New Texan French Arts Alliance Project Opens the Door to Banal Public Art
The Texan French Alliance for the Arts, the well-intentioned and well-connected nonprofit that scattered Bernar Venet’s rusty steel curlicues across Hermann Park in 2009-2010, is at it again: TFAA and its partners have begun Open The Door, an “intercultural public art project” developed by TFAA’s executive director, Karine Parker-Lemoyne, and Romain Froquet, an artist of [...]
Short Days Bring Rice a Twilight Epiphany: Sports Field’s Lights Interfering with Turrell Skyspace
The Rice University Thresher reports that the school’s new James Turrell Skyspace is having some unanticipated conflicts with other uses of the busy campus. Lighting for night-time games on the nearby intramural sports fields was spilling over into the artist’s carefully choreographed light show. Unlike the similar situation in Dallas, where the Nasher Sculpture Center’s [...]
THE MENIL CONNECTION
Celebrating the legendary de Menil years of the Rice Museum and Rice Media Center. The Menil Collection’s 25th anniversary this year has had me thinking a lot about its importance in my life and in the cultural landscape of this city. It has also made me think about the much-longer-than-25-years history of John and Dominique [...]
Rice Arts Survey Dissects Houstonian’s Arts Attitudes, Finds Unexpected Hope Amid Bar Graphs
Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research released the results of their 2012 Houston Arts Survey, a study of the attitudes of Houstonians towards the arts on Sept 25. The first-of-its-kind study polled 1200 scientifically selected Harris County adults in 2011, asking questions their free-time activities, their reasons for attending or not attending arts events, [...]
Houston Students Visualize a Tolerant Society; Unveil Mural at MOCAH
A two-month mural project aimed at visualizing “a religiously and culturally tolerant society” made by 24 students from Houston area middle and high schools was unveiled last week at the Museum of Cultural Arts, Houston. The project was a joint venture between MOCAH and the Boniuk Center for Religious Tolerance at Rice University. The mural [...]
Rice: More, Plensa, Please
Rice University dedicated a pair of big, seated figures by Jaume Plensa at a ceremony on the Rice campus last tuesday. The piece, titled Mirror, is similar in style to Plensa’s Tolerance, the series of kneeling stainless-steel figures along buffalo Bayou in Houston, except that you can go inside them and poke your face out [...]
Josh Bernstein’s “Man Corn”
Josh Bernstein‘s exhibition “Man Corn” is the third exhibition in Rice University’s newest art venue– EMERGEncy Room. Located on the second floor of Sewall Hall, where Rice Gallery is also housed, the project space is dedicated to showing emerging artists in a small room with a front, glass wall through which one can see the [...]
New Rice U Art Building in the Works; Maltzan Working on Pre-Design
Rice University has taken concrete steps towards building a new, $30 million art building on its Houston campus. Architect Michael Maltzan of Los Angeles is under contract for a pre-design of the new facility, which, according to Visual and Dramatic Arts Department Chair John Sparagana will likely bring the Rice University Art Gallery, the department’s [...]