West Texas Charm
Small Texas towns are easy to stereotype, and often, those generalizations prove themselves to be true. Conservative politics, high school football, and abundant red meat are just a few that come to mind. Last weekend I was fortunate to be able and spend a number of days in just this kind of town installing an [...]
Autumn Knight’s “Performance Prescriptions” at DiverseWorks’ “State Fair”
DiverseWorks‘ State Fair feels like a version of “Now THAT’S What I Call Social Practice!” As you walk through, you are beckoned to participate in an idea barter booth, to ask an artist about his role as a shrimp salesman, to chat with a gossip swapper, to play a carnival game with candlemakers, to [...]
Blanton El anatsui Exhibition Opens to Record Crowds: Numbers Up Overall
The opening weekend for El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa at the Blanton Museum in Austin logged over 4,275 visitors between September 22-25. A talk by the artist was SRO during Austin’s Museum Day festivities on Saturday, and in honor of the event, the artist unexpectedly titled a previously untitled work, [...]
The State Fair of Texas: A Feeling, in Pictures
It’s State Fair time again. I haven’t been in nearly a decade, but I’ve promised my small people I’ll go this year. I look forward to it with a kind of glee mixed with fear – a potent cocktail born of memories of sickness and stickiness and the smell of livestock. In honor of those [...]
Pillsbury Contemporary Art Collection on the Heritage Auction Block in Dallas October 26
Heritage Auctions, “The World’s Third Largest Auction house” will sell off more than 250 modern and contemporary artworks that once belonged to Dr. Edmund “Ted” Pillsbury, Dallas art dealer and intrepid scrounger of surprisingly wonderful things for the Kimbell Art Museum on October 26. The sale will take place at Heritage’s Design District Art [...]
Reading through Surrealism
Material girl that I am, I love books. Holding them, smelling them, turning their pages, penciling notes in their margins. Finishing one and closing it with a satisfying thap. The Internet is astonishing: I use it daily. But I can’t have a physical relationship with it. Navigating cyberspace can’t compare to meandering in and out [...]
David Shelton: Kelly O’Connor’s “Post-Utopia”
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 [...]
King Herring TV Appearance Boosts Renoir Theft Glam Factor
Houston’s Channel 13 News ran a lengthy (for local TV news) bit comparing the recently stolen Renoir case to that of socialite Joanne King Herring, who lost Sir Henry Raeburn’s Portrait of a Man in 1985, and later recovered it via an alert from the online Art Loss Registry database when it was up for [...]
The Modern’s Graduate Series Revs up Tonight with UNT new Media Prof Jenny Vogel
The Fort Worth Modern is laying out the welcome mat for graduate students in art and art history, offering free admission and backstage access to visiting artists and lecturers in a program they’re calling the Modern Graduate Series. This year’s schedule of events kicks off tonight at 5pm Four times a year with a lecture [...]
How to Raise the Bar on Dallas’ Scene?
Last week, a Facebook friend of mine — an artist living in Dallas whom I’ve never actually met – caught my attention when he posted this on Facebook after his recent visit to NY: Walking through the galleries in Chelsea… the work that we saw felt different than art here in Dallas. Part of the difference was presentation. [...]
More Odd Details Emerge on Houston Renoir Heist: Celebrated Lecturer and Ex G-Man Robert Wittman Chimes In
The Same day that Robert Wittman, author of a book on his exploits recovering stolen art at the FBI’s Art Crimes squad, was lecturing in town, a million-dollar Renoir painting was stolen at gunpoint (by a man in a ski mask, no less!) from a West Houston home. Now Wittman’s firm has been called in [...]
Soda Tooth: Newish San Marcos Co-op Gallery Focuses on Community
Like many far more venerable institutions, San Marco’ Soda Tooth Gallery, not quite a year old, is already refocusing its take on the art community: more community, less art. According to the Texas State University Star, “the goal is for Soda Tooth to become a place where the students and residents of San Marcos can [...]
Celia Eberle + Michael Mazurek at Plush Gallery
Celia Eberle: The End of Things (Typed notes for this part because I took so many notes that complete sentences would make this review inappropriately epic for a blog post.) 01. Mine 2011, sand, coral, gemstones, dimensions variable Can I touch this? No one would catch me. I want to flop into it. The hole at the [...]
Burgeoning Homecoming Mums Receive Media Attention as Texas Folk Art Spreads
The burgeoning trade in high tech, over-the-top homecoming mums- once flowers, but now mutated into 20-30 pound bling monsters of ribbons, plush toys, LED’s, have been steadily growing in size and complexity since the 1970′s- spurred by prom-night competitiveness and the ingenuity of entrepreneurs capitalizing on it. The tradition, thought to have begun in Texas, [...]
Express-News Scourges Briscoe Museum For Not Existing Despite Tax Support
The editorial board of the San Antonio Express-News griped Friday about the continuing mismanagement of the nascent Briscoe Western Art Museum, which was supposed to be another tourist magnet on the Riverwalk, in the re-purposed historic Hertzberg Building on Market St., but is instead mired in lawsuits, cost overruns and staff turnovers. Even their website [...]
MFAH Buys Big Yellow Stella Painting, Different From Menil’s Big Yellow De Maria Painting.
Big yellow minimalism is in- The Museum of Fine Arts has announced the acquisition of Frank Stella’s Palmito Ranch (1961), which they got at a discount from the artist, who gave them a break in honor of the MFAH’s late director Peter Marzio. “Peter Marzio was everything you would want from the director of a [...]
Populist DMA Director Honored with Free Admission Weekend
Appropriately, next weekend, October 1 & 2, the Dallas Museum of Art is honoring retiring director Bonnie Pitman with a free admission weekend. Sometimes uncomfortably audience-centered for the elite funders who control art museums, Pitman was the Deputy Director from 2000-2007 and The Eugene McDermott Director from 2008-2011, and wrote the book, Ignite the Power of [...]
Trending: Nonprofit Arts Org Mergers
Cases such as the high profile merger between Dance Theater Workshop and the Bill T. Jones Dance Company, which together became New York Live Arts, have inspired talk of an uptick in mergers among nonprofit arts organizations. In the nonprofit sector more broadly, strong anecdotal evidence suggests mergers are on the rise. 20% of 117 [...]
Space-Age Chapel Will Need New Art: Menil’s Byzantine Frescos a Go-Go Going
The Menil Collection announced yesterday that the frescoes on loan from the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus, displayed since 1997 at the Byzantine Fresco Chapel on the Menil campus, will return to Cyprus next year after the loan period concludes in February. Menil Director Josef Helfenstein sent a letter to the museum’s supporters about the [...]