ATTENTION FUTURISTS: Report to Austin, Texas on Thursday November 1 by 7:30 p.m. for author/futurist/design visionary Bruce Sterling‘s kick-off speech at this year’s Harry Ransom Center’s Flair Symposium, “Visions of the Future”. This event is free and open to the public at Jessen Auditorium, across the plaza from the Ransom Center at 300 West [...]
We need to get a few things straight about Afro-Futurism. Afro-Futurism is an attempt to link the future to the past/present. It considers what “blackness” and “liberation” might look like in the future, real or imagined. Deeply rooted in history and African cosmologies, its culls pieces of the past/present, technological or analog, to build on [...]
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is the only U.S. venue for Lucian Freud: Portraits. If you haven’t seen it yet, go now. It closes this Sunday, October 28th. It’s a stunning exhibition, covering portraits from the late 1940s until just before his death last year at age 88. Arranged chronologically, the show opens [...]
Moving between Austin, TX and New York City, Andy Coolquitt is an artist whose work is not merely a bricolage of urban compost: severed plunger handles, discarded bourbon bottles, pipes, wooden planks, spent lighters, scavenged poles and display cases; but a conceptual bricolage as well, drawing together tatters of intellectual principals from his disparate interests [...]
Vincent Valdez: Excerpts for John is the eighth film in a series of short documentaries produced by Walley Films in association with Glasstire. Filmmakers Mark and Angela Walley began documenting the creation of a large scale painting by artist Vincent Valdez in the fall of 2010. The painting depicts Valdez’s best friend from childhood, John [...]
Giorgio Vasari defined drawing as “the animating principle of all creative processes,” and since the Renaissance, drawing has been seen as the foundation of artistic invention, as the most immediate form of artistic expression and as a window into the mind of the working artist. This is often all the more true with drawings by [...]
Colby Bird is an artist born and raised in Austin, now living in Brooklyn, New York. He often blends the discourses of photography and sculpture, and is currently exhibiting 100 handmade house lamps at the Texas State Galleries in San Marcos. I met up with him to discuss the comfort of a studio practice, craft [...]
After a two-year stint in New York and Nebraska, Eric Zimmerman returns to Texas with the multi-site project Endless Disharmony & Telltale Ashes at Art Palace in Houston, The Reading Room in Dallas and online at endlessdisharmony.tumblr.com. His fragmentary integration of myths and systems of understanding with his exquisite drawing technique makes for an engrossing [...]
The Program Will Begin Shortly… Silence is Toby Kamps’ first major exhibition at The Menil Collection since becoming curator of modern and contemporary art two years ago. You should not miss it. It’s been too long since you visited the Chapel anyway. But silence can be hard to find. We arrive at the Rothko Chapel [...]
In Plain Sight at McClain Gallery, organized by Aaron Parazette, is an exhibition of 40 paintings by 40 Houston artists. Its essential premise, apart from a group photo-op, is that painting is alive and well, and the reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. Its thematic heft—principally offered by Frances Colpitt’s catalogue essay—follows [...]
Three things: 1. Amid the brouhaha following Paul Schimmel’s departure from MoCA this summer, Eli Broad was quoted in the LA Times as estimating the value of MoCA’s exhibits by the cost per attendee: Total cost of exhibition ÷ Number of attendees = cost per attendee Broad complained that some of MoCA’s shows had cost over $100 [...]
One Ordinary Day of an Ordinary Town, Mimi Kato’s current exhibition on view at Conduit Gallery, is a continuation of the hybrid digital landscapes she first presented at ArtPace in 2009. Kato takes subject matter and format from traditional Japanese art history and then creates stylized illustrations within the context of her contemporary world. [...]
Carolyn Ramo, Artadia’s new director, spent the last 12 years of her career in the New York gallery world, first at Nicole Klagsbrun, then as a production director at David Zwirner, and most recently as a partner at Taxter & Spengemann. When they brought her on board at T&S, Kelly Taxter explained, “Carolyn brings a [...]
It wasn’t ’til Sunday morning that I got the point of the Marfa Dialogues, an extended look at art, culture and climate change over Labor Day weekend. We were trooping across the chaparral on Mimm’s ranch north of town in the company of Dr. Bonnie Warnock, a range scientist with Sul Ross University. Warnock described [...]
Glasstire contributors offer up their picks for Fall 2012! AUSTIN Emily Roysdon: Pause Pose Discompose Visual Arts Center September 21 – December 8, 2012 Super smart curator and art historian Andy Campbell invited New York- and Stockholm-based artist Emily Roysdon to take over the VAC’s Vaulted Gallery for the fall semester. I first heard of Roysdon in [...]
A few weeks ago, Artnews’ feature on Gary Tinterow discussed the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s plans to build a new wing for modern and contemporary art, at a cost of $250 to $300 million. The museum has announced the project’s architect, Steven Holl, but has not yet made a case for the expansion publicly. [...]
Hybrid Forms at AMOA-Arthouse seeks to codify new media as a traditional art medium. With contributions from ten artists, the exhibition is anchored by video innovator Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV. First created in 1963, the original work sprang from an accidentally-damaged television with a single line on the screen—a moment of Zen striking [...]
Before I entered the gallery to see Erick Swenson’s Sightings at the Nasher, a guard politely stopped me at the door and warned me that there was work in the space that was a bit grotesque and perhaps not for the faint of heart. I thanked her, told her I was prepared to face the [...]
There’s this faction of contemporary artists who seem to feel at pains to jargonize, obfuscate and otherwise Other-ize their own work. If you need to have read Derrida and to have seen the whole canon to get what an artist is doing, that’s cool. But cool is a value of middling worth. The pernicious cycle of [...]
Some of you may have seen “Gallery Girls,” the new Bravo “reality” show which premiered on August 13. For those of you who are less of a slave to Bravo’s programming than I sadly am, what this show claims to do is to give you “a glimpse of the super cutthroat world in which these [...]
