liquor bottle tops. In these pieces, the tops are flattened and stitched together with copper wire to form lush, shimmering canvases of intricate pattern [...]
This past weekend I went on a film binge and took in a documentary a day for Houston’s Cinema Arts Festival. The highlight for me was Chilean director, Patricio Guzman’s documentary, Nostalgia for the Light, and the accompanying question and answer session with Guzman himself at Rice University’s cinema. The explosion of do-it-yourself documentaries has [...]
Over October 26 – November 1, I visited New York to trudge through an early snowstorm (and the resulting slush and sludge) to see a round of recently opened gallery shows and ongoing museum exhibitions. Here’s a snapshot of my trip in pictures…
In his site-specific installation Plexus No. 9, Gabriel Dawe layers a subtly shifting palette of rainbow-colored thread with mind-boggling precision. Stretched from floor to ceiling and nearly wall-to-wall in the gallery space, each color begins at a distinct point on the floor and then fans out in a series of lines to create overlapping, upside down triangles. Dawe loops the [...]
