Radcliffe Bailey “Memory and Medicine” and Tropical Storm Allison
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 [...]
McNay’s El Greco Re-Authenticated, Re-Framed
Along with the modern art she loved, Marion Koogler McNay bought and El Greco Head of Christ, a lonely Renaissance masterwork, possibly emulating a similar oddball El Greco in Washington D.C. ‘s Phillips Collection. At least she thought it was an El Greco, until later scholarship plastered over the luminous visage with doubt: perhaps it [...]
Rogers Fund Buys Smith’s Woman and Sheep for McNay
San Antonio’s McNay art Museum has acquired and installed Kiki Smith’s Woman and Sheep, a bronze sculpture by Kiki Smith alongside works by Tony Cragg, Philip Grausman, Alexander Liberman, George Rickey, and Joel Shapiro in their sculpture garden. It’s a little tame compared with Born (2002), another Smith piece featuring reclining women with four-legged animals, [...]
McNay’s IQ (Impressionist Quotient) Upped by Three Recent Renoir Receipts
Renoir’s Lemons and Tea Cup, a late mini-masterpiece of impressionist still life that has been on loan the the McNay since the 1960′s, has finally stuck; it’s now part of the McNay’s collection, a gift by exchange from Mrs. Morgan Chaney. Two portrait sketches, also by Renoir, were gifted by Lois and John Hayward in [...]
Building a Better Texas Biennial
The fantasy goes something like this: Most everyone was pleased with the clear, focused vision for the 2011 Texas Biennial. It was a brilliant success, with a tightly curated, single exhibition put together by a well-known curator from out of state. The show itself was held in a great institution in a city other than Austin, [...]
Wednesday is Art Museum Day all around the world, and in Texas, too!
100+ art museums will take part in this year’s Art Museum Day on May 18, and some of them are in Texas: The Amon Carter , El Paso Museum of Art, Kimbell, McNay, Meadows, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Nasher Sculpture Center, San Antonio Museum of Art, and The Menil Collection will all have [...]