I headed down to Galveston last Friday to see “The Drawing Room, Part 2,” yet another fine offering from curator Clint Willour at the Galveston Art Center and to check out the old Sam Maceo house. Galveston is always full of surprises, I stumbled across a brothel along the way. Organized crime boss Salvatore “Sam” [...]
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 [...]
Everyone was wondering how the Houston Fine Art Fair‘s move to Reliant Center would work out. From what I can tell it was a good idea. It’s a newer space and this year the HFAF organizers sprang for booth walls that were two feet higher that last year. Meanwhile, the walkways between the booths seemed [...]
Galveston Arts Center‘s pop up show of work from Nick Barbee‘s Galveston Artist Residency is at 4411 Montrose through today, Saturday, September 15. It’s in the former Peel Gallery space and definitely worth a trip. These socked plaster feet are a fine example Barbee’s wonky casting agendas. Barbee gives watercolor a good name in his [...]
Yasuaki Onishi’s reverse of volume RG is the latest great installment in Rice Gallery’s 16-year-run of site-specific installation work. Onishi has used hardware store plastic sheeting and black hot glue to create an ephemeral and haunting environment. A horizontal network of fishing line stretches across the gallery ceiling, Onishi propped up the plastic with boxes [...]
Lawndale’s annual and much-anticipated Big Show opens tonight (Friday the 13th) from 6:30 – 8:30. Curated by Marco Antonini, gallery director of Brooklyn’s NURTUREart, it’s one of the smallest and sparest Big Shows in memory and that’s not a bad thing at all. As artist Elaine Bradford sagely observed at last night’s preview, “It looks [...]
Sasha Dela: The Emotional Life of a Spy closes this Friday, July 6th at the Art League Houston so you don’t even have the weekend to catch it. If you haven’t seen it, you should. Using Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps as raw material Dela retells the story, cutting scenes with her own text and images [...]
Radcliffe Bailey’s show “Memory as Medicine” opened at the McNay last week. I first saw Bailey’s work in “The Magic City,” his ill-fated show at the Blaffer Gallery in 2001. Water is a recurring theme for the artist and it is strangely notable that Bailey’s Blaffer show opened during a flood. Tropical Storm Allison was [...]
Sicardi Gallery opened up their new building last night and it’s pretty amazing. Sicardi finally has a space that lives up to the ambition of its program which includes some incredible Latin American artists, from modern masters like Torres-Garcia to avant-garde luminaries like Jesús-Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Gego to an array of stellar contemporary [...]
The image above and those below were pasted in a document that opened with the following (loosely translated) text: “To all unmarried ones who would like to spend their life by my side and within all the beauties of my home. Please look below at all the magic of my home that I have decorated [...]
I cried all the way home from Care House, Carrie Schneider’s installation and memorial in her childhood home. The house was where Schneider’s mother lived until she died from pancreatic cancer in September of 2010 at age 57. Just a few remnants are left of the home as it was and into these Schneider has [...]
FotoFest 2012 wraps up this weekend and it’s the last chance to see its offerings as well as those at participating spaces. Definitely make time to see Jawshing Arthur Liou’s stunning panoramic video at Poissant Gallery. Poissant may not be on your radar but this show is a must-see. Kora, 2011-2012 is projected cinema scale [...]
The Dallas Art Fair is back and seemed way better than last year. Here are some highlights: Conduit Gallery Dallas’ Conduit brought an interesting range of work. Charlie James Gallery I always love the stuff at this LA gallery. Moody Gallery Houston’s Moody brought a nice piece from Manual’s series of book photographs. CB1 [...]
Last Friday night, “The Deconstructive Impulse: Women Artists Reconfigure the Signs of Power, 1973-1991 opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. In it were some of my favorite Guerrilla Girls posters. It was nice to see them but it was also kind of ironic. 2011 was the (unofficial) “Year of the Guy” at the [...]
More highlights from what’s up around town right now. Check out these shows as you do your holiday shopping, or do your holiday shopping at these shows… Sicardi Gallery “Graciela Hasper: Recent paintings,” through December 24, 2011 It’s bright and exuberant abstraction but it doesn’t feel facile. McClain Gallery “Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher: Reel [...]
There’s a lot of art out there now but here’s a quick overview of the good, the great, and the pretty darn respectable on view in some of Houston’s galleries. Isabella Court Building Bryan Miller Gallery “Soft Math” runs through January 7th at Bryan Miller Gallery and it’s got a lot of great work. Leigh Ruple‘s [...]
Houston’s first art fair opens tonight from 6-9 with a $100 a ticket fundraiser benefiting the Core Program. I swung by the George R. Brown Convention Center yesterday as the Houston Fine Art Fair’s participating galleries were unloading and setting up. A lot of manual labor goes into making art and a significant amount goes [...]
Last week I wrote about Houston’s dueling art fairs coming up this fall. Scheduled one month apart, each has a New York area organizer. It got me thinking about Dallas’s two art fairs last April, held on the same weekend and each locally organized. The fledgling Suite Art Fair debuted at the Belmont Hotel while [...]
I love Galveston. But, like Houston, it’s an acquired taste. It’s got lovely old buildings in various states of decay interspersed with not-so-lovely and downright crappy structures. It’s gritty, with a deserved air of melancholy and if it were located on a less hurricane prone coast it would have been wholly gentrified and cutesified by [...]
Lawndale Art Center‘s annual market/design event has evolved into something very, very cool. It started out life 16 years ago (if my math is correct) as the “20th Century Modern Market.” Always a big event, it was packed to the gills with dealers offering vintage objects, furniture and clothes. In true Lawndale spirit, it had [...]
