The Glasstire Drawing Project presents Chapter 2 of Michael Bise’s “Life On the List,” an autobiographical comic about life on the heart transplant list. For Chapter 1, click here. CHAPTER 2 Coverage of Houston artists has been made possible in part by the William A. Graham Fund.
The Glasstire Drawing Project debuts with Chapter 1 of Michael Bise’s “Life On the List,” an autobiographical comic about life on the heart transplant list.
There’s a person somewhere in Houston. They are healthy, just entering the prime of their life. They’ve left childhood but haven’t entered old age. They might be next to you in a movie theater, at an opening or pushing a cart out of the grocery store. Maybe they’re with someone—their dad, their wife or their [...]
In the five years since the graduate school gates closed behind me with a tinny clatter (I’d like to say resounding clang, but really, it was more like a tinny clatter), my experiences working as a faux finisher have yielded a great wealth of philosophical insight and, combined with selling some art, just enough money [...]
I come from a young family. I’ve been lucky enough to grow up with my mother’s parents playing a significant role in my life. When I was very young my grandmother was still in her forties and I remember my grandfather’s 53rd birthday party. As an adult, their advancing age shocks me every time I [...]
Marxist cultural theory could, arguably, be considered the defining feature of the intellectual movement of the contemporary art world. In the past 20 years, it has had an overwhelming influence on art criticism and art making. Sylvère Lotringer, founder of the journal Semiotext(e) is the guy widely credited with bringing Foucault, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari [...]
Glasstire full disclosure: Art Guy Michael Galbreth is married to Glasstire’s founder and executive director, Rainey Knudson. Two years ago my little sister got married. She married her high school boyfriend; a kid I never liked but who had never given me any reason to put a bullet in his head. I knew he was [...]
Christopher Knight is an idiot. I recently read his blog post on the LA Times website in which he criticizes Michelle Obama and the White House Office of Media Affairs for staging a publicity event at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. His criticism is based on the fact that the Met is the number [...]
I went to my cardiologist the other day and, like many times before, she put a small receiver over the raised square area above my heart and waited for a computer to read the stored data from my pacemaker-defibrillator. This time it made a sound it doesn’t usually make. As my doctor looked at the [...]
“If picante sauce commercials have taught us anything, and they have, it’s that Texans know the real spice when they taste it, and won’t hesitate to string up effete East Coast imitators. But not everything from the Big City is processed, easily consumed pap; some of New York’s artists are making work that’s fresh, chunky, [...]
A few weeks ago I asked Francesca Fuchs if she would be willing to sit down with me for an interview about her work. In spite of the fact that I had never conducted an interview before, she agreed. She even offered lunch, and when I arrived at her home she made me a sandwich [...]
The Top Ten Ghosts in My Studio This Christmas I’ve been thinking about ghosts and what it means to be haunted. I don’t know much about spirituality but I’d probably say that the only reasonable way I’ve found to look at existence is through its physical manifestations. That belief hasn’t done much lately to prevent [...]
I was born and raised in a radical, non-denominational church called The Message of the Hour Church. Its members believe that a man named William Branham was a latter-day prophet through whom God communicated specific messages and interpretations of the Bible. They also believe in an imminent apocalypse and that they alone are God’s chosen [...]
I moved to Houston from Denton for graduate school with a copy of Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death under one arm, The Routledge Cultural Studies Reader under the other, and my ex-girlfriend Valerie* for security. We had been together four years and loved each other very much, but the passionate side of our relationship had [...]
My favorite class in undergrad was a Northern Renaissance art class. It was taught by Dr. Scott Montgomery. Scott had long grey hair and wore Birkenstocks, which he would kick off to the side of the podium before class started each day. For the rest of the class he would alternately jump, glide, shout and [...]
The worst piece of art I’ve ever made is also one of the most important pieces of art I’ve ever made. It sits at the very top of an eight-foot tall bookcase in my bedroom, out of view unless you’re looking for it. I know where it is though and I look at it sometimes. [...]
