Constructivism in Latin America provided fertile ground for a plethora of different movements, proposals and ideas from the 1930s onward as seen in Constructed Dialogues: Concrete, Geometric, and Kinetic Art from the Latin American Art Collection, currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (only until January 6, 2013). The rich traditions of [...]
Recent conversations on contemporary art are littered with language on the archive-as-artwork, mostly inspired by Derrida’s 1988 publication, Archive Fever. Exhibitions continue to spring up centered on the archive, most notably Archive fever: uses of the document in contemporary art curated by Okwui Enwezor at the International Center of Photography in 2008. Passages of the [...]
Need a lawyer to look over a contract before you sign it? Are you planning on starting a nonprofit organization and need assistance with filing the paperwork? Can’t afford litigation and you need mediation services? Do you have questions about copyright issues? Need some help with Quickbooks? While not the most glamorous aspects of [...]
William Pope.L, Foraging (asphixia version), 2008, Digital C-Print It was 2003 and “William Pope.L’s: eRacism was on view at Houston’s DiverseWorks as part of a national exhibition tour (also presented at Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon, and later [...]
Every so often we experience an artwork that reminds us of what art can be. A total artwork—- one which transforms or activates the space it is in, and therefore acknowledges its site; explores some sense of materiality to unravel the materials in which it evolved from; is deeply personal to the viewer, but also [...]
Some say that Black History month no longer needs to be celebrated. The belief is that these marginalized histories can be framed beyond the margins and understood within larger conversations of American history, and most importantly celebrated throughout the year not simply for one month. Maybe this is also the case with Black arts, maybe [...]
Randomly opening Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, takes me to a page with an image of an asymmetrical quilt overflowing with indigo, magenta and crimson polyester squares stacked on top of each other. The artist/ maker is Irene Williams, born in 1920. Like all of the women featured in this extensive catalog, Williams [...]
R.I.P. Cy Twombly (1928-2011) Born in Lexington, Virginia in 1928, Twombly actively distanced himself from the major movements of 20th-century art, both stylistically and geographically. For decades, both critics and the public struggled to place his work within the larger Modern art milieu at large, and later, artists like Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat would [...]
For the next couple of months I will be in New York and will post of a few blog posts called “Houston in New York”. So let’s start it off with the difference between Houstoun and Houston. I always thought that folks in New York constantly mispronounced Houston street (pronounced How-ston). But that was because, [...]
Juneteenth could possibly be seen as the most significant event in American history after independence itself—the eradication of American slavery. On June 19, 1865, more than two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the word finally came down to slaves in Texas, the westernmost of the Confederate states. Juneteenth became so significant in [...]
Probably one of the most stirring moments in the art world in the past year was the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video, “A Fire in My Belly” from the Smithsonian and the public dissent that followed. The film was initially on display at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery as part of the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference [...]
Lygia Clark’s “Bicho (Máquina)” is one of many artworks listed on the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s online feature, “100 Highlights of the MFAH”. Framed as “the most significant objects in the MFAH collections”, these artworks are far-ranging in media, time period, style, and geographies. What is most pronounced is the striking contemporary and avant-garde [...]
To address the conditions of curating contemporary art, one must address the temporality it inhabits. This was one of many currents in a recent lecture at The Glassell School of Art by João Ribas, Co-Curator of the current Stan Vanderbeek exhibition at the CAMH and Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. In a [...]
The role of sound, music, and noises in the visual arts world is a bit of a mystery to me and maybe for others. This term “sound art” seems to have been cemented with the 1983 exhibition, “Sound/Art” at The Sculpture Center in New York featuring artists from far ranging backgrounds all working with some [...]
Houston has often been fertile ground for some off-the-grid artist projects. This year we’ve seen a slew of artists using Houston as their playground to develop new projects, organizations and infrastructures. Some are short lived. Some have given birth to other projects. Some are private. All are artist-led. 1. Sun Ra, Suzan-Lori Parks, Fred Moten, [...]
Pulsating sounds, single and multi-channel videos, moving lights, dance and live music were all part of the one-night-only May 1 event, Projected.2010: New Visions of Sound and Light at Frenetic Theater. Curated by Chris Nelson, Frenetic Theater’s artist-in-residence, the ten-plus multimedia performances, installations and videos engulfed the audience in a sensory overload that would be [...]
How do you manage between being an artist, mother, and teacher? How do you maintain an balanced perspective? With absolute conviction I believe and practice Ad Reinhardt’s thesis put forth in “Extreme Routine”. “One paints when there is nothing else to do” he writes. For Painting to be Painting — elemental visual vocabulary and meter [...]
