Keith Carter: From Uncertain to Blue at PDNB Gallery
PDNB (Photographs Do Not Bend) Gallery isn’t letting a few decades sideline its taste in contemporary photography. Keith Carter: From Uncertain to Blue revisits Carter’s eye on the common folk of small town Texas in the 1980s. While Carter is certainly a respected name in the field, the exhibition lacks the improvisational spirit, potency, and range found in more recent [...]
The End of a Year and the End of a Life: Eva Zeisel
Eva Zeisel was a ceramic artist and designer who revolutionized tableware. She died yesterday at 105 after an amazing life that included being falsely accused and imprisoned for 16 months for conspiring to assassinate Stalin. In 1937 she traveled to Vienna, leaving in 1938 when the Nazis entered Austria, forcing her to emigrate to the [...]
Silva rounds Up 2011 in the San Antonio Visual Arts
It’s not technically over yet, but Elda Silva of the San Antonio Express-News has wrapped up the visual arts in her city for 2011 in yesterday’s paper, highlighting a catholic selection of street art, Chinese jade, British sculpture, Border-inspired politics, and Mapache Man, Jimmy James Canales’ “hulking, faux-furred creation (made out of coonskin caps)” in [...]
Anti-Piracy Bill Could Shut Down Questionable Websites
A bill under consideration in the US House of Representatives could, if passed, have far-reaching effects on the use of copyrighted material on the web, and on artists rights to comment, alter and remix it, reports Martha Lufkin in The Art Newspaper. The Stop Online Piracy Act, introduced by Republican representative Lamar Smith, would empower [...]
Top 10, 2011
End of year lists allow a critic to consider the past year and tally up the most exciting cultural moments. I decided to take a less introspective approach and gave myself just five minutes to come up with a quick list of art exhibitions that I found especially affecting (or, at the very least, memorable). [...]
Artist and Advocate Frances Bagley Receives 2010 Moss/Chumly Award from Meadows Museum
Frances Bagley is the winner of this year’s Moss/Chumley Artist Award, recognizing a North Texas artist who has been important as an arts advocate. The annual award is handed out by the Meadows Museum in honor of Frank Moss and Jim Chumley, Dallas art dealers in the 1980′s. In addition to being lead artist for [...]
Texas Women Support the Arts, Big Time
The NY Times (via Texas Monthly) briefly profiles six Texas women who are continuing the tradition of Ima Hogg and Velma Kimbell by making important contributions to the Texas art scene: Leslie D. Blanton, for her continuing support of the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin; Donna Axum Whitworth, Miss America 1964, a founding member [...]
Stain Painter Helen Frankenthaler Dies at 83
Seminal postpainterly expressionist Helen Frankenthaler died on December 27 at age 83, after a long illness, reports Art Daily. Since her first solo exhibition at NY’s Tibor De Nagy gallery in 1951, which pointed to a way out of brushy ab-ex towards color field painting, Frankenthaler experimented with many media- most recently woodblock printmaking.
FOCUS: KAWS at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Brooklyn artist KAWS hurls the onlooker into a cartoon’s daytime nightmare with effectively targeted film and television favorites, calling forth a sense of the unexpected that is fun and funny but also disturbing and super-creepy. You might call it macabre (which is a pretentious word, like pescetarian). KAWS (whose real name is Brian Donnelly) developed his style [...]
What’s New News: Interactive Racks Hit the Streets for Donnett’s Idea Fund Project
Nathanniel Donnett’s What’s The New News project has hit the streets of Houston’s Third Ward, placing eight customized newspaper racks at neighborhood sites, reinterpreting original news stories at these sites with poems and raps and sculpture. Collaborating with Donnett on the project are writers Ayanna McCloud, Egie Ighile, Michael K. Taylor, Phillip Pyle II, Tyres [...]
End-of-2011 recommendation: Justin Boyd’s boids at Artpace
Justin Boyd’s Window Works installation at Artpace is called “Natural Black, Sprinkled With Cosmic Iridescence.” This title struck me as maybe unnecessarily long when I first heard it, but after “seeing” the installation several times and talking to Justin Boyd about it, it’s won me over. Because not only does ”Natural Black, Sprinkled With [...]
It’s MY Face, Don’t Rip It Off!
If you need something to read during the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, Daniel Grant has written a lengthy, and slightly technical dissection of the developing morass of “publicity rights” and their possible impact on artists in the Huffington Post. According to Grant, there’s a developing, but still highly disorganized tangle of state [...]
MFAH to Unleash Massive Latin American Art Database at January Conference
It’s currently under construction on Friday, January 20 the MFAH’s much touted International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) digital archive goes online at www.icaadocs.mfah.org. After 10 years and $50 million, the first installment of the phased, multiyear launch begins with 2,500 documents from Argentina, Mexico and the American Midwest, intended to catalyze [...]
Our 10th Anniversary Farewell: John Perreault on Robert Rauschenberg’s Glass Tires
Back in 2001, our founder Rainey Knudson named this site in honor of Robert Rauschenberg’s cast glass tire sculptures. The glass tires were made at UrbanGlass, a nonprofit glass center in Brooklyn, where critic, curator, poet and artist John Perreault was the Executive Director. He has graciously let Glasstire reprint his 1998 article,”Don’t Tread [...]
Stonehenge’s Oldest Rocks Moved 160 Miles, Say British Geologists
Wired UK‘s Mark Brown reports that a team of British geologists have pinpointed the site of the quarry from which Stonehenge’s eponymous stones were transported. Robert Ixer of the University of Leicester and Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales painstakingly matched samples of rhyolite from various rock outcrops in Pembrokeshire, Wales with the [...]
CAMH Re-Accredited by AAM: Distinction Accompanied by Mild Rejoicing
The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has been re-accredited by the American Association of Museums (AAM), after a rigorous multi-year review, becoming one of the elite 4% of museums in the US that satisfy the AAM’s exacting standards. According to CAMH director Bill Arning, “the [reaccreditation] process starts again in 2024, but the time to start [...]
Sometimes the ground just has to shake a bit…
There was an earthquake a few weeks ago. It was a 6.8 that originated from the state of Guerrero only a few hours south of Mexico City. For those that have never been in a quake, take it from me that it’s absolutely terrifying, and this one was no exception. Mexico City sits in a [...]
Nativity Scenes Should Be Colorful, Life-Sized, and Plastic
Merry Christmas! The holiday hoopla is drawing to a close and decorations will soon be coming down. This means I will soon drive down Gaston Avenue to discover that my favorite annual assault on visual culture will disappear for another eleven months. This, my friends, is the life-sized, plastic nativity on the front lawn of [...]
Gisha, Emileigh, Juanito
This is Guillermina “Gisha” Zabala, an artist and filmmaker from Argentina who makes her home in San Antonio with her Uruguayan husband Enrique Lopetegui, music editor of the San Antonio Current, and their daughter Shanti. You can watch an excerpt of her San Antonio Artist Foundation Award-winning film, F-Watch, here. “I, Me, Light,” Zabala’s [...]
West Texas LAND Part 2
When we were driving to Marfa there was a shift in the landscape. We entered the desert. “It’s like we’re on Mars,” I said and my friend stretched out his arms and let out loud a sigh. The sky was huge. Scale matters. In my last post on the interventionist and site specific exhibition, Nothing [...]
