Whether she’s navigating the deserts of Kazakhstan or running her own badass art corporation, Eve Sussman doesn’t play by the rules. I was lucky enough to sit down with her just before the Texas debut of her 2007 film, Rape of the Sabine Women. Brought to Austin by the brilliant minds at Arthouse in collaboration [...]
Dean Ruck and Dan Havel, two Houston-based artists, recently completed a two-part sculptural intervention called Give and Take. For the first part, the artists tackled a soon-to-be demolished house in the Houston Heights neighborhood, cutting out a single ovoid form from the center of the house. As the second part of the intervention, this form [...]
Texas-born artist Elvira Clayton lives and practices in Harlem, New York. Clayton’s work, multi-layered and multi-medium, might be reminiscent of elaborate Mexican or Haitian altars to the dead. The artist, however, has no formal ties to these cultures and hasn’t necessarily chosen them as sources for inspiration. Instead, her work seems to be homage to [...]
Terrell James is a highly productive local painter who has been traversing the contemporary art scene here in Houston and abroad for many years. I was able to do an interview with her via email while she was in Miami for the fairs this December. Her new exhibition Preoccupations features a group of works from [...]
Invited by Ballet Austin to create an original libretto, Trenton Doyle Hancock is translating his visual art to the stage. In collaboration with Stephen Mills, the artistic director of Ballet Austin, and the composer Graham Reynolds, who will be creating an original score, Hancock is reworking his ongoing narrative, a mythological saga pitting the good, [...]
Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Smith have been friends since collaborating on his videotape and installation, It Starts At Home. Klonarides interviewed Mike over barbecue at Meyer’s Elgin Smokehouse while visiting Texas for the opening of his retrospective, Mike’s World at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. Mike’s World, on view at the Blanton [...]
I recently sat down with Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, to discuss (among other things) Declaring Space, his revelatory exhibition of four artists who attempted to modernize our very conception of space itself. Featuring Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, this exhibition marks the first [...]
Margo Handwerker: "El Soñador Elegante" derives from Miguel de Cervantes’s character Don Quixote of Don Quixote de la Mancha. How many people do you think have read Don Quixote? David McGee: None, I’m told [laughs]. After the show, I found out none. MH: The show coincides with DiverseWorks’ 25th anniversary. As an artist, what is [...]
In 2006 Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, curator of Latin American art at the Blanton Museum of Art, was selected to be chief curator for the sixth Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is the first non-Brazilian to carry this title. Featuring 67 artists from 23 countries, his Biennial, entitled Third Bank of the River (which opened [...]
Former San Antonio based, now Houston based Augusto Di Stefano uses deliberate marks on canvas and paper to create images that evoke emotional and physical boundaries. He sprays each painting with moody shades of ochre or black before the strategic application of thick impasto marks. The effect suggests, but does not create, an untethered and [...]
The San Antonio new media duumvirate better known as Potter-Belmar Laboratories took a moment to talk to me about new media in TX. Leslie Raymond, head of the new media program at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin, and sound connoisseur Jason Jay Stevens started their collaborative video and sound experiments back in Michigan [...]
Renée Lotenero received her MFA in sculpture from UCLA in 2004. Her work has been featured in various group shows including Almost 30, a 2006 exhibition at the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas, and the 2005 Hammer Museum exhibition titled THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles. New work by the Los Angeles-based artist is [...]
Brit artist Tracey Emin is a woman’s woman. She cuts a clear path through the bush — the weeds of yesterday’s feminism, the “ism” without which we’d be nowhere.
Marie Lorenz fabricated a small, precarious kayak and floated down the San Antonio River along the Riverwalk. She consistently revisits themes surrounding waterways, boats and navigation. The New York-based artist took some time out before a walk-through at Artpace’s Hudson (show)Room to talk about her work and her refreshing approach to art. She culls ideas [...]
This year the Creative Research Laboratory (CRL) mounted the traditional summer grad show, except it shifted the structure around: Where typically a two-part exhibition splits the students into two groups, each with a theme and a separate catalogue, this year saw a three-part exhibition swap-out.
Margo Handwerker interviews curator Valerie Cassel Oliver about Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art, on view at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston.
Collecting is a family affair for Houston collectors Robert, Jereann and Holland Chaney, who began assembling their diverse collection of cutting-edge art over 15 years ago. Early on they developed a particularly keen interest in the burgeoning creativity coming out of Asia. Over 100 of their artworks comprise RED HOT – Asian Art Today from [...]
Sterling Allen, an Austin artist and co-founder of the gallery Okay Mountain, first came to Glasstire's attention in the Austin Museum of Art's 2005 triennial, 22 to Watch. The following conversation took place in May 2007 and is reprinted from the catalogue of his first solo exhibit, Sterling Allen: Writesy Drawsy, at Austin's Art Palace [...]
Cairo-based Basim Magdy has created two giant installations both inside and outside of Okay Mountain in the most ambitious show to date for this one-year-old artists space.
There is a lot going on in Smile Forever, your current show at Art Palace: paintings, drawings and one giant sculpture. Across the board, your subject seems to be, for lack of a better word, monsters. How long have you been working on these guys and where did they come from?
