Shift Your Known Position to The Light; Alvin Baltrop at the CAMH
Alvin Baltrop’s photographs, most of them taken at the Hudson River pier between the 70s and 90s constitute the CAMH’ s latest Perspectives exhibition: Dreams Into Glass. They form a rich text that was sadly overlooked at the time of its making. The photographs depict, among other things, the cruising scene of the 70s, daily [...]
Glass Satire: CAMH Art Crush
Glass Satire’s newest installment explores the incompatibility of contemporary floor-based sculpture with very important people who don’t ever look down. (It also explains why the Félix González-Torres sculpture in the CAMH’s last show moved from the floor to a pedestal.)
Dispatches from Documenta: Part III, Can art change the world?
For Part I, click here. For Part II, click here. Why do certain artworks have such a lasting impact? To stay with me, artworks usually have to affect some kind of change in me. I believe that art can change the world by changing the way you see the world or making your experience as [...]
See it before it closes!: CINEPLEX, Sasha Dela, Harvey Bott
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 [...]
CAMH’s Newly-Extended Hours Offer Seven Days of Icy Contemporary Art Bliss
Beginning July 3, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has new extended hours: 10-7 Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, open late Thursdays until 9pm, Saturdays 10-6, and Sundays 12-6. That’s all seven days, or an extra 14 hours per week of icy art-viewing bliss!
Abstraction Packed
There is a proliferation of exhibitions featuring abstract painting in Houston right now. Gallery Sonja Roesch, Sicardi Gallery, and Hiram Butler Gallery have group exhibitions featuring abstract painters, and there are several galleries featuring solo exhibitions by painters– Zachariah Rieke at Wade Wilson Art, Michael Kennaugh at Moody Gallery, Geoff Hippenstiel at Devin Borden Gallery, [...]
CAMH’s 2011 “Year of the Guy” ends
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 [...]
‘Tis the Season for Shiny Trees: Surls’ White Walking Flower Installed at Rockport Art Center
The Rockport Center for the Arts unveiled James Surls’ “White Walking Flower,” on November 14. Carted in by U-haul, the piece is smaller, and white, but otherwise similar to Surls’ polished steel piece sited in front of Houston’s CAMH. The Fort worth Modern’s steel-tree-lawn-sculptor of choice was the ubiquitous Roxy Paine. As I see it, [...]
Texas Art Travel: Houston
Ever since the mid-1970s, I’ve traveled to Houston whenever it was time for a good art fix. Back then, there were just a handful of fine art galleries to visit. The Museum of Fine Arts was a long way from becoming one of the largest museums in the United States. And the Contemporary Arts Museum [...]
The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston: Crunching the Numbers, Part III
(For Part I and Part II, click here and here.) This series has considered the finances of a number of mid-sized, contemporary U.S. arts institutions outside of the major contemporary arts hubs of New York and Los Angeles. In Texas, these have included the Dallas Contemporary and Arthouse, and, because of the proposed merger, the [...]
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, [...]
The Ten List: Houston Gleaners
In terms of size, concrete and consumer culture, Houston is a hyperbole of a city. Every time I return to it from another place I am shocked at the exorbitant much-ness of Houston. Somehow, though, Houston is also a hub of visionary art made from recycled materials and an especially fascinating place to look for [...]
Texas Contemporary Art Fair
The Texas Contemporary Art Fair has been officially announced. The fair will arrive at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on October 20-23, just as the first Houston Fine Art Fair art fair is sweeping up the last pesky bits of foil from all those champagne bottles. Complete with VIP preview party, and [...]
Peekaboo! New CAMH website
Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum has a new website- underwritten by Houston Endowment, the Anchorage Foundation of Texas, and 20K Group, LLC, it’s lean, playful and easy to decipher. Check out the peekaboo exhibition listings!
CAMH gets a new roof
Answers to Questions: John Wood and Paul Harrison, currently on view at Houston’s Contemporary Art Museum, will close two weeks early for the installation of a new roof, funded by a surpriseingly sudden and generous grant from the Cullen Foundation. In a delightfully tongue in cheek letter to CAMH-goers, Director Bill Arning pointed out that [...]