[Disclosure: I am married to one of The Art Guys. I am not an impartial bystander. Read the following with that in mind.] It was announced yesterday that the Menil Collection is removing the artwork The Art Guys Marry A Plant from its collection. Practically speaking, this means digging up a small tree and removing [...]
Thank you for being a part of this, Glasstire’s very special 11th Anniversary Year!! We’ve had a banner year and we’re very grateful to all of our readers and supporters. Mostly we thank the teeming mass of the Texas art scene for remaining so interesting a subject. Now for some exciting news: Something is coming [...]
In the wake of this fall’s Houston Fine Art Fair and Texas Contemporary Fair in Houston, someone remarked to me that art fairs are “Art Porn,” an overwhelming smorgasbord of visual stimulation and (hopefully) frenzied acquisition. This got me thinking about how the term “porn” has expanded from its traditional sense. To wit: Food Porn [...]
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 [...]
Breaking news: this September, David Shelton will move his eponymous gallery from San Antonio to Houston. The new gallery will be located in the iconic Isabella Court building on Main Street, with neighbors Inman Gallery, Art Palace, Devin Borden and Kinzelman Art Consulting. “We are thrilled to welcome David to Houston with the opportunity to [...]
Let’s take a moment to check in with Galveston. Poor old Galveston, right? The city has its great old Victorian mansions and brick streets and palm-lined avenues; it also has that decaying grandeur of Gulf Coast towns that get their teeth kicked in every 20 years by a hurricane. It’s run-down and funky. The hustling [...]
Congratulations to Austin-based artist Jeff Williams, winner of this year’s $30,000 Texas Prize!! Statewide audiences will perhaps be most familiar with Jeff’s dust-encrusted sculptures from a few years ago (as seen at Okay Mountain and LA><ART), or more recently with his stressed concrete sculpture from his 2011 Artpace residency. For more on Jeff, see his [...]
This just in: after a 5-year run which saw the introduction of some great artists to Houston, the much-loved Bryan Miller gallery in Houston is closing. The current group show, CTRL Group Two, will close Saturday. We’re sorry to lose this space, which has been a wonderful addition to the Houston gallery scene.
Hilton Kramer, chief art critic for the NY Times from 1973-82, has died at age 84. Like many critics whose careers grew up with postwar American art, Kramer never feared voicing prescriptive, polarizing opinions. William Grimes, who wrote Kramer’s Times obituary said “Mr. Kramer took dead aim at a long list of targets: creeping populism [...]
In what can only be described as a coup, the massive ceramics collection of New York dealers Garth Clark and Mark del Vecchio was acquired by the MFAH five years ago. In 2009 there was a small “teaser” show to announce the acquisition, and now the bulk of the collection has been unveiled in a [...]
Houston arts patron Toni Beauchamp died March 9 from ovarian cancer. A steadfast presence on the Houston art scene for decades, Toni served as the assistant director at Blaffer Gallery in the 1970s and early 80s; and on the boards of DiverseWorks, the CAMH, and the magazine Art Lies, among other organizations. She was also [...]
The big news this weekend is the arrival of Michael Heizer‘s “big rock” at LACMA, attended by hundreds of onlookers lining Wilshire Boulevard with their camera phones at 4:30 a.m. this morning (the LA Times has photos from the event in an article that never mentions the artist’s name). Many Texas art fans are probably [...]
Iconic LA sculptor Ken Price, 77, died early today after struggling with tongue and throat cancer for several years. He recently completed preparations for his retrospective, which opens this fall at LACMA and travels to the Nasher Sculpture Center next year. Christopher Knight’s extensive obituary chronicles Price’s early education, his breakout shows at Ferus Gallery [...]
This Mughal Dynasty (mid-18th c.) fly whisk is on view in the MFAH’s Indian art galleries. It’s an outstanding object which alone merits a visit to the museum. The MFAH purchased it in 2009, at the time of the opening of the Indian art gallery. The handle is a remarkable example of ivory carving, but [...]
It’s the BIG Show, the annual smorgasbord of Houston art at Lawndale Art Center! Here are a few highlights of this massive open-call hodgepodge: Patrick Turk’s work is currently on view in Collage, at the Bank of America building.
The fantasy goes something like this: Most everyone was pleased with the clear, focused vision for the 2011 Texas Biennial. It was a brilliant success, with a tightly curated, single exhibition put together by a well-known curator from out of state. The show itself was held in a great institution in a city other than Austin, [...]
Two striking artworks are now on view in San Antonio. That they are both sculptures by women depicting a frozen moment of enraged feminine violence is, I think, a coincidence. Gabrielle Dumontet’s Medusa wall sconce, sculpted in 1906, is odd in many ways. First off, good luck finding information on the artist (even the French [...]
The Dallas Museum of Art has announced that Charlie Wylie, their curator of contemporary art, will step down in June after 15 years at the museum. Wylie worked on major shows at the DMA, including solo traveling shows for Brice Marden, Thomas Struth and Sigmar Polke. He was the leader of the curatorial team that [...]
This year we are celebrating our 10th anniversary with a series of statewide events. First on the docket is DFW: on May 7, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is collaborating with Glasstire to present a panel on the topic of regionalism today. Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art and [...]
The Dallas Museum of Art announced today that its director Bonnie Pitman is to step down next month due to health reasons. Olivier Meslay, the DMA’s Senior Curator of European and American Art, will serve as the interim director as the museum forms a search committee to find a new director. Pitman joined the museum [...]
