Russian-born Mark Cheikhet is a master violinist who also paints, seeking to fuse the arts into something that Wassily Kandinsky called “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or the total work of art. With a palette that conjures Marc Chagall, Cheikhet creates abstract paintings of shimmering colors and vibrating bands of white that he considers part of his struggle for [...]
Providing a behind-the-scenes peek at the work of San Antonio artists, Donna Simon, a retired Brackenridge High School art teacher, conducts guided tours of the city’s studios, artist-run spaces, galleries and museums, which she organizes through her Web site at www.SeeingArtSanAntonio.com. On a cold day in early December, she led a small group of [...]
Lucky has been anything but. A 46-year resident of the San Antonio Zoo, the sixtyish, female elephant became a cause célèbre for animal rights activists after her longtime companion Alport died in 2007, leaving Lucky alone. Since then, she’s gained a new friend, Boo, but Lucky remains, as she has been since she was captured [...]
Somewhere between childhood wonder and adult disillusionment, Kelly O’Connor is creating a psychic landscape from fragments of familiar movies, TV shows, vacationlands and fairy tales. While she’s been making the collages mined from her childhood pop culture for years, O’Connor’s “Post-Utopia” show at the David Shelton Gallery seems more intimate and introspective, inspired by a [...]
For 21 days representing all the societal and environmental abuse of 21 centuries, San Antonio artist Carla Veliz beat, scraped, tore, kicked, stomped on and generally tormented a soft, innocent piece of silk. Then she spent another 21 days trying to undo the damage to create “XXI: Who We Are and Who We Could Become.” [...]
Before the era of car bombs and IEDs, Icelandic-born sculptor Gudjon Bjarnason began using high explosives to create unorthodox shapes and forms in his work. He was looking for unexpected dimensions to use in his architectural designs for unconventional houses. A maquette he created for a house he’s planning has a front entrance that looks [...]
Emotions roil and crest like crashing waves in Australian-born artist Tracey Moffatt’s “Handmade,” seven cinematic mashups made from 1999 to 2010 on view through Sept. 11 at Artpace. Her movie montages are made up of nearly 1,000 TV and film clips linked by common themes, ranging from the various permutations of motherhood in “Mother” to [...]
Artists generally can’t afford to be too materialistic, but they can be counted on to come up with creative responses to tough economic times. Director Patty Ortiz has assembled four artists who “tend to look for deeper values, such as beauty” in “Trans/Action” through June 25 at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. “You are [...]
A haunted swamp, an ersatz jazz hall of fame and battling saber-tooth cats make up Artpace’s “”11.1 International Artists-in-Residence” projects, curated by Heather Pesanti of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. With newspaper headlines reading “It’s in the Water,” Kelly Richardson’s “Leviathan” acquired extra topicality. Though the headlines referred to radiation in Japan, the glowing [...]
From Luminara attended by 300,000 to the Cammie Awards at Chrispark and the Seventh Annual Dignowity Hill Pushcart Derby, Contemporary Art Month is an eclectic celebration of new work by local, regional and national artists. And many of the main CAM exhibits will be up into May. The McNay Art Museum’s chief curator Rene Paul [...]
An influential figure in ceramics for 40 years, Steve Reynolds pioneered the idea that clay is supple and malleable and can be used like any other media to ponder difficult philosophical and aesthetic issues. Seeking to elevate ceramics to the same high art status as painting and sculpture, Reynolds’ far-reaching work ranges from non-functional vessels [...]
A native of St. Louis who teaches at Washington University, Joan Hall is an avid sailor who is often dismayed to see plastic trash floating miles from the ocean shore. She notes that 10 percent of all plastic winds up in the oceans, resulting in monstrosities such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, estimated to [...]
In 2007, the German-born artist Barbel Helmert moved from San Antonio to Alpine, drawn by the wide-open skies and austere landscape. She’s found inspiration in subtle, highly textured, colorful elements of the harsh land, creating abstract photographs of rust and stains as well as small assemblages incorporating found and organic pieces of far West Texas, [...]
Mostly an armchair explorer of the human psyche, Hills Snyder journeyed to Peru in 2006 to visit the ancient temple of Chavin de Huantar, experiencing first-hand the Ayahuasca ceremonies of the Shipibo Indians of Amazonia. “I’ve participated in ceremonies where I felt like I was bathed in this light of divine caring,” Snyder says. “But [...]
Walking into Matthew Ronay’s dense, dark “Between the Worlds” installation is like stumbling into an Edward Gorey black-and-white fairy tale forest. Mysterious striped owls sit in the bleak limbs of creepy trees. Toadstools grow on the logs, and traces of sea life can be found. Creations with gourds, beads, shells and other decorations form primitive [...]
Debra Sugerman is the creator and former co-director of the Creativity for Peace Camp, which brings together teenage girls from Israel and Palestine in an attempt to break down barriers and establish a foundation for coexistence. In “Dear Mr. President,” an acclaimed documentary she directed in 2006, Sugerman and five of the teenage girls from [...]
Panel (left to right): Jake Zollie Harper, artist; Beto Gonzales, artist; Ed Saavedra, curator; Justin Parr, curator; Derek Allen Brown, artist; and Jeremiah Teutsch, artist. In making art, failure is an option. Sometimes, it’s the best option. And often it’s hard to tell the difference between success and failure. Just ask any artist, curator or [...]
In his spatial intervention at Artpace, New York artist Corey McCorkle used air conditioning vents to connect his second floor artist’s apartment to his first floor studio, emphasizing the way buildings “breathe.” The vents run through galleries and down a stairway, ending up in front of a large projected image of the sign on [...]
Kyle Olson uses the simplest of materials – bubble gum, playing cards, cloth and wood – but that doesn’t make his work easy to understand. With titles such as “Not Titled, Not with Name,” “Not Called Untitled” and “Not an Untitled Work,” his conceptual sculptures can be mysterious and enigmatic, yet most are [...]
Steve Brudniak, the artist as mad scientist, or maybe vice versa, has invented a new “emanating reflection optical lens,” a dark, reflective glass that appears to project hologram-like images when you look at it just right. Incorporated into his new series “Noumenon,” named for the “ultimate source of all things,” the dark glass components provide [...]
