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 [...]

  The future of painting is smart and sincere, is deft with a brush and a punch line, knows its talking points and keeps to them, asks questions to which it has given forethought, and holds potential answers in reserve.  And while such an artistic multitude will hardly bear a strict and singular profile, as [...]

  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 [...]

It’s possible of course that Marcel Duchamp did not invent the readymade—after all, artists have prized random objects since cave painters first stumbled upon bison-shaped driftwood in the streams near Lascaux. But such formative acts count for nothing: It’s that later Frenchman to whom all the credit falls. Principally, this is because he coined the [...]