Draped in camouflage, bunting, or shroud, war’s singular product is death. In face after face of WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, nothing is more abundantly clear than the awful intimacy of war and death. The exhibition begs the question, is our greatest modern efficiency murder? [...]
Soldier, At Ease, at the Houston Center for Photography, runs concurrently with the extensive WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. Both exhibitions include works by Tim Hetherington, Louie Palu and Erin Trieb. WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY focuses on an exploration of the role of photography in documenting various aspects of conflict, including the periods between fighting. Soldier, [...]
ZZzzzzzz by Nathaniel Donnett was the result of his one-week residency at Art League Houston as part of the group show/mini residency STACKS, curated by Robert Pruitt. On opening night for STACKS, the five participating artists—Phillip Pyle II, Nathaniel Donnett, Jamal Cyrus, M’kina Tapscott and Autumn Knight—were clad in gray hazmat suits while they inventoried, announced, axed [...]
The Perot Museum of Nature and Science has an exterior that looks like one of the collection’s incredible mineral crystals. Conjunctive cubes intersect each other and rest on an undulating foundation of polished concrete, rocks and shrubs. The building itself appears to be in a state of change, which is appropriate for a science museum. [...]
In celebration of the Menil Collection’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the museum has mined its archives to produce Dear John and Dominique. Curator Michelle White and archivist Geraldine Aramanda have gathered a thoughtful collection of letters written to John and Dominique de Menil accompanied by ephemera, photographs and art objects. With low lighting, available seating and a [...]
Three different exhibitions—Sandow Birk and Elyse Pignolet’s The 99 Names of God, Moreshsin Allahyari’s Re: apologies to the many wonderful Iranians and Christopher Blay’s Machine Time are on display at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary through December 8. Both Birk/Pignolet and Allahyari examine mis/perceptions of the Middle East, addressing the ramifications of political warfare. Meanwhile, Blay [...]
When I walked into the Dallas Contemporary for Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin’s solo exhibition, Pretty Much Everything, I wasn’t totally sure what to expect, but as an art lover who also loves fashion and pop culture I knew I had to attend. I had, of course, perused the images included in the press [...]
The cryosphere is the area of the earth’s surface where water is in solid form, such as glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, sea ice and permafrost. It exists in a close relationship of climactic linkages and feedback loops to the hydrosphere, earth’s areas of liquid water. The works in this exhibition explore the fluctuating zone [...]
The word “cosmopolitanism” conjures up worldly, cultured and possibly elitist connotations. The idea that all humanity belongs to a single moral community is a lesser-known definition of the word. Theoretically I buy into that idea, but on a practical level, trying to achieve consensus on the definition of morality would prove impossible. Curator Ben Lima’s [...]
We need to get a few things straight about Afro-Futurism. Afro-Futurism is an attempt to link the future to the past/present. It considers what “blackness” and “liberation” might look like in the future, real or imagined. Deeply rooted in history and African cosmologies, its culls pieces of the past/present, technological or analog, to build on [...]
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is the only U.S. venue for Lucian Freud: Portraits. If you haven’t seen it yet, go now. It closes this Sunday, October 28th. It’s a stunning exhibition, covering portraits from the late 1940s until just before his death last year at age 88. Arranged chronologically, the show opens [...]
Moving between Austin, TX and New York City, Andy Coolquitt is an artist whose work is not merely a bricolage of urban compost: severed plunger handles, discarded bourbon bottles, pipes, wooden planks, spent lighters, scavenged poles and display cases; but a conceptual bricolage as well, drawing together tatters of intellectual principals from his disparate interests [...]
Giorgio Vasari defined drawing as “the animating principle of all creative processes,” and since the Renaissance, drawing has been seen as the foundation of artistic invention, as the most immediate form of artistic expression and as a window into the mind of the working artist. This is often all the more true with drawings by [...]
After a two-year stint in New York and Nebraska, Eric Zimmerman returns to Texas with the multi-site project Endless Disharmony & Telltale Ashes at Art Palace in Houston, The Reading Room in Dallas and online at endlessdisharmony.tumblr.com. His fragmentary integration of myths and systems of understanding with his exquisite drawing technique makes for an engrossing [...]
The Program Will Begin Shortly… Silence is Toby Kamps’ first major exhibition at The Menil Collection since becoming curator of modern and contemporary art two years ago. You should not miss it. It’s been too long since you visited the Chapel anyway. But silence can be hard to find. We arrive at the Rothko Chapel [...]
In Plain Sight at McClain Gallery, organized by Aaron Parazette, is an exhibition of 40 paintings by 40 Houston artists. Its essential premise, apart from a group photo-op, is that painting is alive and well, and the reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. Its thematic heft—principally offered by Frances Colpitt’s catalogue essay—follows [...]
One Ordinary Day of an Ordinary Town, Mimi Kato’s current exhibition on view at Conduit Gallery, is a continuation of the hybrid digital landscapes she first presented at ArtPace in 2009. Kato takes subject matter and format from traditional Japanese art history and then creates stylized illustrations within the context of her contemporary world. [...]
Hybrid Forms at AMOA-Arthouse seeks to codify new media as a traditional art medium. With contributions from ten artists, the exhibition is anchored by video innovator Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV. First created in 1963, the original work sprang from an accidentally-damaged television with a single line on the screen—a moment of Zen striking [...]
Before I entered the gallery to see Erick Swenson’s Sightings at the Nasher, a guard politely stopped me at the door and warned me that there was work in the space that was a bit grotesque and perhaps not for the faint of heart. I thanked her, told her I was prepared to face the [...]
There’s this faction of contemporary artists who seem to feel at pains to jargonize, obfuscate and otherwise Other-ize their own work. If you need to have read Derrida and to have seen the whole canon to get what an artist is doing, that’s cool. But cool is a value of middling worth. The pernicious cycle of [...]
