What are you doing this Saturday? Come with me to Houston’s first Mini Maker Faire. I first heard about Maker Faire from Aisen Caro Chacin, and to me it embodies a very sane counterpoint to the art pyramid, with its huge base of creative hobbyists, inventors, tinkerers and Sunday makers who often go uncelebrated for [...]
Sensory Substitution, Devices, Perception, Alternative Displays, Bone Conduction Hearing, Parametric Sound, Tactile Visual Displays, HipHop, Gastronomy, Echolocation, Accessibility, Hardware, Physiology, Bionics, Tongue Display Unit, Electrode Vibrotactile Stimulation These are the keywords listed in Aisen Caro Chacin’s MFA thesis on sensory substitution. In the year and a half since she left Houston for The New School, [...]
Lynn Barber lives in Rapid City, South Dakota. She has degrees in microbiology and law, and intermittently works as a patent attorney. She enjoys playing the hammer dulcimer and the concertina. She’s married to a shy guy named Dave, who holds advanced degrees in meteorology and theology. Both are members of the ACLU and are [...]
[Disclosure: I am married to one of The Art Guys. I am not an impartial bystander. Read the following with that in mind.] It was announced yesterday that the Menil Collection is removing the artwork The Art Guys Marry A Plant from its collection. Practically speaking, this means digging up a small tree and removing [...]
Amon G. Carter was a man of iron will, blunt charm and big ideas. Her father’s daughter, Ruth Carter Stevenson, inherited his intractibility and vision but thinly cloaked it with her own brand of old-school femininity. Her death on January 6 almost completely severs Fort Worth’s last links with the larger-than-life figures who made it [...]
Lauren Kelley creates animated videos that often feature Barbies altered by clay and confectioner’s sugar and that evoke a complex commentary on race, youth and desire. Kelley’s works also engage materiality and the craft of making miniatures. Her show True Falsetto is currently up at Women & Their Work through January 17th. I sat down [...]
The windows at 3700 Main Street in Houston have been getting interesting. I live above this building and have grown increasingly curious about the project as I’ve watched the windows fill up with artwork. As I walk to and from my apartment I’ve been witness to photographs by Galina Kurlat, a sculpture by exurb, and [...]
The Goss-Michael Foundation’s zesty, celebrity-filled exhibition of Canadian pop star Bryan Adams’s photography embodies the essence of escapist entertainment that Dallas confuses with reality. I have a history of bashing this gallery for pandering to fame, but Adams is a sensational photographer, and I suspect his famous subjects—including Mick, Posh and Amy Winehouse—were all the [...]
Glasstire contributors offer up their picks for the best spring shows around the state. Think we missed something great? Post it in the comments section below! AUSTIN Alison Kuo: Colorful Food 1117 Garland January 4 – February 14 Former Austin resident and current School of Visual Art grad student, Alison Kuo will present a psychedelic [...]
I thought I just really hated art. Or the art world. Like Dave Hickey does. Maybe I do. Maybe not. Let’s find out together. One month ago, I was officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder not otherwise specified (BD-NOS), or, in less official parlance, bipolar 3. My new psychiatrist describes bipolar 3 as a mixed-mood disorder [...]
Two recent films made by two very different directors have accomplished something a bit rare for a mainstream Hollywood production: They not only bring to the screen glimpses of American history, they are timely commentary on contemporary American existence. The wizardry of Spielberg and the ridiculously superb performance of Daniel Day-Lewis in “Lincoln” made me [...]
Norman Bel Geddes’ compass always pointed forward. From his design of the Palais Royal nightclub in 1922 to his plans for a pilot television studio for NBC in 1954, Bel Geddes proved to be a fearless and imaginative dreamer who was convinced that art, design and architecture enriched people’s lives immeasurably. The exhibition I Have [...]
My first and likely only prediction for visual art in 2013: thanks to the retrospective that was organized by and debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Ken Price will lose his cult status and be embraced by the unwashed masses, and perhaps even by Michael Kimmelman. As a result, the legacy of [...]
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, [...]
M’Kina Tapscott’s installation New Soil: Tessellations of Dark Matter is part of STACKS, a group show at Art League Houston curated by Robert Pruitt. Tapscott’s installation is refreshingly immersive and cohesive, so much so that this post can’t do it justice: it is meant to let you step in and be saturated. It’s a shame [...]
Oh how we long for the End! Is there not something slightly disappointing about waking up to an unchanged world after everything was supposed to be snuffed out? That small sense of dread, the apocalypse has not arrived and our daily routines resume as if nothing at all happened (because nothing at all did happen). [...]
Austin hosted its second International Film Festival Summit December 3 – 5, bringing together film and music festival organizers and industry folks from coast to coast. Staff from Sundance, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and distributors like Warner Brothers rubbed shoulders with directors and programmers of small to large-sized festivals, cross-pollinating and [...]
As the holiday season arrives, we all have a little reprieve from the busy slate of art openings, lectures, performances and other events. I have used this mini-break to do something I started this past summer, which is to branch outside of my immediate Montrose/Rice Village area. My trips started with an attempt to work [...]
It’s here, finally, the end of the world. It snuck up so quickly that I’d forgotten about it altogether. As the cycle of the Mayan calendar comes to an end, we prepare to say goodbye to the tumultuous 2012; to the latest tumultuous 52-year Mayan century cycle, and it can’t come a moment too soon. [...]
